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So this is how liberty dies…with thunderous applause
-George Lucas
The month of June 2015 will go down as one of the most significant and dark times in American history. In mid-June, the nation was shocked as a young man mercilessly took the lives of 9 parishioners in a AME church in Charleston, South Carolina. Out of that event came both great promise and great sorrow as Americans embraced one another, as brothers and sisters with no regard to race, and mourned the tragic loss.
Sadly, also out of that event came a call to get rid of anything that would remind one of the Civil War South – the Confederate Battle Flag, statues of Confederate figures, and ultimately, even old glory. Amazon, Ebay, Walmart, and many others quickly declared they would no longer sell the battle flag in their businesses, even though Nazi paraphernalia and even ISIS flags are apparently still available.
Meanwhile, while we were arguing about the meaning of the Confederate flag and the free speech issues with its forced erasure from history, the Trans-Pacific Partnership bill passed by Congress and was sent to President Obama’s desk for signing. The bill, negotiated in secret, gives the President fast track authority in treaty negotiations and denies Congress the ability to amend or change any agreements to best represent their constituents interests. Its critics say that it essentially makes the President “King.” Talk about fundamental transformation!
Finally, not to be outdone, the SCOTUS had to stick their proverbial finger in America’s eye twice by actually rewriting unconstitutional provisions within Obamacare, effectively saving the gift that keeps on giving on one day, and then inventing a Constitutional right to homosexual marriage the next. Justice Roberts said of the decision “The majority’s decision is an act of will, not legal judgment.” And a man I will miss, Judge Antonin Scalia had several terse comments concerning the majority judgment.
“Today’s decree says that my Ruler, and the Ruler of 320 million Americans coast-to-coast, is a majority of the nine lawyers on the Supreme Court,” he writes.
“This practice of constitutional revision by an unelected committee of nine, always accompanied (as it is today) by extravagant praise of liberty, robs the People of the most important liberty they asserted in the Declaration of Independence and won in the Revolution of 1776: the freedom to govern themselves.”
He also writes:
“To allow the policy question of same-sex marriage to be considered and resolved by a select, patrician, highly unrepresentative panel of nine is to violate a principle even more fundamental than no taxation without representation: no social transformation without representation,”
Finally, just today, I read of 6 black churches, in the midst of all of this national chaos, being torched by arsonists and two more parting shots from the Supremes during this session: Texas’ abortion law which would have shut down many clinics has been put on hold by the court and the court refused to hear a case about whether or not voters would have to prove citizenship before they could vote in US elections.
All in all, you could say the month of June has been like the close of an epic tragedy painted in rainbow hues. Liberty has suffered several blows, some no doubt mortal. America is more divided today than ever. We sit around as some are trying to orchestrate a race war and as Washington has ceased to care what we the people think.
The America we knew is gone. She is morphing into something the founders never envisioned. And, for Christians, the journey may be about to become quite rocky. If our hope were in man or even in country, we would be in despair. Still, we know that whatever may come, we serve a God who’s got this. Let’s take time to reflect upon what it is He wants us to do and say in a post-Christian USA.