Alan Keyes
As rights are unalienable, the battle for right can never be surrendered
By Alan Keyes
"Conservative talk-show host Rush Limbaugh said Thursday that those who support same-sex marriage have already won the culture war. 'This issue is lost,' Limbaugh said. 'I don't care what the Supreme Court does, this is now inevitable – and it's inevitable because we lost the language on this.'"
In the last little while, Rush Limbaugh has talked like someone who cares about the issue of marriage. He now declares the issue lost. Is this intended to have a demoralizing effect on people who either don't remember or never knew that Rush surrendered the issue of marriage years ago? Back in September 2010, I posted an article on my blog entitled "Rush to judgment on Gay Marriage." In it I discussed a clip Steve Deace played on his radio show (he was still with WHO radio at the time) that led me to remark that "Rush Limbaugh has now openly joined the moral shrug-meisters, who dismiss the issue of gay marriage." In light of this fact, it comes as no surprise that he now rushes to declare as lost a battle he never took seriously in the first place.
In that 2010 article, I discussed the connection between the battle for marriage and the fight for economic liberty, which Limbaugh and so many other self-styled conservatives profess to care about deeply. I urge everyone to read and carefully ponder the logic I examined at that time. It leads inevitably to the conclusion that "if the government is not obliged to respect the rights of the natural family...it has no inherent obligation to respect any property rights whatsoever."
Once this fundamental point becomes clear, there is something tragically pathetic about the doomed protestations of so-called "economic conservatives" trapped in the delusion that we can defend all the institutions derived from property rights (such as free enterprise economic activity) when we have denied the basis for all individual claims to any property whatsoever.
The leftists responsible for the assault against marriage understand this perfectly well. Do you really think they care very much about how a small, relatively privileged minority of the population scratches their sexual itch? Of course not; they are people who admire leaders like Mao, Lenin, and Fidel Castro – communist leaders who tried to make sure of the outcome of history by systematically sacrificing not just the feelings, but the lives, of millions of human beings on the altar of their communist/socialist ideology. To put it bluntly, such people are not staying awake at nights anguishing about the emotional distress occasioned by society's rejection of anal intercourse. The only lust they care about is for material power.
Their assault on marriage is part of their cold-blooded agenda to seize and permanently control such power. As part of this agenda, they have done, and are doing, everything they know how to degrade the moral and intellectual condition of the American people. They are pushing toward the moment when some Americans are so depraved, and others so craven and confused, as to allow a little clique of elitist usurpers to define away familial belongings to which all human beings have an inherent, primordial claim, antecedent to all humanly instituted governments whatsoever. They know that once they have redefined marriage without regard to the natural ties that bind children to their parents, and parents to their children, according to the natural ordinance of God, there is no claim of property those who control government cannot eventually undo.
(In America today, the process of that undoing is already well under way. In my upcoming WND column on Friday, I will discuss a breaking news story that illustrates this.)
The architects of socialist domination are counting on the fact that, once Americans are brought to relinquish the familial belongings that are the obvious paradigm of natural right, they will no longer have the sense to recognize, much less rationally sustain, their claim upon the other rights and belongings to which their God-bestowed humanity entitles them. They will fall prey to force and fear, to addictive materialist appetites and narrow self-obsessed lusts and ambitions, until they find themselves once again toiling in the fields of slavery and serfdom, as people mostly did before the light of Christian reasoning justified their claim to God-endowed unalienable right.
This is the irony of the regime of entitlement which the elitists are shrewdly reconstructing as the purpose of government. Today, many Americans still buy into the delusion that the entitlements are for the poor, the weak, the disadvantaged, or abused. Yet somehow, the resources being ruthlessly extracted from the income of the wage-slaving multitudes end up financing bankster schemes that leave a larger and larger share of the world's wealth in the hands of an elitist few. Behind the façade of the welfare state, the elitists are reconstructing the regime of oligarchic entitlement like those who governed humanity's fate throughout most of history. These are regimes in which those with superior power, from whatever advantage of wealth, knowledge, or physical prowess it derives, abuse the institutions of law and government. By this abuse, they establish and sustain a way of life in which they are exempt from the burdens they impose on others, whom they speak of with contempt as the "masses" (like the mass of dehumanized tissue their regime of legalized murder has disposed of via millions of abortions.)
As it was preserved by previous generations, the United States of America posed the greatest obstacle to the elitists' restoration of this age-old pattern of oligarchic domination. As it was, and for as long as enough of its people strove to remain true to the principles of God-endowed natural right on which it was founded. Those principles embolden people to fight for the self-evident truth which declares that true law and justice are determined by a standard of God-endowed right that transcends and limits the claims of human power, not by the standard of that power alone.
This is the first principle from which America's constitutional self-government is ultimately derived. Anyone who joins in the assault on the rights of the natural family supports the overthrow of this principle. So does anyone who surrenders to that assault. As we decide issues that involve our adherence to this principle, we decide the fate of liberty and justice in our land. In past generations, a majority of Americans invariably emerged who understood that. That's why so many were willing to fight to the death rather than allow the permanent entrenchment of practices (like slavery in the 19th century and socialist government in the 20th) that contradict it.
Now, in the early morning of the 21st century, we shall see whether such a majority can still find the way to make its voice prevail. Rush Limbaugh may think that the battle is over. But in the life and death struggle for unalienable right, as long as life endures, the battle may not justly be surrendered. That's what the term unalienable signifies. With respect to the natural rights of family; or the right to keep and bear arms; or any other right entailed by the obligations of our God-endowed humanity, what's involved is right in a way that cannot justly be despoiled or given up for lost. Rush Limbaugh and others may no longer remember or care for that meaning of the term, but I earnestly pray God for a sufficiency of true Americans who do.
April 11, 2013
"Conservative talk-show host Rush Limbaugh said Thursday that those who support same-sex marriage have already won the culture war. 'This issue is lost,' Limbaugh said. 'I don't care what the Supreme Court does, this is now inevitable – and it's inevitable because we lost the language on this.'"
In the last little while, Rush Limbaugh has talked like someone who cares about the issue of marriage. He now declares the issue lost. Is this intended to have a demoralizing effect on people who either don't remember or never knew that Rush surrendered the issue of marriage years ago? Back in September 2010, I posted an article on my blog entitled "Rush to judgment on Gay Marriage." In it I discussed a clip Steve Deace played on his radio show (he was still with WHO radio at the time) that led me to remark that "Rush Limbaugh has now openly joined the moral shrug-meisters, who dismiss the issue of gay marriage." In light of this fact, it comes as no surprise that he now rushes to declare as lost a battle he never took seriously in the first place.
In that 2010 article, I discussed the connection between the battle for marriage and the fight for economic liberty, which Limbaugh and so many other self-styled conservatives profess to care about deeply. I urge everyone to read and carefully ponder the logic I examined at that time. It leads inevitably to the conclusion that "if the government is not obliged to respect the rights of the natural family...it has no inherent obligation to respect any property rights whatsoever."
Once this fundamental point becomes clear, there is something tragically pathetic about the doomed protestations of so-called "economic conservatives" trapped in the delusion that we can defend all the institutions derived from property rights (such as free enterprise economic activity) when we have denied the basis for all individual claims to any property whatsoever.
The leftists responsible for the assault against marriage understand this perfectly well. Do you really think they care very much about how a small, relatively privileged minority of the population scratches their sexual itch? Of course not; they are people who admire leaders like Mao, Lenin, and Fidel Castro – communist leaders who tried to make sure of the outcome of history by systematically sacrificing not just the feelings, but the lives, of millions of human beings on the altar of their communist/socialist ideology. To put it bluntly, such people are not staying awake at nights anguishing about the emotional distress occasioned by society's rejection of anal intercourse. The only lust they care about is for material power.
Their assault on marriage is part of their cold-blooded agenda to seize and permanently control such power. As part of this agenda, they have done, and are doing, everything they know how to degrade the moral and intellectual condition of the American people. They are pushing toward the moment when some Americans are so depraved, and others so craven and confused, as to allow a little clique of elitist usurpers to define away familial belongings to which all human beings have an inherent, primordial claim, antecedent to all humanly instituted governments whatsoever. They know that once they have redefined marriage without regard to the natural ties that bind children to their parents, and parents to their children, according to the natural ordinance of God, there is no claim of property those who control government cannot eventually undo.
(In America today, the process of that undoing is already well under way. In my upcoming WND column on Friday, I will discuss a breaking news story that illustrates this.)
The architects of socialist domination are counting on the fact that, once Americans are brought to relinquish the familial belongings that are the obvious paradigm of natural right, they will no longer have the sense to recognize, much less rationally sustain, their claim upon the other rights and belongings to which their God-bestowed humanity entitles them. They will fall prey to force and fear, to addictive materialist appetites and narrow self-obsessed lusts and ambitions, until they find themselves once again toiling in the fields of slavery and serfdom, as people mostly did before the light of Christian reasoning justified their claim to God-endowed unalienable right.
This is the irony of the regime of entitlement which the elitists are shrewdly reconstructing as the purpose of government. Today, many Americans still buy into the delusion that the entitlements are for the poor, the weak, the disadvantaged, or abused. Yet somehow, the resources being ruthlessly extracted from the income of the wage-slaving multitudes end up financing bankster schemes that leave a larger and larger share of the world's wealth in the hands of an elitist few. Behind the façade of the welfare state, the elitists are reconstructing the regime of oligarchic entitlement like those who governed humanity's fate throughout most of history. These are regimes in which those with superior power, from whatever advantage of wealth, knowledge, or physical prowess it derives, abuse the institutions of law and government. By this abuse, they establish and sustain a way of life in which they are exempt from the burdens they impose on others, whom they speak of with contempt as the "masses" (like the mass of dehumanized tissue their regime of legalized murder has disposed of via millions of abortions.)
As it was preserved by previous generations, the United States of America posed the greatest obstacle to the elitists' restoration of this age-old pattern of oligarchic domination. As it was, and for as long as enough of its people strove to remain true to the principles of God-endowed natural right on which it was founded. Those principles embolden people to fight for the self-evident truth which declares that true law and justice are determined by a standard of God-endowed right that transcends and limits the claims of human power, not by the standard of that power alone.
This is the first principle from which America's constitutional self-government is ultimately derived. Anyone who joins in the assault on the rights of the natural family supports the overthrow of this principle. So does anyone who surrenders to that assault. As we decide issues that involve our adherence to this principle, we decide the fate of liberty and justice in our land. In past generations, a majority of Americans invariably emerged who understood that. That's why so many were willing to fight to the death rather than allow the permanent entrenchment of practices (like slavery in the 19th century and socialist government in the 20th) that contradict it.
Now, in the early morning of the 21st century, we shall see whether such a majority can still find the way to make its voice prevail. Rush Limbaugh may think that the battle is over. But in the life and death struggle for unalienable right, as long as life endures, the battle may not justly be surrendered. That's what the term unalienable signifies. With respect to the natural rights of family; or the right to keep and bear arms; or any other right entailed by the obligations of our God-endowed humanity, what's involved is right in a way that cannot justly be despoiled or given up for lost. Rush Limbaugh and others may no longer remember or care for that meaning of the term, but I earnestly pray God for a sufficiency of true Americans who do.
To see more articles by Dr. Keyes, visit his blog at LoyalToLiberty.com and his commentary at WND.com and BarbWire.com.
© Alan KeyesThe views expressed by RenewAmerica columnists are their own and do not necessarily reflect the position of RenewAmerica or its affiliates.
(See RenewAmerica's publishing standards.)
