Free Republic

Alberto R. Gonzales, President Bush’s newly confirmed replacement for John Ashcroft as U.S. attorney general, was partying with some comrades on March 8. "I … have this organization to thank for support of my nomination for attorney general," Gonzales said in his address at an awards ceremony of the National Council of La Raza (NCLR), a militant subversive organization with which he has been affiliated for many years. The NCLR, more commonly known as La Raza (“The Race,” meaning those of Mexican descent), credits Gonzales, a former Texas Supreme Court judge, with moving George W. Bush into the “progressive” line...

WASHINGTON, March 7 - Dozens of terror suspects on federal watch lists were allowed to buy firearms legally in the United States last year, according to a Congressional investigation that points up major vulnerabilities in federal gun laws. People suspected of being members of a terrorist group are not automatically barred from legally buying a gun, and the investigation, conducted by the Government Accountability Office, indicated that people with clear links to terrorist groups had regularly taken advantage of this gap. Since the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, law enforcement officials and gun control groups have voiced increasing concern about the...

A "passenger's rights" regulation enacted by the socialist European Union that went into effect on February 17 contributed to a life-threatening mid-air crisis three days later. During the 1814-1815 Congress of Vienna, which was convened to rebuild Europe after the Napoleonic wars, European rulers contemplated grand schemes for continent-spanning security, regulatory, and tax systems. One observer at the conclave sarcastically complained: "The Congress is working on a law that will lay down how high birds may fly and how fast hares may run." While those ill-advised designs fell apart by the 1820s, the socialist European Union aspires to create a...

Liberty Letters, Madison, Tucker, Jefferson, Adams, Letter 24 Those who delude themselves into believing that our public schools and universities are telling the truth about the foundations of American government – or, for that matter, teaching our youth how to think – ought to read through the stack of e-mails I regularly receive from educated individuals who passionately defend that which is absolutely false and completely nonsensical. The latest came from a female New Yorker, responding to my article "Blessed Tolerance: The 'Virtue' of a Republic in Decline," who worked herself into a lather over my suggestion that a "me...

Conservative Americans who consider George W. Bush a champion of national sovereignty have been shocked to learn that the president seeks Senate ratification of the UN's Convention on the Law of the Sea Treaty (LOST). Despite the Senate's refusal thus far to ratify the treaty, it went into effect in 1995, and elements of the vast regulatory apparatus it outlines are already in operation. When fully implemented, LOST would consummate the largest act of territorial conquest in history, turning seven-tenths of the Earth's surface over to the jurisdiction of the United Nations. It would create a mammoth bureaucracy to regulate...

The United States and six members of the Organization of American States have signed new agreements on trade and the environment. The agreements are aimed at strengthening environmental protection and creating a Secretariat for Environmental Matters to help implement the environmental provisions of the Central American Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA). The accords were signed in Washington D.C. Friday by senior representatives of the governments of Costa Rica, the Dominican Republic, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua and the United States.

Using Iraq as a model, the Bush administration intends to export democracy worldwide. But as our Founders warned, and Iraq proves, democracy isn't synonymous with freedom. Roughly one year ago, U.S. soldiers and Marines deployed to Iraq were caught in an escalating conflict with the Mehdi Army, a guerrilla force led by radical Islamic cleric Muqtada al-Sadr. With battles raging in and around religious sites in Najaf, many thousands of Shi’ite Muslims enlisted in al-Sadr’s insurrection. In April 2004, an Iraqi judge, acting on orders from the U.S.-created Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA), issued an arrest warrant charging al-Sadr with ordering...

Rev. Randy Steele, a 32-year-old pastor from Mount Vernon, Illinois, was quizzed by FBI agents after the Bureau received a complaint from an anonymous informant. Rev. Randy Steele, senior pastor at Southwest Christian Church in Mount Vernon, Illinois, thought that "somebody in my church might have done something" when he received a phone call from the FBI last November. It wasn’t until part way through an interview with two FBI agents later that day that the 32-year-old pastor realized that he was the subject of the inquiry. The agents quizzed the pastor about a sermon he had preached on Memorial...

Judge M. Ashley McKathan tells about his decision to have the Ten Commandments embroidered on his judicial robes. M. Ashley McKathan is a circuit court judge in Covington County, Alabama, and presides from the bench at the county courthouse in Andalusia. Last December 13, Judge McKathan began wearing a judicial robe in his courtroom upon which he had the Ten Commandments embroidered in gold lettering. Within two days, the national news media were reporting on the judge’s action, drawing immediate comparisons to former Alabama Chief Justice Roy Moore’s battle to place a Ten Commandments monument in the state Supreme Court...

Overseas, our troops are being mauled in the long dark night of Iraq - a war with no end in sight that has already claimed the lives of more than 1,100 American troops and thousands, perhaps tens of thousands, of innocent Iraqis. At home, the party of the sitting president is systematically stomping on the right of black Americans to vote, a vile and racist practice that makes a mockery of the president's claim to favor real democracy anywhere. This will never be seen as a shining moment in U.S. history. There is a hallucinatory quality to the news as...

During and after the Revolutionary War, Gen. George Washington had a thorn in his side, a man that a fair amount of evidence pointed to as a “traitor,” who, traitor or not, served the enemy and nearly cost us the peace because he had one God he worshipped and served, and one only — himself. The man’s name was Gen. Horatio Gates, or just plain Horatio Gates, if you please, for rarely if ever had the rank of general in the American armies fallen upon a more undeserving soul than he. Story Continues Below Gates was of foreign birth, described...

Is God the author of liberty, or not? A valid, and need I say, vital question. But in this age of secularism, humanism, and socialism, just try mixing God and government in the same breath and get ready for the snickers, sneers, hisses, and guffaws for daring to exercise one’s free speech as regards this off-limits, dangerous, homophobic subject. Yet the right to free speech and freedom of religion is ours, and the question, a must for all to at least consider. Seven years ago, the dean of a Social Science Department scolded me in big red letters, highlighted by...

For generations, in the singing of “America, the Beautiful,” (1) Americans encouraged each other to exercise freedom responsibly, to understand the need for law and moral restraint. Not a bad idea. To understand why, the hymn reminds us that those who gave us our freedom were the sort “who more than self their country loved, and mercy more than life.” (2) They sacrificed. Thousands died. Thousands more were maimed for life. Wives and children wept. Homes burned to the ground. Fortunes were scattered to the wind. Poverty and disease ran rampant. This was freedom’s heavy cost. It always is. It...

Theodore Roosevelt warned, “to educate a man in mind and not in morals is to educate a menace to society.” If one such man is a menace — and we can all think of examples — how about an entire generation? I think we know the answer. Such a group would run roughshod over our constitution and liberties without flinching, without looking back, without even having the horse sense to see the value in looking back. And guess what? It's happened. I refer to the pressing matter of four judges in Massachusetts, spitting on the moral and legal tradition of...

Do we need to amend the Constitution to defend the age old tradition of marriage? Professor Richard Wilkins, former Assistant to the Solicitor General of the United States, and the founder and managing director of Defend Marriage (a project of United Families International), believes so. A little over a week ago, he asked me to join Defend Marriage as their press director. I accepted; and why not? Is there a more vital cause? The traditional family is the transmission belt of the values of a free society. You know this. I know this. Our enemies know this. Destroy the family,...

Liberty Letters, Jefferson, Letter 6 On Monday, March 4, 1805, Thomas Jefferson gave his Second Inaugural Address as president of the United States. In his closing remarks he painted a provocative parallel between the settling and establishment of the United States following our exodus from tyrants in Europe, and the settling and establishment of ancient Israel following the Israelites’ exodus from tyrants in Egypt. He referred to God as “that Being in whose hands we are, who led our forefathers, as Israel of old, from their native land, and planted them in a country flowing with all the necessaries and...

Is there a new tyranny in town? A tyranny of ideology, perhaps? (1) If one were to stop and think about the inflexible, ideologically driven blockade of so many current presidential nominations by one side of the Senate, one would think so; one might declare that a serious attack on our Constitution was in progress – a point hardly mentioned in the mainstream media. Even from the beginning, the Senate struggled to understand its proper role in the governing process. As early as Washington’s administration, the Senate was suspicious of the power given to the president by the U. S....

In April of 1996, the traditionally liberal Democratic Party did something it is, in theory, never supposed to do: It out-conservatived the Republican Party, stood up for the U.S. Constitution, and threw out a radical proposal designed to transform the United States from a republic to a democracy. This the congressional Democrats did when they rejected the Republican Party-sponsored Term Limits Amendment. This past month, the Supreme Court repeated the feat, sending to the Dumpster an even more radical version, again the work of Republicans, which would have permitted the states to accomplish what the U.S. Congress hadn't – that ...

Do religion and morality have a place in the law, in government, in policy and in the public classroom? Finding the answer to that question, in lieu of the arrival of President Bush’s Compassionate Conservatism, is a quest worthy of our full attention. As stated previously by this column, "the unspoken consensus, though few will admit it, is: It is appropriate to inject religion and/or morality into political debate and into public policy just so long as the moral slant parallels my moral view of the universe, and it is highly inappropriate if it does not!" It’s time to 'fess ...

During the debate over the Electoral College – a system that validated as victor a man who had lost the popular vote, President George W. Bush – for the first time in years the vast majority of Republicans were finally saying what they should been saying all along: "We are a republic, not a democracy, let’s keep it that way!" Conservative Republicans were ecstatic! Republics, they knew, take in a wider sweep of interests than the simple majority will of democracies. And it was high time, they felt, that we as a nation rediscovered what those interests are. Yet, now ...