I know, these are opinion pieces, and as such, they’re entitled to theirs, and have obviously been granted a forum to express them. But the predictable consistency in their assaults on faith is monotonous and wearisome.

And they’re not alone in their religious assaults. Academics and media hounds seem to thrive on the disapprobation and scorn they can heap upon people of faith. But then, it doesn’t seem to be universally against people of faith, but more accurately, Christians. They say nary a word about Muslims, even the extremists that think “infidels,” even “people of the book” like Christians and Jews, must be brought to Allah, one way or another. Their method or conversion tool of choice is a suicide bomb. And other religions are praised and supported to ostensibly illustrate their “objectivity.” But Christians are just no more than “bitter clingers” who have to be discredited!

There are several aspects to this practice that are disconcerting, but that we should be attentive to. Those who consistently belittle Christians and the object of our faith consider themselves to be the enlightened ones, or the more erudite amongst us. They typically hold themselves up as the bastions of societal tolerance. They are the ones who fully embrace the politically correct version of diversity, and may actually sport one of those bizarre-looking “Coexist” bumper stickers made up of the world’s religious symbols. For some inexplicable reason, Christians are excluded from their pantheon of acceptable religious groups. It’s just not PC to tolerate Christians, they are rather to be scorned and ridiculed.

And since the assailants of Christianity view themselves as more enlightened and erudite than the rest of us, it’s in the spirit of noblesse oblige that they seek to destroy and invalidate anything that even smacks of Christianity. They will condescend from their ivory towers of academia, in tone as well as tome, to belittle and crucify anew the tenets and foundation of the Christian faith.

Perhaps they attack Christians because we’re the low-hanging fruit on the monotheistic tree of world religions. We’re the largest and easiest target for them, and since the majority of American Christians are white we are a politically-correct target for them to display their erudition against, and through their hubris, denounce our faith. We’re also safer targets, since we’re unlikely to behead their cartoonists for disrespectful renderings of Christ, or blow them up for their heterodoxy.

All persons of belief, regardless of label, should thoroughly examine their belief system intellectually and logically, as well as spiritually. The Old Testament prophet Isaiah had it exactly right when he said, quoting the Lord, “Come now, and let us reason together.” We’re sentient beings and must, and can, intellectually resolve the issues thrust upon us by the arrogant who seek to belittle or demean our faith.

When a writer attacks constitutional literalists by making it synonymous with Biblical literalism, he’s being doubly politically correct by targeting not only Christians, but conservatives. To disingenuously compare a legal document to a compilation of religious writings is ludicrous and specious. I rather doubt the writer was as glib about literal interpretation of his employment contract with his university!

I’m impressed with the tenet of the predominant religion of this area, which states, “We claim the privilege of worshiping Almighty God according to the dictates of our own conscience, and allow all men the same privilege, let them worship how, where, or what they may.” Now that’s tolerance I can believe in!

While ostentatiously parading their self-inflated, yet distorted sense of objectivity and “tolerance,” the antagonists of Christianity are, to the contrary, proving their bigotry and biases, couched in academic terms. In their blighted zeal to denounce the simple-minded Christians, they have embarked on a jihad of their own to replace Christian faith with a godless secular humanism, devoid of Christianity’s supposedly arcane and anachronistic values. They flaunt their bigotry and call it objectivity, and their disdain for anything Christian and call it tolerance. Those who seek to destroy eschatological faith understand not the relationship between the two. I believe as John Donne, the English poet, who said, “Reason is our soul's left hand, faith her right.”

Nowhere in recent memory has this been more self-evident than in dealing with the oil spill disaster in the Gulf of Mexico. Time and time again the government has proven Dr. Boren’s aphorism by getting in the way of any progress to clean up the mess down there.

For example, early on, the state of Alabama conceived a plan to erect huge booms offshore to protect their coastline, which is about 200 miles long, from the drifting blobs of oil. They searched the world, scouring sources for the massive booms, some weighing tons and as high as twenty feet, to help protect their coastline.

No sooner had Alabama gotten the booms into place then the Coast Guard, who had helped them locate the equipment, mandated that they be moved to protect the Louisiana coast instead.

This led Alabama to devise a backup plan, where they would procure snare booms to catch the oil as soon as it began to wash up on their beaches. Low and behold, another federal bureaucracy snatched that solution away from them. The Fish and Wildlife Administration nixed that plan because they said it would endanger sea turtles that nest on the beaches. Never mind that the entire ecosystem of the turtles is endangered by the encroaching mass of oil blobs invading the Alabama beaches!

So, Alabama state officials, not to be outdone by bureaucratic obstacles, resolved they would try another, less high tech effort to prevent the oil from caking their beaches. They decided to hire 400 workers to patrol the beaches and, by hand, scoop up the oil residue that washed ashore.

So how did that plan turn out, you ask? Well, you probably guessed it: another federal bureaucracy hampered that backup plan to the previous backup plan, which was the backup plan to the original plan aborted by federal bureaucracy. The Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) wouldn’t allow those workers to work more than 20 minutes per hour. They further demanded that the state allow said workers an hour-long break after every 40 minutes of work. OSHA’s requirements had the affect of reducing manual cleanup effort efficiency by more than 60%, with just 40 minutes of work for every three hours on the clock.

As Richard Morris, former Clinton administration advisor has said, “Every agency — each with its own particular bureaucratic agenda — was able to veto each aspect of any plan to fight the spill, with the unintended consequence that nothing stopped the oil...” Rather than facilitating the cleanup, federal bureaucracies have thwarted state and corporate cleanup efforts, as they engage in an apparently uncoordinated tug-of-war jockeying for control and exercising their bureaucratic “epoxy” power. Consequently, the ineptitude hampers cleanup efforts as the assault on our southern shoreline advances.

Alabama Gov. Bob Riley characterized the situation by stating that the administration’s “lack of ability has become transparent” in its handling of the oil spill.

Even more disconcerting is the fact that we’ve been enlarging federal bureaucracy at an unprecedented pace over the past two years. The new health care mandate creates over 100 new government agencies and bureaucracies to implement the dictates of that onerous legislation.

The new financial reform package passed by congress creates another 20 new government agencies to beat financial institutions into submission because of the way they implemented the last set of federal regulations congress foisted upon them. Most of the costs of this additional bureaucratic morass will be borne by us. Not just in the form of taxes to cover government cost of implementation and enforcement, but through additional banking fees and charges to cover the anticipated 20% increase in costs to affected financial institutions, which will be passed on to the consumers. That’s us. 

Ronald Reagan recognized intuitively as well as empirically how destructive to freedom and liberty bureaucracies can be. He said, “Man is not free unless government is limited.... As government expands, liberty contracts.” And that’s not just for individuals. Just ask the state of Alabama. All of this gives added significance to another of Ronald Reagan’s statements, when he referred to the phrase, “I’m from the government and I’m here to help,” as “the nine most terrifying words in the English language.”

An efficient and effective bureaucracy is critical to the proper function of government in serving citizens. We have obviously far exceeded that. For those who love government and bureaucratic micromanagement of our lives, this is your heyday. For those of us who love freedom and actual solutions, we’re living a nightmare.

Published - Idaho State Journal, 07/04/10

No country in modern history has been founded on principles of individual freedom, and the preservation of life, liberty, and property, as was the United States of America. No nation has provided a beacon of hope and freedom, as has this country, because of that unique and auspicious beginning. No country has been a beacon of hope, even a Mecca to all in the world seeking freedom and liberty, as has America. Recognition of these verities constitute the foundation for American exceptionalism.

So for our own president to say in Europe last year that, “I believe in American exceptionalism, just as I suspect that the Brits believe in British exceptionalism, and the Greeks believe in Greek exceptionalism,” is a denial of the historicity that made this country what it was designed to be. The “fundamental transformation” of our country that we have witnessed over the past couple of years leaves many freedom-loving citizens wondering what will be left of American exceptionalism after the radicals in Washington have completed their transformation of the country.

Even the presidents’ own history, and his acknowledgement of that history, attest to the uniqueness of America. As he has said many times his story would only be possible in America. Why is that, if we’re no different than any other country?

The president’s statement about American exceptionalism might be “politically correct,” but it’s factually, historically, and ideologically erroneous. His is the same mentality that maintains that every kid should win at dodge ball. Or better yet, no one should play dodge ball because someone’s feelings might get hurt. It’s the same mentality that grades shouldn’t be posted, or scores shouldn’t be kept, or that everyone who participates should get a trophy, rather than just the winners. And even more seriously, that all nations deserve to have a nuclear bomb regardless of disposition or intention of use. Sorry, Mr. President, just as there are winners in sports, there are “winners” in freedom and liberty, and America was founded to be that winner.

Many of us will celebrate this Independence Day revering what the founders created, and what our nation has been and represented before the current cadre of narcissists and statists began their transformation. We will sorrowfully acknowledge that an era has passed, that the nation which stood for freedom throughout the world has now temporarily joined with the socialist states of the world in promoting governmental control over individual lives rather than individual liberty. We will lament the transformation of this bastion of liberty, as we fly our flags celebrating the ideals she was founded on.

We will still celebrate Independence Day with patriotic fervor, for such patriotism acknowledges the uniqueness of our humble national beginnings, based on eternal principles, inalienable rights granted by God, and not on the whims of monarchs, tyrants, or a government “grant” of rights and privileges. But our patriotic zeal is more subdued as we witness the current departure from those precepts.

We recognize that for the first time in history, a nation was created by “we the people,” for we the people, based on a series of principles and tenets recognized to be God-given, not government bestowed. As James Madison said regarding the patriots who fought for freedom, “Happily for America, happily, we trust, for the whole human race, they pursued a new and more noble course. They accomplished a revolution which has no parallel in the annals of human society.”

Our national uniqueness makes the celebration of our nation’s birth a most consequential event. Attempts at imitation of American governance have and will be made, but nothing approximates the uniqueness of the establishment of these United States of America because of those founding principles.

The Pope acknowledged this American exceptionalism two years ago when he visited Washington, DC. The Holy See stated, “From the dawn of the Republic, America’s quest for freedom has been guided by the conviction that the principles governing political and social life are intimately linked to a moral order based on the dominion of God the Creator. The framers of this nation’s founding documents drew upon this conviction when they proclaimed the self-evident truth that all men are created equal and endowed with inalienable rights grounded in the laws of nature and of nature’s God.”

May we be filled with a resolve, while celebrating this Independence Day, to return to our ideological roots based on individual freedom, and commit to support only statesmen who support those ideals, rather than politicians seeking statist governmental control who do not embrace and champion those inalienable rights. Such determination will make this Independence Day a very personal and memorable one.