COLUMN: Give me Liberty of give me death

On March 23, 1775 Patrick Henry delivered an impassioned plea containing the words “Give me liberty or give me death.” Some six-plus years later the British general Lord Cornwallis surrendered at Yorktown and we became, for all intent and purpose, the land of the free.

The catalyst for resolving to decide our differences with the British was their imposition of taxes and intrusion on our freedoms and inequality in treatment as we saw them.

There is an old saying which goes something like this: “You can put a frog in a pan of water and slowly raise the temperature and he will boil to death without becoming aware of what is happening to him.” Folks, a similar situation is happening with the erosion of our freedoms. Little by little and piece by piece we are moving from a free and democratic people, guaranteed by the Constitution of the United States of America, to a totalitarian state with increasingly unfettered control of our every action.

“Any society that would give up a little liberty, to gain a little security, will deserve neither, and will lose both”—the words of the great Benjamin Franklin. Does the “Patriot Act” come to mind? A little bit here, a little bit there and before you know it there is nothing left. It seems that none care that our freedoms are slowly being taken from us. This failure to act on our part is nothing less than a failure of personal responsibility. When we, as a people, fail to stand up and say “no more” to those who enact and enforce these takings of our freedom then we are responsible for death of our precious nation.

The clock is ticking people — death may occur slowly or quickly but dead is dead.

I read somewhere that more of us vote for the American Idol than in many of our state or national elections. Come on, doesn’t the future of our nation mean anything to you?

Let me remind you of a few of the things that have occurred since we became a free nation that we have accepted (remember the frog). Federal, state and local taxes take roughly one half of what you earn (our ancestors were incensed at a tax on tea) a law was passed that established “withholding” and we did not object to the rise in the temperature of the water; a minimum wage law was enacted, a discrimination law was enacted and an employer was hamstrung by regulations attached thereto in his conduct of business.

The Food and Drug Administration controls what medicines you may purchase. The government has decided on what type of light bulbs you may purchase. The government decided that banks should provide loans to almost anyone regardless of their ability to repay — the results of that idiotic action are well documented. The government requires that we buy official stamps for many documents to make them legal — the British Stamp act of 1765 was a harbinger for the Revolutionary War.

I will close this article with a couple of examples of recent court decisions, which further debase our Constitutional rights. The Indiana Supreme Court ruled that “doing anything to resist police busting down your door and conducting an illegal search is now a criminal act.”

That tramples the Fourth Amendment which says that a citizen is “secure in their person, houses, papers and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizure.”

The Supreme Court of the United States recently ruled that “the police can bust down a door and enter your property without a warrant, if they smell marijuana or hear sounds that are suggestive of destruction of evidence.”

The President of the United States has claimed the right to order the killing of any citizen considered a terrorist and has exercised that claimed right in the past year by ordering the killing of a U.S. Citizen named Anwar al-Awiaqi. That is, in my opinion, a direct violation of Amendment VI of the Constitution of the United States of America.

New laws and claimed rights now permit indefinite detention, warrantless searches, monitoring of citizens by use of GPS without obtaining a court order and on and on. These actions trample on, at least, Amendments 1, 4, 5, 6, & 8 of the Constitution.

If you accept these rulings by these courts of law and executive edicts then you are accepting that the government may deny our basic rights of assembly, criticizing the government and the possession of firearms to mention a few.

Bayne’s column runs every Sunday. He is an author and historian. He lives in Culpeper. Email: walking.h.farm @hughes.net