Instances of heresy arise when one is faced with two seemingly contradictory, or conflicting doctrines and chooses to embrace one while rejecting the other.
For instance, faced with the seeming logical contradiction between fate and human free will, one denies free will and insists everything is predetermined, fated and freedom is an illusion.
The common human experience of the mystery of paradox is not limited to religious doctrine and theology. It permeates virtually every aspect of human experience and existence, including civil, social and political theory. One sees it even in physics.
Dr. Rand Paul, Republican nominee, has come under fire for trying to escape the Constitutional heresy that has gone viral for decades now in the increasingly toxic atmosphere of political correctness. For his candor he has been accused by some of racism (ho-hum). Specifically, he is attacked because he disagrees with one of the nine points of the civil rights legislation passed in the 60s.
He makes the following statements:
1. He, personally, is against institutional racism or racism in any form and says government funds should never be used to support institutions, businesses or associations that promote or practice discrimination in their hiring or service for reasons of race, culture or sexual preference.
2. At the same time, he questions the right of government to force a private business or association to serve, hire or associate with anyone they choose not to.
3. He says without any government legislation this sort of behavior will be very limited because of public reaction. Simply put, few people would give stores and companies run by bigots any business at all. As a consequence, businesses would either end their practice of discrimination or simply go bankrupt.
What is Paul doing? He is trying to throw out the dirty bathwater of racism and unjust discrimination without throwing out the baby of American Liberty.
In debating this issue with Jon Stossel this morning on FOX news Meagan Kelly began one of her points by saying, "Say you walked into a restaurant..."
Whoa, I say. You can just depersonalize it like that. That avoids the elephant in the room: the individual.
You're not just walking into a restaurant, you are walking into someone's restaurant.
That "someone" may have labored for years to be able to open that restaurant. Did the government labor and sacrifice to purchase even one napkin on the restaurant's table? Did the government take the risk of becoming self-employed, mortgage a home or put relatives at risk who loaned the family entrepreneur money? Did anyone in the government look with concern about what would become of the novice restauranteur's children as they slept at night? Did anyone in the government labor seventy hours a week, week after week, giving up vacations, benefits, often sacrificing his own salary to make payroll?
NO!
Yet, the government wants to not only increase the risk that the restaurant owner will fail by increasingly unjust taxation, it wants to add insult to injury by dictating whom the restaurant owner must serve and hire.
He has done the labor, he has made the sacrifices, he has taken the risks, yet he is not free to make the choices he prefers while larger and larger amounts of his profits are confiscated from him by the same ones who are dictating his hiring policies---policies that must be obeyed under threat of law suits and even imprisonment.
Those in political power are practicing Constitutional heresy in order to hang on to power. They seek to make political hay by being shown to be heros of racial and sexual equality, even if it means doing all they can to destroy the liberty of individuals, preventing them from running the businesses they own as they see fit.
It is a horrible precedent.
It is reasonable to say a government which must serve all without bias cannot use tax dollars to promote discrimination against individuals or groups. ( I hasten to point out government has never done that anywhere but on paper).
But it is unreasonable to lay those same restrictions and requirements on the individual citizen who alone has labored and sacrificed for what he owns.
When the government places restrictions on what an owner can do with his property or business the government, in effect, is saying, you don't really have any private property or ownership.
The heretic who embraces the doctrine of equality over and against liberty must, de facto, deny true ownership and the citizens right to private property.
Ownership means you have power over your property. You can choose what to do with it. If others can come in and dictate policy their exercise of control, implicitly, is saying you are not the real owner, they are. In fact, you are even owned by them. You not only own nothing, your liberty is also an illusion.
You are a slave, but your masters simply choose not to remind you of it by placing chains on you that can be seen.
Heresy throws everything out of balance and proportion. In our age the heresiarchs have used equality like a crowbar to dismantle every thing else in the American Constitution and every thing unique in American life, including that unique American treasure, liberty.
Liberty rooted in Charity should be at the heart of every aspect of American life and law. When liberty is driven out and replaced with the ugliness of Government legislated mandates and police state enforcement tactics charity departs. Rather than resulting in true brotherhood, trust and good will, such tactics increase hatred, resentment and malice between groups, as our present society proves after almost two generations of Government Gestapo tactics being used to enforce equality in virtually every aspect of American social and political life.
Ironically, the one place equality does properly belong, equality before the law, is the one place equality is becoming increasingly scarce.
No, no matter what Al Sharpton might say, race does not determine "justice"––money does. If the O.J.Simpson trial proved nothing else it proved that. If you're rich you get a very different form of justice than if you're poor or even of modest means. Justice in America is only for the few, for only the few can afford it.
Government unconstitutional legislation and ruthless enforcement has all but destroyed the possibility of charity, brotherhood and cooperation among groups in America. Hatred, poverty, irreligion, perverse values, destruction of the family and suspicion have increased with the intrusive actions of government. But government agencies are not the only ones driving the issues and poisoning the waters of social cooperation and good will. They have lots of non-government help that is gladly using the power of government for their own advantage.
The race and class warfare pimps and demagogues who profit from these issues use every opportunity to increase their personal power bases, regardless of the social outcome for either those they claim to defend or those they oppose.
They either do not see or do not care that the corrupt means of government policy they both use and promote for their advantage can and will also be used to their disadvantage at another time.
In contrast to these race and class hucksters, more and more Americans, including Dr. Paul, do know and care that every time we increase the power of government we decrease our own liberty and move ever closer to slavery and a servile existence in which an all-powerful, all-controlling government micromanages every part of our lives.
Dr. Paul knows with the rest of us how often liberty has been sacrificed on the altar of the modern mania of unrestricted enforcement of equality in every nook and cranny of the lives of private citizens.
Sadly, the Constitutional heretics who have nothing but contempt for individual liberty and an obsession with the exercise of control and coercion over others have long ago seized the reigns of power. They sit in the high seats of honor. And whenever their doctrine is challenged they howl like rabid wolves and their hit squads are sent to the four winds of modern media to spread the cry of racism across the lands.
How long will these wolves who devour liberty be able to cry racism to render the effect they desire: more and more power?
When will their cries be heralded for what they really are: the school yard bully tactics of avoiding substantive engagement on the real issues by going straight for the jugular and attempting to discredit the personal character of their opponents by name calling?
The answer to that question is blowing in the wind. Some progress has been made, but vast multitudes still remain in the deep trance-like sleep in which Government lies and miseducation has placed them. An ignorant, scarcely educated, semi-literate people, deprived of the tools of critical judgment and thought, is a people ripe for the sound-byte propaganda the enemies of truth and liberty sitting in the halls of political power have become so fond of.
And so it goes in present day America. The place that used to be the land of the free, the land of individualism, independence and liberty has a government ruled by demagogues and tyrants who that now brand a man who loves liberty and seeks to restore it a racist, and a man who seeks to exercise his liberty a criminal, all the while it honors and panders to those who use unconstitutional government race and class social engineering as a means of increasing their own wealth and power. Those few among them who really want to do good seem totally ignorant of the fact that ignoble means used to achieve noble goals can result in an increase of evil and injustice. Such are almost always the unintended consequences resulting from corrupt means. Present day America is exhibit A as proof of this truth.
The use of ruthless and inappropriate means of imposing equality in every aspect of American life has created greater social disharmony, disparity and factionalism than ever, to the point that the whole social fabric of America is in danger of rupturing.
Heresy always throws every thing out of balance and out of proportion. Heresy always causes great evil, not because of the essential thing it advocates, but because of the equally essential thing it denies or places out of order. Heresy always creates factionalism, hatred and suspicion. Heresy always drives out charity and restrains and suppresses liberty. Liberty suppressed results in a people abused and oppressed. Sooner or later, there is always a grave consequence for such sustained and widespread injustice.
Equality has wrongly been made the teleological raison d'etre of the American experiment and placed as the central purpose of every American law and the core intent of every American social action. Until we expose this heresy for what it is and restore Liberty to its proper and central role in American life there is little hope for what little remains of our once great and free Republic. Instead, the poisonous weed of tyranny will become permanently rooted in our lands and Liberty, utterly vanquished, will once again wander the earth like a beggar in search of a people who will give her a home. Already she is shod and her loins are gird for the journey.
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