The View From 1776

Rosen, an Obama pit bull, excoriates Mitt Romney’s wife for never having worked a day in her life, insinuating that Mr. Romney therefore is unworthy of public office.

In response to Rosen it should be noted that, before the 1970s, economists always were careful to observe that a huge part of work in the economy was the unpaid labor of housewives.  Cooking, keeping the home clean, and raising children qualifies in every respect as work, no matter what the Democrat-Socialist Party contends.

Only an ultra feminist could assume that nothing other than competing with men in the corporate world qualifies as work.  Democrat-Socialist Rosen’s warped sense of reality echoes one of her predecessors, Emma Goldman, a leading anarcho-socialist from the late 1800s and early 1900s.  Goldman wrote:

It is the narrow puritanic spirit, as represented in the sterile minds of the Young-Men-and-Old-Maid’s Christian Union, Temperance Union, Sabbath Union, Purity League, etc.  A spirit which is absolutely blind to the simplest manifestations of life; hence stands for stagnation and decay.  As in ante-bellum days, these old fossils lament the immorality of our time.  Science, art, literature, the drama, are at the mercy of bigoted censorship and legal procedure, with the result that America, with all her boastful claims to progress and liberty is still steeped in the densest provincialism…Unfortunately the Lie of Morality still stalks about in fine feathers, since no one dares to come within hailing distance of that holy of holies.  Yet it is safe to say that no other superstition is so detrimental to growth, so enervating and paralyzing to the minds and hearts of the people, as the superstition of Morality… The Property Morality declares that that institution is sacred.  Woe to anyone that dares to question the sanctity of Property, or sins against it!  Yet everyone knows that Property is robbery; that it represents the accumulated efforts of millions, who themselves are propertyless…However, it is with the effects of Morality upon women that I am mostly concerned.  So disastrous, so paralyzing has this effect been, that some even of the most advanced among my sisters never thoroughly outgrow it.  It is Morality which condemns women to the position of a celibate, a prostitute, or a reckless, incessant breeder of hapless children.

Rosen’s implicit preference for abandoning motherhood and housekeeping has its roots in Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society expansion of the socialistic welfare state that pushed us into the devastating stagflation of the 1970s.

The inflation part of stagflation took something out of everybody’s savings or pension account each month to pay for the shortfall between what the economy produced and what the government was spending.  Retirement savings that had been worth $50,000 in 1960 were by 1980 worth only $27,174 in real purchasing power.  The Federal government had simply stolen 46% of our money.

This colossal loss in real national wealth was paid for largely by women leaving their homes to become second wage earners.  Between 1960 and 1980, the number of women in the labor force increased 96%, compared to only a 33% increase in the number of men.  By 1980, women accounted for 43% of the entire full-time working population.  Clearly the forced separation of so many mothers from their children was related to the explosion of drug addiction and crime among children and young adults.

Liberal-progressives have always championed moral relativism with emphasis on hedonism.  Democrat-Socialist advisor Hilary Rosen’s attack on Ann Romney is understandable in that light.

Election 2012: A Republic or Marxism

Gary Kelly 
April 9, 2012

Thomas Paine: “Those who expect to reap the blessings of freedom, must, like men, undergo the fatigues of supporting it.”

Unlike 1776 when “We the people” went on the offense and kept tyranny on the defense, tyranny, now in the form of progressive political correctness, is again on the offense and “We the People” of Biblical moral virtue are now on the defense. Perhaps your educators or Pastors neglected to teach you about the Black Robed Regiment, Rev. John Wise, Rev. John Peter Muhlenberg, Rev. Jonas Clark, Rev. Nathaniel Whitaker, and that nearly all Minutemen were Christians. Will Christians in America today accept that same challenge?

Samuel Adams: “The liberties of our country, the freedom of our civil Constitution, are worth defending at all hazards; and it is our duty to defend them against all attacks. We have received them as a fair inheritance from our worthy ancestors: they purchased them for us with toil and danger and expense of treasure and blood, and transmitted them to us with care and diligence. It will bring an everlasting mark of infamy on the present generation, enlightened as it is, if we should suffer them to be wrested from us by violence without a struggle, or to be cheated out of them by the artifices of false and designing men.”

The most disturbing aspect in being vigilant in our own duties to preserve the Republic is the complacency or perhaps willingness of “we the sheeple.” They either do not value or appreciate the Republic for which it stands, or worse, they prefer to become slaves to those who are elected to be our servants.

Ben Franklin: “Make yourself sheep and the wolves will eat you.” …"Man will ultimately be governed by God or by tyrants.” Dwight D. Eisenhower: “A people that values its privileges above its principles, soon loses both.” Steven Franklin Shell: “Ignore your Rights and they’ll go away. …If they’re not worth defending, then they’re not worth having.”

Since warnings from the Founders concerning preserving, protecting, and defending the Republic they established have essentially been ignored and unheeded, how can “We the people” convince “we the sheeple” that progressives are bent on “fundamentally transforming” America from a Republic into Marxism, when their cheerleaders, the major Marxist media outlets, are using deceptive selective coverage aimed at keeping citizens slaves to a tyrannical government.

Groucho Marx: “The secret of life is honesty and fair dealing. If you can fake that, you’ve got it made.”

While “We the people” continue, for the most part, to “preach to the choir” and “we the sheeple” continue to abide by the deceptions of progressive Marxists, “We the people” need to learn from Andrew Breitbart and others who have refused to remain on the defensive against the Marxist tactics.

Patrick Henry: “It is natural to man to indulge in the illusions of hope. We are apt to shut our eyes against a painful truth—and listen to the song of that syren, till she transforms us into beasts. ... Are we disposed to be of the number of those, who having eyes, see not, and having ears, hear not?” …"There is a just God who presides over the destines of nations ... who will raise up friends to fight our battle for us. The battle, sir, is not to the strong alone; it is to the vigilant, the active, the brave. ... Is life so dear, or peace so sweet, as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery? Forbid it, Almighty God! I know not what course others may take; but as for me, give me liberty or give me death.”

In order to prevent Marxism returning to the White House in Election 2012, “We the people” must become united now in increasing our efforts to put progressives on the defensive by consistently challenging and demanding, by what foundation do they justify their mandates and acts of tyranny. We will witness progressives on the defensive when they resort to the Marxist and Alinsky “jamming” tactics of deflecting from the issue, using name calling, false claims of intolerance, bigotry, hate, and bullying. However, “We the people” can no longer afford to kowtow to their agenda to outlaw freedom of speech and silence Biblical moral virtue. We must demand what their foundation is, and learn that it is built on sand and tyranny. See the list of grievances in the Declaration of Independence for insight.

William F. Buckley Jr.: “Liberals claim to want to give a hearing to other views, but then are shocked and offended to discover that there are other views.”

Gary Kelly’s web site is EarsToHear.net and he is the author of Lessons of The Holy Spirit: A Guide for Entering the Kingdom of God and Discover Why It Pleased God to Hide His Kingdom from the Wise.

The cornerstone of Western civilization, beginning with the Old Testament prophets and classical Greek philosophers, was the belief that human nature is constant, unchanging over the ages.  Liberal-progressive-socialist theory, inaugurated by French intellectuals before and after the bloody French Revolution of 1789, propounded the theory that human behavior can be controlled and changed by restructuring society.

In pre-French Revolutionary society, constancy of human nature meant that a good and just society depended upon every individual’s aligning himself with God-given natural law, intuited through religion and philosophy.  No matter whether the ruler was good or bad, every individual needed to do the right thing, to deal fairly with others, to aid widows, orphans, and others in need.  Every individual ultimately would be judged by his Maker.

Liberal-progressive-socialism, exemplified in psychology and the other so-called social sciences established by French intellectuals, hypothesizes in contrast that humans have no capacity to intuit a Divine Creator or a natural law imparted by His Mind, which created the universe.  Humans are just products of Darwinian evolution, beings whose fundamental characteristic is response to external agents of pleasure or pain.  Intellectuals therefore can manipulate evolution with laws and regulations to compel people in the mass to respond as the intellectuals intend.

The cornerstone question, then, is whether individuals can be relied upon to perceive their own best interests, or whether only Ivy League intellectuals and Democrat/Socialist Party politicians can know wherein lie the best interests of the masses, e.g., electric cars, shutting down industries that create jobs but emit CO2, and supporting mafia-style labor unions and “green” ventures.

If the Judeo-Christian Western civilizational paradigm is correct, government should encourage religion as the best means to impart individual morality and responsibility, and government should give maximum free rein to individual initiative and creativity.

If President Obama and his fellow liberal-progressive-socialists are correct, ultimately everyone should be employed by the government, because only government is able to improve peoples lives, only government perceives what is best for the masses, only government can protect helpless members of the mass from predations of capitalist businessmen.

Svetlana Kunin, who grew up under the liberal-progressive benevolence of the Soviet Union, explores the implications of those differing views in an op-ed piece appearing on the Investors’ Business Daily website.  Read Who Created Prosperity? Bureaucrats Or Individuals?

Jay Richards, writing in the Washington Post, debunks that thesis.

See also Social Activism and the Social Gospel and Religious Left: Same Old Social Gospel.

Even before the 1917 Russian Revolution, leading universities in the United States had begun a transition from the Christian roots of our nation into atheistic, secular materialism in their teaching of the so-called social sciences.
Nominally-Christian theological seminaries were in the vanguard of the movement toward socialism.  Rochester Theological Seminary’s professor Walter Rauschenbusch, one of the best known socialist spokesmen of his era, was a founder of the Social Gospel movement late in the 19th century.  Social Gospel was nothing more nor less than socialism masquerading as Christianity. 

Social Gospel embraced the avowed aims of socialism, which sound similar to the results that flow from the Bible’s commandment to love one’s neighbor as he would wish to have his neighbor love him.  The insurmountable problem is that socialism, and therefore Social Gospel, is atheistic and materialistic, i.e., the antithesis of Christianity and religious Judaism.

To believe that Social Gospel is true Christianity is to believe that the Soviet dictatorship of the proletariat was truly democratic.

In “Christianizing the Social Order” (1912), Professor Rauschenbusch wrote:

“The Socialists found the Church against them and thought God was against them, too.  They have had to do God’s work without the sense of God’s presence to hearten them.....Whatever the sins of individual Socialists, and whatever the shortcomings of Socialist organizations, they are tools in the hands of the Almighty.......Socialism is one of the chief powers of the coming age......God will raise up Socialism because the organized Church was too blind, or too slow, to realize God’s ends.”

Two other prominent seminaries, among many others, were active promoters of socialism.  Their spokesmen also were nationally known figures: Dr. Harry F. Ward of Union Theological Seminary in New York and Dr. Bernard Iddings-Bell of St. Stephens College in Annandale, New York.

Dr. Ward wrote “The New Social Order,” to express sympathy for Socialism and to laud the Bolshevik revolutionary movement in Russia, which he regarded as a desirable replacement for the Russian Orthodox Christian Church.  Dr. Ward also was chairman of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), which actively defended the terrorist tactics of the radical IWW labor organization, whose members murdered more than a dozen employees and executives of industrial companies they sought to intimidate with demands for labor seizure of management control.

Dr. Iddings-Bell in “Right and Wrong After the War,” in this case World War I, advocated Sigmund Freud’s version of Marxian materialism, in which human life is controlled by hunger and the sex urge.  From this theory of secular and materialistic human nature, he concluded that (1) private property should be abolished; (2) income earned from investments, savings accounts, and rental property is robbery; (3) the family as a social unit should be abandoned except as a temporary arrangement for purely sexual relations. 
In his sermon delivered on May 23, 1920, at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine, Dr. Iddings-Bell gave his support to revolutionary labor demands for abolishment of the wage system and control of industry by communistic labor unions. 

He declared that the New Social Order had arrived and that people were obliged to accept it.  Among other things, that meant that internationalism must replace American patriotism.