A
MARCH ON WASHINGTON?
PART 2 of 3
By
Jon Christian Ryter
February 14, 2009
NewsWithViews.com
When he argued in favor of his amendment, DeMint began by mentioning that he had, just that morning, attended the National Prayer Breakfast. President Barack Obama, he said, addressed the 3,000-or-so people in attendance and, DeMint noted: "...said many great things, and one of them was this: 'The particular faith that motivates each of us can promote a greater good for all of us. I don't expect the vision for this to appear overnight, but I do believe that if we can talk to one another openly and honestly, then perhaps all risks will start to mend and new partnerships will begin to emerge.'"
DeMint continued: "We heard President Obama and former Prime Minister of Great Britain, Tony Blair, say that faith gave us tools to solve problems that could not be solved without faith. This is a beautiful message and I think we all know it's true. But then we come here and we find a provision in this massive spending bill that would make sure that students could never talk openly and honestly about their faith. The fact is that any university or college that takes any of the money in this bill to renovate an auditorium, dorm or student center could not hold the National Prayer Breakfast affair any longer because of what's written in this bill.
"This bill," he continued, "provides funds to modernize, renovate, repair facilities on college and university campuses—both private and public. But, there's a phrase in there, a couple of lines, that says the facilities that accept these funds cannot use them for sectarian instruction, religious worship, or school or department of divinity or in which a substantial portion of the facility are subsumed in a religious mission. Keep in mind that a prayer has been called by our courts to be religious worship. What this means is that students cannot meet together in their dorms if that dorm has been repaired with this federal money, and have a prayer group or a Bible study. They can't get together in their student centers, they can't have a commencement service where their speakers talk about their personal faith. What this means to universities is legal risk. The threat of lawsuits from the ACLU if they allow any religious activity on a campus and take any of this money. It's not just the particular facility, this money can be used be electrical wiring, plumbing, sewer systems and other things that affect every building on campus.
"This language has been written by very smart lawyers to do what they try to do—which is to intimidate the free speech of traditional, freedom-loving Americans. My amendment would just simply strike this language and affect no other part of the bill. The National Prayer Breakfast could not be held in a building renovated with funds from this bill. The Campus Crusade, the Fellowship of Christian Athletes, Intervarsity Christian Fellowship, Catholic or Jewish student groups, that are meeting on campuses all over the country today could no longer meet in buildings that used funds from the bill we're talking about today. There are classes on world religion and religious history, academic studies on religious text that could be banned from facilities renovated by this bill.
"What about a group of students and professors who just wanted to start a meeting with prayer? What about chaplains on campus? What about a private Bible study in a student's dorm room? What about a campus that wants to bring on Billy Graham or Rick Warren to speak? Would they be barred from campus? Would the college be sued by the ACLU? What if one us—a member of Congress—went to speak at a college graduation and shared a little bit about the faith in our lives? Would that college be sued?
"The people who wrote this bill want to create risk and liability and put a chilling affect on religious freedom in our country. But the most important thing for us to consider here is what is this nonsense doing in this bill in the first place? The courts have decided this issue. Religious groups have the same freedom as non-religious groups. This has nothing to do with the economy, and even less to do with stimulus.
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"Keep
in mind this bill did not write itself. Someone around here thinks it
was a good idea to discriminate against people of faith." Once
again the authors of Sec. 803(d)(2)(c) were Senators Inouye and Baucus.
Christians, whether Democrat or Republican, need to remember both of
them when they come up for reelection. Akaka comes up for reelection.
in 2012. Baucus, who doesn't think much of the 1st Amendment (except
to protect LiberalSpeak), comes up for reelection. in 2016.
Any member of Congress who tries to abridge your rights under the Constitution
needs to be removed from office. "To deny them the education and
opportunities and access to public facilities , someone is so hostile
to religion that they are willing to stand in the schoolhouse door like
the infamous George Wallace to deny people of faith from entering any
campus building renovated by this bill. This cannot stand.
"It is in hard times that our society most needs faith. It provides the light that no darkness can overcome. This provision is an attempt to extinguish that light from college campuses, and from the lives of our youth. In the words of the President today, '...if faith can promote a greater good for all of us, our very beliefs can bring us together and build what is broken, and lift those who have fallen on hard times. Our culture cannot survive without faith, and our nation cannot survive without freedom.' This provision is an assault against both. It's un-American and it's unconstitutional, intolerant and it's intolerable. It must be struck from the underlying bill, so I urge my colleagues to support a very simple amendment, a few lines that just strikes this provision that has already been decided by the courts has no place in this bill."
The vote on the DeMint Amendment was pretty much a party line vote with Sen. Evan Bayh joining the Republicans. Sen. Arlen Specter [R-PA] , the turncoat who took the Democrat's 30-pieces of silver along with Sen. Susan Collins [R-ME] and Olympia Snow [R-ME] who gave the far left the votes they needed to enact the Hogfest Reinvestment Act of 2009 into law, first voted against the DeMint Amendment. When he realized he was the lone Republican voting against religious freedom, he hurriedly changed his vote before the roll call vote was announced. The DeMint Amendment was defeated, 54 to 43. The American Bar Association and the ACLU scored another legislative victory in a bill that appears to have been designed to pay back every special interest group in America for helping Obama win the White House and the Democrats win an FDR-majority in Congress.
Only one provision in the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 has been denounced by Obama. He has demanded that offensive provision be stricken before the bill is sent to him for his signature. Buried in both the House and Senate versions of the stimulus bill is the "Buy American" Amendment. The measure, which was sponsored by Congressman Peter Vischlosky [D-IN] and Sen. Byron Dorgan [D-ND] was left in the bill by Senate Majority leader Harry Reid [D-NV] and Speaker Pelosi because both felt the rider would pull Republican votes at the last minute. The measure mandates that all construction projects funded by the legislation must use materials—particularly steel—that were mined and/or produced in America.
Yet, Obama and the congressional leadership saw nothing wrong with another provision in the bill to provide a handout to Philippine soldiers who fought the Japanese in World War II. The handout was originally introduced as S.1315, the Veterans' Benefit Enhancement Act of 2007 by Sen. Daniel Akaka [D-HI]. The bill was designed to give US military pensions to aging Filipino veterans who fought not to protect the United States, but to protect the Philippines from the Japanese between 1942-1945. I wonder why the bill didn't include pensions for French patriots who fought the Nazis, or Dutch soldiers or, for that matter, Soviet soldiers? How many US soldiers who were drafted in WWII and left the service at the end of the wars in Europe and Asia, received military pensions after four years of duty? Let me tell you how many. None. Nada. Zip. Zilch. Like I said, the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 is a hogfest for everyone except the middle class American taxpayers and their descendants who are expected to pay for it.
It's very important that the American people—regardless of their political pedigree—understand what's happening to their country at this moment in history. They must pay close attention, because history is being made—and not for the better. We are witnessing Act Three of a live performance that should be billed as "The Demise and Fall of America." Act One of this saga played out between 1906 and 1913 with the curtain call taking place when banker-bought President Thomas Woodrow Wilson, Democratically-controlled House Speaker Champ Davis and Democratically-controlled Senate Majority Leader J. Hamilton Lewis engineered the passage of the Federal Reserve Act which was signed into law on Dec. 23, 1913 on top of the fraudulent ratifications of the 16th and 17th Amendments on February 3m 1913 and April 8, 1913 respectively. The 17th Amendment, demanded by the money barons, removed the States from the equation of power and placed all power in the hands of an elected oligarchy. The Republic of the United States of America died on April 8, 1913 when the United States became a parliamentary democracy—rule by the majority.
The advocacy of the American, anti-tax citizenry dwells solely on the fraudulent ratification of the 16th Amendment while ignoring the proposition that the States, which viewed themselves as the superior form of governance in the United States, would willingly vote to eliminate their own voice in the federal government. Why was it important to the money barons to eliminate the voice of the States? Because every time the money barons attempted to legislate a permanent central bank in the United States, it was the US Senate that killed it. Eight months and ten days after silencing the States, a permanent central banks in the United States was signed into law by Woodrow Wilson. The 16th Amendment deals only with taxes. Taxes, like death, will always be with us. If we didn't have a national income tax, the money barons would have concocted some other way of stealing the wealth of the working class to fund their socialist programs. The 17th Amendment struck at the heart of the coalition between the States and the People to control the growing bureaucracy in Washington.
Today the separation of powers between the States and the federal government and between the Executive, Legislative and Judicial branches of government have become blurred, with the central government assuming the mantle of power over both the States and the People, with the authority of the three branches of government coalescing into a single cauldron of government, with each branch assuming powers for themselves that they do not constitutionally possess. But, I'm getting ahead of myself.
Act Two of the political drama, "The Demise and Fall of America," opens with a cliff hanger. The Stock Market, manipulated by the money barons, crashes. And the media, aided by the incoming president, Franklin D. Roosevelt, decried the national crisis, warning that if something very dramatic did not happen, the entire economy would collapse. The liberal media predicted massive bank failures as the fabricated national emergency worsened. Hundreds of thousands of working class investors whose retirement nest eggs were tied up in the stocks that failed on October 29, 1929 ran to their local banks and demanded what was left of their life savings in gold coin or gold certificates.
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As the newspaper headlines predicted more gloom and doom, consumers stopped spending, causing a cascading, domino affect that rippled across the country, beginning with layoffs at factories owned by the money barons and spiraling down to impact the mom and pop shops just off Main Street America. As layoffs and firings became more prevalent, all discretionary spending came to a screeching halt. The Roaring Twenties devolved into the Bankrupt Thirties. Roosevelt succeeded in actually creating the national catastrophe his planned society was going to fix. For part three click below.
