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Letter from 2012 in Obama’s America
What will the United States be like if Senator Obama is elected? The most reliable way of predicting people’s future actions is by looking at their past actions. Jesus himself taught, “You will recognize them by their fruits” (Matthew 7:16). Anyone who has hired employees knows that – the best predictor of a person’s future job performance is not what he tells you he can do but what he has actually done in the past.
So here is a picture of the changes that are likely or at least very possible if Senator Obama is elected and the far-left segments of the Democratic Party gain control of the White House, the Congress, and perhaps then the Supreme Court. The entire letter is written as a “What if?” exercise, but that does not make it empty speculation because every future “event” described here is based on established legal and political trends that can already be abundantly documented and that only need a “tipping point” such as the election of Senator Obama and a Democratic House and Senate to begin to put them into place. Every past event named in this letter (everything prior to October 22, 2008) is established fact and has already taken place.
This letter is not “predicting” that all of the imaginative future “events” named in this letter will happen. But it is saying that each one of these changes could happen and also that each change would be a the natural outcome of (a) published legal opinions already written by liberal judges, (b) trends already seen in states with liberal-dominated courts such as California and Massachusetts, (c) recent past promises, practices, and legislative initiatives of the current liberal leadership of the Democratic Party and (d) Senator Obama’s previous actions, previous voting record, and previous public promises to the far-left groups that won the nomination for him.
Many of these changes, if they occur, will have significant implications for Christians. This letter is addressed particularly to their concerns so they will be aware of what is at stake before the November 4 election.
Some will respond to this letter by saying, “Well, I hope hardship and even persecution come to the church. It will strengthen the church!” But hoping for suffering is wrong. It is similar to saying, “I hope I get some serious illness because it will strengthen my faith.” Jesus taught us to pray the opposite: “And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil” (Matt. 6:13). Paul urged us to pray not for persecution but “for kings and all who are in high positions, that we may lead a peaceful and quiet life, godly and dignified in every way” (1 Tim. 2:2). So Christians should hope and pray that such difficult times do not come. But if they do come, then it will be right to trust God to bring good out of them and also bring them to an end.
Of course, there are many evangelical Christians supporting Senator Obama as well as many supporting Senator McCain in this election. Christians on both sides should continue to respect and cherish each other’s friendship as well as the freedom people have in the United States to differ on these issues and to freely speak our opinions about them to one another.
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October 22, 2012
Dear friends,
I can hardly sing “The Star Spangled Banner” any more. When I hear the words,
O say, does that star spangled banner yet wave
O’er the land of the free and the home of the brave?
I get tears in my eyes and a lump in my throat. Now in October of 2012, after seeing what has happened in the last four years, I don’t think I can still answer, “Yes,” to that question. We are not “the land of the free and the home of the brave.” Many of our freedoms have been taken away by a liberal Supreme Court and a majority of Democrats in both the House and the Senate, and hardly any brave citizen dares to resist the new government policies any more.
The 2008 election was closer than anybody expected, but Barack Obama still won. Many Christians voted for Obama – younger evangelicals actually provided him with the needed margin to defeat John McCain – but they didn’t think he would really follow through on the far left policies that had marked his entire previous career. They were wrong.
The Supreme Court
On January 20, 2009, President Obama’s inauguration went smoothly, and he spoke eloquently of reaching out to Republicans who would work with him. Even in the next month, when Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg and John Paul Stevens announced that they would step down from the Supreme Court, nobody was very surprised – Ginsburg was already 75 year old and in ill health
and Stevens, 88. President Obama nominated two far-left, American Civil Liberties Union-oriented judges and the Democratic Senate confirmed them quickly. They are brilliant, articulate, and in their early 40s, so they can expect to stay on the Court for 30 or 40 years. But things seemed the same because the Court retained its 4-4 split between liberals and conservatives with Justice Anthony Kennedy as the swing vote.
The decisive changes on the Supreme Court started in June, when Justice Kennedy resigned – he was 72 and had grown weary of the unrelenting responsibility. His replacement – another young liberal Obama appointment – gave a 5-4 majority to justices who were eager to create new laws from the bench. The four conservative justices who remained — John Roberts, Antonin Scalia, Clarence Thomas, and Samuel Alito — were suddenly in the minority.
Then in August, 2009, two months after Kennedy resigned, Justice Scalia unexpectedly announced his resignation due to health reasons and by October of 2009 another Obama appointment took his oath and joined the Court.
The three remaining conservatives (known as “originalists” because they hold that the meaning of the Constitution is its “original public meaning”) kept objecting that the role of the Supreme Court should not be to create new laws but only to interpret the Constitution and the laws that had been passed by Congress and the state legislatures. But the six liberal justices paid no attention. They decided cases in light of their understanding of the needs of society, and they took more and more precedents not from the U. S. Constitution but from international laws when it suited their agenda. From the end of 2009, Justices Roberts, Thomas, and Alito have been constantly outvoted 6-3 and they are essentially powerless. It might now be 20 or 30 more years before enough new appointments could be made to change the far-left dominance of the Supreme Court.
Finally the far-left had the highest prize: complete control of the Supreme Court. And they set about quickly to expedite cases by which they would enact the entire agenda of the far left in American politics – everything that they had hoped for and more just took a few key decisions.
Same-sex marriage
The most far-reaching transformation of American society came from the Supreme Court’s stunning affirmation, in early 2010, that homosexual marriage was a “constitutional” right that had to be respected by all 50 states because laws barring same-sex marriage violated the equal protection clause of the U.S. Constitution. Suddenly homosexual marriage was the law of the land in all 50 states and no state legislature, no state Supreme Court, no state Constitutional amendment, not even Congress had any power to change it. The Supreme Court had ruled, and the discussion was over. This was a blatant example of creating new law by the court, for homosexual marriage was mentioned nowhere in the Constitution, nor would any of the original authors have imagined that same sex marriage could be derived from their words. But it just followed the precedents that had been already set by state Supreme Courts in Massachusetts (2003), California (2008), and Connecticut (2008).
President Obama repeated his declaration that he personally was against same sex marriage, but he told the nation that there was nothing now that he could do. The Supreme Court had ruled, and it was now the law of the land. The President asked the entire nation to support the decision.
After that decision, many other policies changed, and several previous Supreme Court cases were reversed rather quickly — raising the question, “Is America still the land of the free?” (1) Boy Scouts: “The land of the free”? The Boy Scouts no longer exist as an organization. They chose to disband rather than be forced to obey the Supreme Court decision that they would have to hire homosexual scoutmasters and allow them to sleep in tents with young boys. (This was to be expected with a change in the Court, since the 2000 decision Boy Scouts of America v. Dale, which affirmed the right of the Boy Scouts as a private organization to dismiss a homosexual scoutmaster, was a 5-4 decision, with Stevens, Ginsburg, Souter, and Breyer dissenting even then.)
It had become increasingly difficult for the Boy Scouts to find meeting places anyway, because in 2009 Congress passed and President Obama signed an expansion of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which extended federal civil rights protections to people engaging in homosexual behavior. So the Boy Scouts had already been kicked out of all public facilities.
(2) Elementary schools: “The land of the free”? Elementary schools now include compulsory training in varieties of gender identity in Grade 1, including the goodness of homosexuality as one possible personal choice. Many parents tried to “opt out” their children from such sessions, but the courts have ruled that they cannot do this, noting that education experts in the government have decided that such training is essential to children’s psychological health.
Many Christian teachers objected to teaching first graders that homosexuality was morally neutral and equal to heterosexuality. They said it violated their consciences to have to teach something the Bible viewed as morally wrong. But state after state ruled that their refusal to teach positively about homosexuality was the equivalent of hate speech, and they had to teach it or be fired. Tens of thousands of Christian teachers either quit or were fired, and there are hardly any evangelical teachers in public schools any more.
Non-Christians found this hard to understand. “Why not just teach what the school says even if it’s not your personal opinion? So what? We can’t have every teacher deciding what he or she wants to teach, can we?”
But the Christian teachers kept coming back to something Jesus said: “Whoever causes one of these little ones who believe in me to sin, it would be better for him to have a great millstone fastened around his neck and to be drowned in the depth of the sea” (Matthew 18:6). And they quit by the thousands, no matter what the personal cost, rather than commit what they believed to be a direct sin against God.
In addition, many private Christian schools decided to shut down after the Supreme Court ruled that anti-discrimination laws that include sexual orientation extended to private institutions such as schools, and that private schools also had to obey the law and teach that homosexuality and heterosexuality are both morally good choices.
(3) Adoption agencies: “The land of the free”? There are no more Roman Catholic or evangelical Protestant adoption agencies in the United States. Following earlier rulings in New York and Massachusetts, the U.S. Supreme Court in 2011 ruled that these agencies had to agree to place children with homosexual couples or lose their licenses. Just as the Catholic Charities adoption agency had closed down for this reason in Massachusetts in 2006, so all the agencies across the United States have now closed down rather than violate their consciences about the moral wrong of homosexual behavior.
Christian parents seeking to adopt have tried going through secular adoption agencies, but they are increasingly excluding parents with “narrow” or dangerous views on religion or homosexuality.
(4) Businesses with government contracts: “The land of the free”? All businesses that have government contracts at the national, state, or local level now have to provide documentation of equal benefits for same sex couples. This was needed to overcome “systemic discrimination” against them and followed on a national level the pattern of policies already in place in San Francisco, Los Angeles, and Seattle.
(5) Public broadcasting: “The land of the free”? The Bible can no longer be freely preached over radio or television stations when the subject matter includes such “offensive” doctrines as homosexual conduct or the claim that people will go to hell if they do not believe in Jesus Christ. The Supreme Court agreed that these could be kept off the air as prohibited “hate speech” that is likely to incite violence and discrimination. These policies followed earlier broadcasting and print restrictions that were already in place prior to 2008 in Canada and Sweden.
(6) Doctors and lawyers: “The land of the free”? Physicians who refuse to provide artificial insemination for lesbian couples now face significant fines or loss of their license to practice medicine, following the reasoning of a decision of the California Supreme Court in North Coast Women's Care Medical Group v. Superior Court of San Diego County (Benitez), which had been announced August 18, 2008. As a result, many Christian physicians have retired or left the practices of family medicine and obstetrics & gynecology. Lawyers who refuse to handle adoption cases for same-sex couples similarly now lose their licenses to practice law.
(7) Counselors and social workers: “The land of the free”? All other professionals who are licensed by individual states are now also prohibited from discrimination against homosexuals. Social workers and counselors, even counselors in church staff positions, who refuse to provide “professional, appropriately nurturing marriage counseling” for homosexual couples lose their counseling licenses. Thousands of Christians have left these professions as a result.
(8) Homosexual weddings: “The land of the free”? Church buildings are now considered a “public accommodation” by the United States Supreme Court and churches have no freedom to refuse to allow their buildings to be used for wedding ceremonies for homosexual couples. If they refuse, they lose their tax exempt status, and they are increasingly becoming subject to fines and anti-discrimination lawsuits.
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(9) Homosexual church staff members: “The land of the free”? While churches are still free to turn down homosexual applicants for the job of senior pastor, churches and parachurch organizations are no longer free to reject homosexual applicants for staff positions such as part-time youth pastor or director of counseling. Those that rejected homosexual applicants have already had their tax-exempt status revoked, and now the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission has begun to impose heavy monetary fines for each new instance of such “discrimination” which, they say, is “contrary to the U.S. Constitution as defined by the Supreme Court.” These fines follow the pattern of a precedent-setting case in February, 2008, in which the Diocese of Hereford in the Church of England was fined $94,000 (47,000 UK pounds) for turning down a homosexual applicant for a youth ministry position.
(10) Homosexuals in the military: One change regarding the status of homosexuals did not wait for any Supreme Court decision. In the first week after his inauguration President Obama invited gay rights leaders from around the United States to join him at the White House as he signed an executive order directing all branches of the military to abandon their “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy and to start actively recruiting homosexuals.
As a result, homosexuals are now given special bonuses for enlisting in military service (to attempt to compensate for past discrimination) and all new recruits, and all active-duty and reserve personnel, are compelled to take many hours of “sensitivity training” to ensure that they demonstrate positive attitudes toward those with different sexual orientations and practices. Any who seem hesitant or who object are routinely passed over for promotion. In addition, any chaplain who holds to an interpretation of Scripture that homosexual conduct is morally wrong and therefore does not espouse “mainstream values,” is dismissed from the military. This is not “the land of the free” for them.
Religious speech in the public square
(11) High schools: “The land of the free”? High schools are no longer free to allow “see you at the pole” meetings where students pray together, or any student Bible studies even before or after school. The Supreme Court ruled that this is considered speech that is both “proselytizing” and involves “worship,” special categories of speech which, as liberal Justice John Paul Stevens had already argued in his dissent in Good News Club v. Milford Central School (2001), should not be allowed in public schools, since it is in a different category from other kinds of speech. (Justice Souter filed a similar dissent, which Justice Ginsburg joined). The new 6-3 liberal majority on the Supreme Court followed his reasoning and outlawed any use of school property for any kind of religious meeting, even outside of normal school hours. In addition, Christian students cannot raise religious objections to curriculum material that promotes homosexual behavior.
(12) Church use of school property: “The land of the free”? Tens of thousands of young churches suddenly had no place to meet when the Supreme Court ruled that public schools in all 50 states had to stop allowing churches to rent their facilities even on Sundays, when school was not in session. The Court said this was an unconstitutional use of government property for a religious purpose. Most of these churches have still been unable to find any suitable place to meet. Public libraries and public parks are similarly excluded from allowing churches to use their facilities. Once again, the reasoning of liberal justices Stevens, Souter, and Ginsburg in 2001 in Good News Club (see above) was able to garner 6-3 support with the new Court, and they prevailed.
(13) Campus ministries: “The land of the free”? Campus organizations such as Campus Crusade for Christ, InterVarsity, Navigators, Baptist Campus Ministry, and Reformed University Fellowship have shrunk to mere skeleton organizations, and in many states they have simply ceased to exist. After the Supreme Court ruled that “proselytizing” speech and “worship” speech did not have the same First Amendment protection as other speech, and after it declared same-sex marriage to be the law of the United States, a subsequent Supreme Court decision predictably ruled that universities had to prohibit campus organizations that promote “hate speech” and have discriminatory policies. Therefore these Christian ministries have been prohibited from all use of campus buildings, all campus bulletin boards, all advertising in campus newspapers, and all use of dormitory rooms or common rooms for Bible studies.
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Their staff members are no longer
allowed to trespass on university property. The only ministries allowed to function on campuses are “non-discriminatory” ministries that agree to allow practicing homosexuals and members of other religions on their governing boards. With the new Supreme Court appointed by President Obama, the long years of liberal opposition to these evangelical ministries finally bore fruit, and only liberal ministries are left on campuses.
(14) Pledge of allegiance: “The land of the free”? Public school teachers are no longer free to lead students in the Pledge of Allegiance to the flag of the United States. The U. S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit heard a new challenge to the phrase “under God” in the pledge, and, as it had in 2002 in Newdow v. United States Congress, Elk Grove Unified School District, et al., it held the wording to be unconstitutional. Now the Supreme Court has upheld this decision.
Abortion
(15) Freedom of Choice Act: Congress lost no time in solidifying abortion rights under President Obama. In fact, Obama had promised, “The first thing I’ll do as President is sign the Freedom of Choice Act” (July 17, 2007, speech to the Planned Parenthood Action Fund).
This Federal law immediately nullified hundreds of state laws that had created even the slightest barrier to abortion.
Now states can no longer require parental involvement for minors who wish to have an abortion, or any waiting period, or any informed consent rules, or any restrictions on late-term abortions. The act reversed the Hyde Amendment, so that the government now funds Medicaid abortions for any reason. As a result, the number of abortions has increased dramatically. The Freedom of Choice Act also reversed the Partial Birth Abortion Ban Act of 2003, so that infants can be killed outright just seconds before they would be born alive. States whose laws were overturned challenged the law in court but it was upheld by the Obama Supreme Court. “The land of the free”? There is no freedom for these infants who are killed by the millions.
(16) Nurses and abortions: “The land of the free”? Nurses are no longer free to refuse to participate in abortions for reasons of conscience.
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If they refuse to participate, they lose their jobs, for they are now failing to comply with Federal law. Many Christian nurses have left the health care field entirely rather than violate their consciences. A number of Christian nurses challenged their loss of jobs in court, but the Supreme Court ruled that medical professionals do not have the freedom to refuse nonessential, elective care on the basis of conscience. In their decision, the Supreme Court followed the reasoning of the California Supreme Court in the 2008 Benitez case (see section (13) below).
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(17) Doctors and abortions: “The land of the free”? The same restrictions apply to doctors: Doctors who refuse to perform abortions can no longer be licensed to deliver babies at hospitals in any state. As a result, many Christian doctors have left family medicine and obstetrics, and many have simply retired.
Pornography
(18) Pornography: “The land of the free”? It’s almost impossible now to keep any children from seeing pornography. The Supreme Court in 2011 nullified all Federal Communications Commission restrictions on obscene speech or visual content in radio and TV broadcasts, and television programs at all hours of the day now contain explicit portrayals of sexual acts. The Court simply applied more broadly the “Miller test” from the 1973 decision in Miller v. California, by which a work could not be found obscene unless “the work, taken as a whole, lacks serious literary, artistic, political, and scientific value.” In the 2011 decision the Court essentially found that any pornographic work had some measure of “serious artistic value,” at least according to some observers, and thus any censorship of any kind of pornographic material was an unconstitutional restriction on the First Amendment freedom of speech and freedom of the press. In addition, all city and county laws restricting pornography were struck down by this decision. As a result, pornographic magazines are now openly displayed in gas stations, grocery stores, and newsstands (as they have been in some European countries for several years).
In addition, law enforcement officials can no longer stop the distribution of child pornography, after the Supreme Court ruled 6-3 that the such distribution violated freedom of speech and interstate commerce laws.
Gun ownership
(19) Guns: “The land of the free”? It is now illegal for private citizens to own guns for self defense in eight states, and the number is growing with increasing Democratic control of state legislatures and governorships. This was the result of a 6-3 Supreme Court decision in which the Court reversed its 5-4 decision that had upheld private gun ownership in District of Columbia v. Heller (2008).
In the new decision, a response to test cases from Oregon, Massachusetts, and Vermont, the Court adopted the view of the Second Amendment that had already been defended in Heller by the four liberal justices, Stevens, Souter, Ginsburg, and Breyer.
In this new decision the Court specified that “the right of the people to keep and bear arms” was limited to that purpose they said was specified in the Second Amendment, namely, to those people who were part of a “well regulated militia” in the various states. To those who argued that this view was not the “original intent” of the framers, they pointed to a long history of dispute over the interpretation of the expression and then said that, in any case, the Constitution was an “evolving” document that must change with the times, and so what may have been applicable in 1790 need no longer be decisive. Therefore they allowed cities and states to limit gun ownership to active duty military personnel and police officers. Citizens in those areas who are discovered owning guns have been subjected to heavy fines and imprisonment. Inner-city violent crime has increased dramatically.
Education
(20) Home schooling: “The land of the free”? Parents’ freedom to teach their children has been severely restricted. The Supreme Court, to the delight of the National Education Association, followed the legal reasoning of a February 28, 2008 ruling in Re: Rachel L by the Second District Court of Appeal in California (although that ruling had been later reversed).
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The Court declared that home schooling was an illegal violation of state educational requirements except in cases where the parents (a) had an education certificate from an accredited state program, (b) agreed to use state-approved textbooks in all courses, and (c) agreed not to not to teach their children that homosexual conduct is wrong, or that Jesus is the only way to God, since these ideas have been found to hinder students’ social adjustment and acceptance of other lifestyles and beliefs, and to run counter to the state’s interest in educating its children to be good citizens. Parents found in violation of this ruling have been subject to prosecutions for truancy violation, resulting in heavy fines and eventual removal of their children from the home.
Thousands of home schooling parents, seeing no alternative in the United States, have begun to emigrate to other countries, particularly Australia and New Zealand, where home schooling is still quite prevalent.
President Obama’s response to the Supreme Court
After many of these decisions, especially those that restricted religious speech in public places, President Obama publicly expressed strong personal disapproval of the decision and said that the Supreme Court had gone far beyond anything that he ever expected or thought that it would do. But he has also stated repeatedly that he had sworn to “preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States,” and, now that the Supreme Court had ruled, he had no choice but to uphold the law, for these decisions were now the law of the land.
Military policy
In his role as Commander in Chief, President Obama has been reluctant to send our armed forces to any new overseas commitment.
(21) Iraq: “The home of the brave”? President Obama fulfilled his campaign promise and began regular withdrawal of U.S. troops from Iraq, completing it in the promised 16 months, by April, 2010. All was peaceful during those months, but then in May, 2010, Al Qaida operatives from Syria and Iran poured into Iraq in a flood and completely overwhelmed the Iraqi security forces. A Taliban-like oppression has now taken over in Iraq, and hundreds of thousands of “American sympathizers” have been labeled as traitors, imprisoned, tortured, and killed. The number put to death may soon reach into the millions.
Al Qaida leaders have been emboldened by what they are calling this American “defeat” and their ranks are swelling in dozens of countries.
(22) Terrorist attacks: “The home of the brave”? President Obama directed U.S. intelligence services to cease all wiretapping of alleged terrorist phone calls unless they first obtained a specific court warrant for each case. Terrorists captured overseas, instead of being tried in military tribunals, are now given full trials in the U.S. court system, and they have to be allowed access to a number of government secrets to prepare their defense.
Since 2009 terrorist bombs have exploded in two large and two small U.S. cities, killing hundreds, and the entire country is now fearful, for no place seems safe. President Obama in each case has vowed “to pursue and arrest and prosecute those responsible,” but no arrests have yet been made. However, he has also challenged the nation to increase foreign aid to the poorer nations that were the breeding grounds for terrorism, so that people could have an opportunity to escape from the cycles of poverty and violence in which generations had been trapped.
(23) Russia: “The home of the brave”? As Vice President Joe Biden had predicted on Oct. 20, 2008, some hostile foreign countries “tested” President Obama in his first few months in office.
The first test came from Russia. In early 2009 they followed the pattern they had begun in Georgia in 2008 and sent troops to occupy and re-take several Eastern European countries, starting with the Ukraine, Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania. President Obama appealed to the United Nations (UN), taking the same approach as he had in his initial statements when Russia invaded Georgia in August 2008 and he said, “Now is the time for Georgia and Russia to show restraint, and to avoid an escalation to full scale war,” and “All sides should enter into direct talks on behalf of stability in Georgia, and the United States, the United Nations Security Council, and the international community should fully support a peaceful resolution to this crisis,” But Russia sits on the Security Council, and no UN action has yet been taken.
Then in the next three years Russia occupied additional countries that had been previous Soviet satellite nations, including Poland, Hungary, the Czech Republic, and Bulgaria, with no military response from the U.S. or the UN. Meetings of NATO heads of state have severely condemned Russia’s actions each time but they could never reach consensus on any military action. Liberal TV commentators in both the US and Europe have uniformly expressed deep regret at the loss of freedom of these countries but have also observed that “the U.S. cannot be the world’s policeman.”
President Obama’s popularity dropped somewhat after each of these crises, but media criticism was remarkably muted. And Vice President Joe Biden reminded the nation that on October 20, 2008, he had predicted that Russia might be one of “four or five scenarios” where an “international crisis” would arise. “It will not be six months before the world tests Barack Obama like they did John Kennedy” and that Obama would have to make “some incredibly tough decisions,” and that “it's not gonna be apparent initially, it's not gonna be apparent that we're right"
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(24) Latin America: President Obama has also moved to deepen U.S. ties and U.S. trade with Communist regimes in Cuba, Venezuela, and Bolivia, regimes that had long enjoyed the favor of far-left factions in the Democratic Party. Several other Latin American countries now seem ready to succumb to insurgent Communist revolutionary factions funded and armed by millions of petrodollars from Hugo Chavez in Venezuela.
(25) Israel: “The home of the brave”? In mid-2010 Iran launched a nuclear bomb which exploded in the middle of Tel Aviv, destroying much of that city. They then demanded that Israel cede huge amounts of territory to the Palestinians, and after an anguished all-night cabinet meeting, Israel’s Prime Minister agreed. Israel is now reduced to a much smaller country, hardly able to defend itself, and its future remains uncertain. President Obama said that he abhorred what Iran had done and he hoped that the UN would unanimously condemn this crime against humanity. He also declared that the U.S. would be part of any international peacekeeping force if authorized by the UN, but the Muslim nations in the UN have so far prevented any UN action.
Health care
(26) Health care systems: The new Congress under President Obama passed a nationalized “single provider” health care system, in which the U.S. government is now the provider of all health care in the United States, following the pattern of nationalized medicine the United Kingdom and Canada. The great benefit is that medical care is now free for everyone -- if you can get it. Now that health care is free it seems that everybody wants more of it. The waiting list for prostate cancer surgery is 3 years. The waiting list for ovarian cancer is 2 years. Just as the Canadian experience had shown prior to 2008 with its nationalized health care, so now in the US only a small number of MRIs are performed — only 10% of what they were in the U.S. in 2008 – because they are just too expensive, and they turn out to discover more problems that need treatment, so they are almost never authorized.
(27) Limited care for older Americans: “The land of the free”? Because medical resources now must be rationed carefully by the government, people over 80 have essentially no access to hospitals or surgical procedures. Their “duty” is increasingly thought to be to go home to die, so that they don’t drain scarce resources from the medical system. Euthanasia is becoming more and more common.
Taxes, the economy, and the poor:
Many Christians who voted for Obama did so because they thought his tax policies were more fair and his “middle class tax cuts” would bring the economy out of its 2008 crisis. But once he took office he followed the consistent pattern of the Democratic Party and the pattern of his own past record and asked Congress for a large tax increase. He explained that the deficit had grown so large under President Bush, and the needs of the nation were so great, that we simply couldn’t afford to cut taxes at the present time.
And several of Obama’s economic policies have hurt the poor most of all because they have decreased production, increased inflation, and increased unemployment. Here is what happened:
(28) Taxes: Tax rates have gone up on personal income, dividends, capital gains, corporations, and inheritance transfers. The amount of income subject to Social Security tax has nearly doubled. The effect on the economy has been devastating. We have experienced a prolonged recession. Everybody has been hurt by this, but the poor have been hurt most of all. In dozens of cities there are just no jobs to be found.
It turns out that the people President Obama called “the rich” were mostly not all that rich. They were just ordinary people who worked hard, saved, and built small businesses that provided jobs and brought economic growth. They were the people who kept inventing new and better ways to produce things and bring prices down. They were the people whose companies produced the goods and services that gave us the highest standard of living in history of world. They were the people who provided the competition that kept prices of everything so low. And the top 50% of earners were already paying 97% of income taxes collected by the U.S. government in 2006.
President Obama increased their tax burden so much that many business owners decided they didn’t want to work any harder when the government was taking so much away. “The land of the free?” Not for the most productive workers in the American economy. Just as nearly two million citizens in the decade prior to 2008 had moved out of California and New York when the Democrats had control and kept raising state taxes, many of these entrepreneurs have now moved their money, their factories, and often themselves, overseas. So many jobs have been lost that welfare rolls have swelled, and President Obama is calling for more taxes to meet the needs of those without work.
However, Obama’s tax bill still included “tax credits” for the lowest 40% of earners, who were said to “need the most help.” Since the bottom 40% were not paying any Federal income taxes in the first place, these “tax cuts” were actually a gigantic redistribution of income, a huge welfare payment, a way to “spread the wealth around,” as Obama had told “Joe the Plumber” on October 13, 2008.
When critics objected that Obama’s tax policies were leading to inflation and unemployment, he responded that our goal should not be merely to increase America’s materialism and wealth and prosperity, but to obtain a more just distribution of wealth, even if it costs everybody a little to achieve that important goal.
(29) Budget deficit: The Federal budget deficit has increased dramatically under President Obama, in spite of higher tax rates. It turned out that increasing tax rates on “the rich” did nothing to reduce the deficit because the economy shrank so much with reduced investment that the total dollars collected in taxes actually decreased, even though most people’s tax rate is now higher. As numerous economists had predicted, higher tax rates in practice meant that the government took in less money. When reporters asked Obama why he still favored higher taxes on the rich when it brought in no more money, he replied that it was important that the rich pay their fair share.
(30) Union organizing: “The land of the free”? Congress passed in 2009, and President Obama quickly signed, a “card check” program that nullified the requirement for secret ballots when voting on whether workers wanted a union shop. Now the union simply has to get signatures from a majority of workers in any business, and unions around the country are now using strong-arm tactics to intimidate anyone who stands in their way. Several industries are now completely unionized and prices of goods produced by those industries have shot up as a result.
(31) Energy: World demand for oil continues to climb, and prices keep going up, but President Obama for four years has refused to allow any additional drilling for oil in the United States or offshore. Gas now costs more than $7.00 per gallon, and many Democrats now openly applaud this, since high prices reduce oil consumption and thus reduce carbon dioxide output. But working Americans are hit especially hard by these costs.
Nuclear energy would provide a substitute for oil in some uses, and could generate electricity to power electric cars, but environmentalist legal challenges have prevented the construction of any new nuclear plants, and the courts have been leaning so far in a pro-environmentalist direction that nobody expects the construction of any new nuclear plants for several decades, if ever. Obama keeps reminding people that we cannot guarantee that it will be safe.
As for coal, President Obama directed the Environmental Protection Agency to implement strict new carbon emission standards that drove many coal-powered electric plants out of business. The country now has less total electric power available than in 2008, and periodic blackouts to conserve energy occur on a regular schedule throughout the nation. The price of electricity has tripled in some places like California, which also faces rolling blackouts during peak energy periods. The impact on our economy, and on the comfort of our homes, has been devastating.
Talk radio
Through the actions of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) and Congress,
Democrats were able to largely silence the largest source of conservative opposition: talk radio.
(32) Fairness doctrine: “The land of the free”? By the summer of 2009, the 5-member Federal Communication Commission (FCC) was controlled by Democratic appointees – including a chairman appointed by President Obama. The “Fairness Doctrine” became a topic of FCC consideration following pressure from Democratic Congressional leaders who initially did not have sufficient votes to pass the measure in Congress. The FCC quickly implemented the “Fairness Doctrine” which required that radio stations provide “equal time” for alternative views on political questions.
As a result, all radio stations had to provide equal time to contrasting views for every politics-related program they broadcast by talk show hosts like Rush Limbaugh, Laura Ingraham, Sean Hannity, Dennis Prager, Janet Parshall, Michael Medved, and Hugh Hewitt, and broadcasters like James Dobson. Every conservative talk show began to be followed by an instant rebuttal to the program by a liberal “watchdog” group that followed each conservative broadcaster. Many listeners gave up in frustration, advertising (and donation) revenues dropped dramatically, and nearly all conservative stations have now gone out of business or switched to alternative formats such as country or gospel or other music. Conservative talk radio, for all intents and purposes, was shut down by the end of 2010. In order to solidify the Fairness Doctrine at the FCC, the Congress in 2010 passed, and President Obama signed, legislation making it permanent. Many legal scholars had predicted that the Fairness Doctrine would be declared unconstitutional by the Supreme Court. But the new liberal Obama Court upheld it easily. Of course, this bill fit the deeper purpose of the liberal-left wing of American politics, which trumps all other purposes, and that is getting and increasing their power so as to impose their agenda on the nation. It was not surprising the liberal Supreme Court went along.
Christian publishers
(33) Christian books: After the Supreme Court legalized same sex marriage, homosexual activist groups targeted three large Christian book publishers that had publications arguing that homosexual conduct was wrong based on the teachings of the Bible. The activists staged marches and protests at Barnes and Noble stores around the country, demanding that the stores remove all books published by these “hate-mongering” publishers. Barnes and Noble resisted for a time, but the protests continued, there was a lot of vandalism and secret defacing of books in various stores, and eventually the cost was too great and Barnes and Noble gave in. The same thing happened at Borders and other chains. Then they staged a massive nationwide computer attack on Amazon.com, with the same demands, and the same result. As a result, those evangelical publishers could no longer distribute any of their books into in any of these chains. The same thing happens now to any other Christian publisher that dares to publish anything critical of homosexuality. Several Christian publishers have already gone out of business.
Prosecution of former Bush administration officials
(34) Criminal charges against Republican officials: In his first week in office Obama followed President Clinton’s precedent and fired all 93 U.S. Attorneys, replacing them with his own appointments, many taken from the most active members of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU). President Obama argued that this was not a selective political action like what President Bush had done, because Obama had fired all of them, conservatives and liberals alike.”
The Justice Department soon began to file criminal and civil charges of various sorts against nearly every high Bush administration official who had any involvement with the Iraq war. During his campaign, Senator Obama said, “What I would want to do is to have my Justice Department and my Attorney General immediately review the information that's already there and to find out are there inquiries that need to be pursued.” In order to facilitate these proceedings, President Obama rescinded President Bush’s executive order that had prevented presidential papers from being released, and millions of pages of previously secret White House papers were posted on the Internet. ACLU attorneys have spent four years poring over these papers looking for possible violations of any law. Dozens of Bush officials, from the Cabinet level on down, are now in jail, and most of those are also bankrupt from legal costs.
Where is the opposition?
Has America completely lost God’s favor and protection as a nation? If it has, is this surprising? How can God continue to bless a nation whose official policies promote blatant violation of God’s commands regarding the protection of human life, and sexual morality? Why should God bless any nation that elects officials who remove people’s freedom of religion and freedom of speech and freedom even to raise their own children? His Word says, “Righteousness exalts a nation, but sin is a reproach to any people” (Prov. 14:34).
A lot of brave Christian men and women tried to resist some of these laws, and some Christian legal agencies tried to defend them, but they couldn’t resist the power of a 6-3 liberal majority on the Supreme Court. It seems as though many of the bravest ones actually went to jail or were driven to bankruptcy. And many of their reputations have been destroyed by a relentless press and the endless repetition of false accusations, against which no response was ever allowed in any nationwide public forum.
The same question written in “The Star Spangled Banner” by Francis Scott Key in 1814
rings in the air:
O say, does that star spangled banner yet wave
O’er the land of the free and the home of the brave?
Now in October of 2012, after seeing what has happened in the last four years, the answer to that question is “No.” Our freedoms have been systematically taken away. Many of “the brave” are now in jail. We are no longer “the land of the free and the home of the brave.”
How did this happen?
When did this all start? Christians share a lot of the blame. In 2008 many evangelicals thought that Senator Obama was an opportunity for a “change,” and they voted for him. They simply did not realize Obama’s far-left agenda would take away many of our freedoms as a nation, perhaps permanently (it is unlikely that the Supreme Court can be changed for perhaps 30 more years). Christians did not realize that by electing Barack Obama, the most liberal member ever to serve in the U.S. Senate, they would allow the law, in the hands of a liberal Congress and Supreme Court, to become a great instrument of oppression. Many people thought he sounded so thoughtful, so reasonable. And during the campaign, after he had won the Democratic nomination, he seemed to be moving to the center in his speeches, moving away from his earlier far-left record. No one thought he would enact such a far-left, extreme liberal agenda.
But the record was all there for anyone to see. The agenda of the ACLU, the agenda of liberal activist judges in their dissenting opinions, the agenda of the homosexual activists, the agenda of the environmental activists, the agenda of the National Education Association, the agenda of the global warming activists, the agenda of the abortion rights activists, the agenda of the gun control activists, the agenda of the euthanasia supporters, the agenda of the one-world government pacifists, the agenda of far-left groups in Canada and Europe – all of these agendas were there in plain sight, and all of these groups provided huge support for Senator Obama. The liberal agenda was all there. But too many people just didn’t want to see it.
Christians didn’t take time to find out who Barack Obama was when they voted for him. Why did they risk our nation’s future on him? It was a mistake that changed the course of history.
What about our faith?
Personally, I don’t know how we are going to get through tomorrow, for these are difficult times. But my faith in the Lord remains strong. I still believe that “for those who love God all things work together for good, for those who are called according to his purpose” (Rom. 8:28). I still believe that “kingship belongs to the LORD, and he rules over the nations” (Psalm 22:28). I still believe that our salvation comes from no earthly government for “there is salvation in no one else” than Jesus Christ (Acts 4:12). I still believe that God is sovereign over all history, and though I don’t know why he has allowed these events to come about, it is still his purpose that will ultimately be accomplished. He alone can say of all history, “There is none like me, declaring the end from the beginning and from ancient times things not yet done, saying, 'My counsel shall stand, and I will accomplish all my purpose'” (Isaiah 46:9-10).
Sincerely,
A Christian from 2012
