Freedom Friday: Most of you aren’t going to like this

April 18, 2008 at 6:12 am (Freedom Friday, Thoughts and Musings)
Tags: , ,

Imagine for a moment that you walked to your door tomorrow morning to find police officers dressed in riot gear, armed with machine guns standing there. On the hill above your home you see the barrels of guns pointing down directly at you, and in the street are armored vehicles. Someone tells you that a 16 year old in your church has reported being raped and beaten by a 50 year old man. She hasn’t been found. He hasn’t been found. No one has been arrested. But just to be safe, they are removing your children from you because of your association to a crime that hasn’t been proven.

That is what happened at the YFZ ranch in ElDorado, TX earlier this month.

I’ve tried to keep Freedom Fridays positive, but today i want to voice a very unpopular view.

In this country you are free to be weird.

You are not free to abuse children.

You are not free to beat your wife.

You are not free to have more than one wife.

But no one has been arrested for any of these crimes. Instead, 400 children have been dragged at gun point from the only home they have ever known because people think their lifestyle is weird.

I think that these polygamist compounds are immoral cesspools of depravity and abuse, but if we are willing to allow the government to ignore the constitution in the case of one religious group that secular America thinks is creepy, we had better be prepared to be the next group without any constitutional protection.

The 4th amendment of the Constitution provides protection against unreasonable search and seizure. The government is not allowed to show up at your door, hold a gun to your head and demand anything without proving first that they believe you to be guilty of a crime. The 5th amendment states that the government can’t seize you or your property without first following the due process of law. The state of Texas was free and responsible to investigate the alleged abuse of ONE sixteen year old girl. They had every right to arrest every man in the compound for polygamy. Instead, the state chose to break the law.

I say that because this blogger sees no difference between what I believe about marriage and submission and what the FLDS teach. I see a big difference. I think the women she quotes would see a big difference. But she doesn’t. She uses the same words to describe women like me, that these readers use when talking about the FLDS compound women. What happens one day when I have a knock at my door telling me that because I once blogged that I believe in submission, my daughter is being removed on suspicion of unnamed abuse?

This Freedom Friday, I would like to point out that we are only free under the protection of the Constitution if we believe the Constitution should protect everyone. The law only protects our freedoms if it protects them all the time and for everyone.

*************************************************************

Do you want to share your ideas about Freedom Friday? If you write a Freedom Friday post, and want to share it, add a link to it in the Mr. Linky below.

8 Comments

Freedom Friday: It’s Right In Front Of You

April 11, 2008 at 9:57 am (Freedom Friday, Thoughts and Musings)
Tags: , ,

This is what Freedom means to me.

Can you see it? Do you know what it is?

It is the uncensored, almost uncensorable, wide open, Information Super Highway! Please stick with me on this one, because it’s not the “depravity at your fingertips” version of the internet I’m talking about.

For most of human history, words have been the property of the elite, distributed sparingly, if at all, to hoi polloi like us. A small group of people - usually religious leaders - determined who received literacy, who had access to literature, and what literature was fit for consumption. Men like John Wycliffe worked to make scripture accessible, but the task was too enormous for one lifetime.

With the Gutenberg Press, reproducing words became an easier task. Thanks to the press, Martin Luther’s theses spread across Europe in a very short time, which would have been isolated to Wittenberg only a generation before. The truths of the reformation, and the ideas of the resulting renaissance were able to reach more people because of the press.

So governments, recognizing the power of words and the ideas they convey, licensed the presses. In order to own a press, you were required to be licensed and only print approved words, “safe” ideas, expedient literature.

Even when the licensing of presses stopped, the presses themselves - large, expensive, increasingly technical machines - became another control on the distribution of words. Now ideas had to be vetted by a publisher for marketability, or pass across an editor’s desk to be deemed worthy of print. While people had increasingly more access to cheap, disposable words, there were still sentinels who stood guard, often over truth in favor of expediency.

The computer made it possible for one man, in the spirit of John Wycliffe to print and distribute his words as quickly and efficiently (sometimes more so) as professional printing houses, but it is the internet that has allowed those men and their ideas to truly find an audience.

True, this freedom has allowed some total crackpots to gain an audience, but it has also allowed the scripture to be available at the touch of a finger in 50 versions and 35 languages. Thanks to the internet, we can read and compare 15 different bible commentaries for free, read men as diverse in both history and belief as Augustine and Brian McLaren in their own words and compare and contrast them to the truths of scripture. With the internet, William Tyndale’s wish that “a boy that driveth the plow, shall know more of the Scripture than [a reformation era arch-bishop]” is not only possible, it should be the rule.  Providing that we “plow boys” avail ourselves of the treasure at hand.

Now the only sentinel standing guard over our access to truth is our own apathy.

Like all freedoms, it can and has been abused, but the treasure, in my opinion, outweighs the dross.  So this week, the internet is what freedom means to me.

1 Comments

Freedom Friday: A Dream

April 4, 2008 at 2:13 pm (Freedom Friday)
Tags: , ,

Today Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. is what freedom means to me.  Dr. King believed that freedom was more than just the absence of slavery, so this Friday, the 40th anniversary of his assassination, please take a moment and read his “I Have a Dream” speech.

This picture of our mac with one of our students was taken a stone’s throw from the steps on which Dr. King delivered his famous speech, and is the very image of Dr. King’s dream.

Today, on this freedom Friday, we remember the dream, but let’s not forget that true freedom, and true reconciliation, can only be found when we come, stained with sin, to be washed clean at the foot of Christ’s cross.

Eph 2: 13But now in Christ Jesus you who once were far off have been brought near by the blood of Christ. 14For he himself is our peace, who has made us both one and has broken down in his flesh the dividing wall of hostility 15by abolishing the law of commandments expressed in ordinances, that he might create in himself one new man in place of the two, so making peace, 16and might reconcile us both to God in one body through the cross, thereby killing the hostility. 17And he came and preached peace to you who were far off and peace to those who were near. 18For through him we both have access in one Spirit to the Father. 19So then you are no longer strangers and aliens, but you are fellow citizens with the saints and members of the household of God, 20 built on the foundation of the apostles and prophets, Christ Jesus himself being the cornerstone, 21 in whom the whole structure, being joined together, grows into a holy temple in the Lord. 22In him you also are being built together into a dwelling place for God by the Spirit.

2 Comments

Freedom Friday: Firearms (Warning: Controversial Topic)

March 28, 2008 at 10:40 am (Freedom Friday)
Tags: , , ,

While on our way home from our school trip to Washington DC, several of us stopped off at the NRA National Firearms Museum in Virginia. I highly recommend the stop. It begins with the advent of gun powder, displaying some of the first firearms ever used around the world, and then moves through the different firearms and their roles in American history.

As we walked through the displays and observed everything from the historic (such as a rifle carried aboard the Mayflower by a Puritan) to the trivial (for instance, the gun Tom Selleck used in the movie Quigley Down Under) I realized the powerful freedom it is to own a weapon for the purpose of both defense and recreation.

Consider the following quotes:

“…to disarm the people - that was the best and most effectual way to enslave them.” (George Mason, 3 Elliot, Debates at 380)

“Americans have the right and advantage of being armed - unlike the citizens of other countries whose governments are afraid to trust the people with arms.” (James Madison, The Federalist Papers #46 at 243-244)

The freedom to bear firearms is the heart of freedom, because all other freedoms are so easily removed when one does not have the ability to defend them. Mahatma Ghandi, that epitome of non-violent protesters, said:

Among the many misdeeds of the British rule in India, history will look upon the Act of depriving a whole nation of arms, as the blackest. Mahatma Gandhi, Gandhi, An Autobiography, page 446

But it is not just the freedom from potential oppression at the heart of a freedom to bear firearms, it is also a confrontation of fear. Cesare, the Marquis of Beccaria, a socialist philosopher opposed to the death penalty, wrote the following:

False is the idea of utility that sacrifices a thousand real advantages for one imaginary or trifling inconvenience; that would take fire from men because it burns, and water because one may drown in it; that has no remedy for evils except destruction. The laws that forbid the carrying of arms are laws of such a nature … laws not preventive but fearful of crimes.

Laws that forbid the carrying of arms . . . disarm only those who are neither inclined nor determined to commit crimes . . . Such laws make things worse for the assaulted and better for the assailants; they serve rather to encourage than to prevent homicides, for an unarmed man may be attacked with greater confidence than an armed man.

So this Friday, firearms are what freedom means to me: freedom of protection, freedom from fear, the freedom to defend all other freedoms.

6 Comments

Freedom Friday: Good Friday

March 21, 2008 at 12:51 am (Freedom Friday)
Tags: , ,

But now that you have been set free from sin and have become slaves of God, the fruit you get leads to sanctification and its end, eternal life. For the wages of sin is death, but the free gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord.
Romans 6:22, 23

So I saw in my Dream, that just as Christian came up with the Cross, his Burden loosed from off his shoulders, and fell from off his back, and began to tumble, and so continued to do, till it came to the mouth of the Sepulchre, where it fell in, and I saw it no more.
Then was Christian glad and lightsome, and said with a merry heart, “He hath given me rest by his sorrow, and life by his death.”
Pilgrim’s Progress The First Part par. 193, 194

Also: don’t forget to enter the Christa-Taylor giveaway.  It’s open until Tuesday.

1 Comments

Freedom Friday the First

March 14, 2008 at 8:03 pm (Freedom Friday, Thoughts and Musings)
Tags: , ,

I have decided to institute a new tradition here at the blog. I am going to dedicate every Friday to posting about what freedom means to me. This will be political, it will be religious, and it will probably be controversial, but I think it’s important.

Two days ago Condoleezza Rice testified before State, Foreign Operations and Related Programs subcommittee hearing on the State Department’s fiscal 2009 budget. During her testimony, the radical anti-war group “Code Pink” held up hands painted to appear blood stained, and signs reading “Condi kills kids.” Ms. Rice maintained her equanimity and professionalism during her testimony, and despite vocal outbursts, the group was permitted to remain in the hearing room.

That’s what freedom is. Those women have the freedom to wear their pink anti-war tutus (?!) and shout rude, offensive slogans to the people charged with defending the constitution that protects their right to said freedom. Freedom also means that I can choose to disagree. I have the freedom to call their actions rude and offensive.

If Condaleezza Rice was the Secretary of State (or equivalent) in a great many countries in the world, she wouldn’t have to put up with this kind of abuse. She wouldn’t even have to defend herself to untold numbers of House Committees and Senate Oversight Panels. But because we live in a free country, one of the most powerful (and can I say articulate and intelligent?) women in the country didn’t even raise her voice when she was called a “war criminal.”

Freedom isn’t just about what you like, it’s about defending the things you don’t like as well. Condaleezza Rice may go home and cry after being called a war criminal and being accused of killing children, but she still gets up every morning and works to defend the rights of the people to call her names.

So this Friday (which is almost Saturday by now), my inaugural freedom Friday, Condaleezza Rice is what freedom means to me.

5 Comments