Crisis of Conscience Coming Up
Now that the PelosiCare Fiasco has passed the House (in the middle of night, sight unseen, nothing to see here, folks, just keep moving), all eyes turn to the Senate. As Americans who know how to count continue to watch our solons of subtraction with fascinated horror, let me just throw up a small post here in anticipation of crisis of conscience that I think a number of Christians are going to have in pretty short order.
Political junkies like to buy their cloth by the yard, and don't really know what to do with odds and ends. They deal with the political parties, and conventions every four years, congressional elections every two years, and the occasional off-year elections to give them a handful of tea leaves to read. All the trains run on the tracks, and nobody is doing any political ATV freewheeling out in the fields.
But unless I am misreading the mood out there, we are seeing a genuine national tax revolt coming to a boil. The specter of Pelosi and company just doubling down to push through an exercise in trillionizing that nobody wants is the kind of hubris that has provoked many tax revolts in history, and so I really don't think we are done with them. We are not yet done with the action, clearly, and so we are not done with the equal and opposite reaction.
And note: by revolt I don't mean revolution in the streets, and I don't mean political lobbying as usual. I am referring to direct action, of a peaceful and entirely non-cooperative nature. And when this happens, an awful lot of evangelical Christians are going to be rocking back and forth from one foot to the other, wanting to join in the party and yet feeling constrained by a misunderstanding of Romans 13. But "obey the existing authorities," in our setting, does not mean submission to arbitrary and caprious government. The president, the Congress, and the judiciary are all part of our existing authority, true. But so are our state and local governments, and so are our constitutions. So the question is this -- does our existing authority authorize such direct action by the people? Is such behavior constitutional?
Here are a couple of citations, to provide a little grist for the intellectual mill. The first two are from Idaho's constitution.
"Section 1.Inalienable rights of man. All men are by nature free and equal, and have certain inalienable rights, among which are enjoying and defending life and liberty; acquiring, possessing and protecting property; pursuing happiness and securing safety" (Art 1/Sec 1, emphasis mine).
Inalienable means that the government can't take it away, not even if they have a straight-up vote on a bill that nobody has read in the middle of the night.
"Section 2.Political power inherent in the people. All political power is inherent in the people. Government is instituted for their equal protection and benefit, and they have the right to alter, reform or abolish the same whenever they may deem it necessary; and no special privileges or immunities shall ever be granted that may not be altered, revoked, or repealed by the legislature" (Art 1/Sec 2, emphasis mine).
Then there is this little gem from the New Hampshire constitution:
"Whenever the ends of government are perverted, and public liberty manifestly endangered, and all other means of redress are ineffectual, the doctrine of non-resistance against arbitrary power, and oppression, is absurd, slavish, and destructive of the good and happiness of mankind" (Article X, emphasis mine).
And though I am not accustomed to quoting him with approval, we can even read this from Abraham Lincoln's First Inaugural:
"This country, with its institutions, belongs to the people who inhabit it. Whenever they shall grow weary of the existing Government, they can exercise their constitutional right of amending it or their revolutionary right to dismember or overthrow it."
Now I am not trying to sum everything up in one simplistic point. The issues involved in teh situation at large are simply enormous. I just want to separate that little Romans 13 point out of the general confusion, and set it off to the side. If five million people marched on Washington to inform our elected representatives that they had absolutely no intention of paying for this health care freakshow, and they thereby succeeded in scaring all the professional politicos to death, and as a result the aforementioned freakshow was trundled off and quietly drowned in the Chesapeake Bay, this deliverance would have involved absolutely no violation of Romans 13. And why? Because the documents that constitute an essential part of our "existing authorities" say that this kind of thing is necessary from time to time. Keeps the politicians limber.
Posted by Douglas Wilson in Blog and Mablog 9th November, 2009
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