Enemies Within

A New American Revolution: A Manifesto

In 2004, I watched Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas swear in his good friend, Senator John Danforth, as our new Ambassador to the United Nations. It was a solemn and moving moment, and one phrase struck me forcefully: “I promise to defend the Constitution from enemies without and within.”

I’ve been pondering that phrase ever since. Of course, we know that we have had numerous enemies from without, and we have faced and defeated them all. Currently, we are enmeshed in a war to the death with maniacal terrorists—not some nation or other, but blood-crazed zealots, men and women and even some children, who wish us dead just because we live. But we are facing that challenge, and though we’ve been attacked on our own soil, we have taken the fight to them. I’m particularly grateful for that.

But do we have “enemies within”?

Would John Danforth or his successors—and for that matter, any and all of our elected representatives—have to defend our Constitution against enemies within our own country? Yes, they will—or they had better—because the enemy is upon us already.

In 2006, our country is again gripped and increasingly bound by tyrants—not regents and despots from afar, but by cancerous growths from within. Long ago it was prophesied by objective observers that America was too strong to be defeated by outside forces, but it could someday rot and crumble from within and go the way of all the other great nation-states, succumbing in the slime of selfishness, greed, immorality, and abuse of its own freedoms.

It’s happening all around us. Our valiant ship of state is listing, springing dangerous leaks in vital places, threatening after only 230 years to sink into the abyss of history. Fellow citizens, we won our first revolution under God; now, because of the inroads that have been made already against many of the values we hold dear, I call for a new revolution!

What are the powerful forces steadily binding us all around, like a sleeping Gulliver in Lilliput Land, robbing us of the very liberty to perpetuate the vision of our Founding Fathers? There are several, and they are pernicious, relentless, and eventually fatal. I’ll list the most obvious:

Ignorance, which is appalling, pervasive, and increasing daily. Basic literary and math skills diminish. Newspapers choose 4th grade vocabulary and short, shallow stories to cater to the lowest possible denominator. They’ve discovered that the median reading comprehension level in America today is at the 4th grade level. American history is abbreviated and given short shift, taught very selectively according to prevailing “political correctness” and intellectual bias. Left-leaning media and even liberal church groups abandon “first principles” and historic guidelines, constantly brainwashing the masses, cutting them adrift from ancient moorings into a sea of aimless relativism.

Apathy. America grew huge and strong on the near-unanimous involvement of its citizens. In war or peace, every vote counted and every voice could be heard. From each ward to each city hall to each county board to each state house and to each legislature to the very halls of Congress, the citizens took part, debated, came to majority agreements, and moved forward. Today, too often half or more of our citizens who are eligible don’t even vote! They feel left out, unnecessary, distracted, cynical, and alienated—and, of course, ignorant of the issues—so they stay home and grouse. This has to stop! Citizens, this new revolution must overthrow the bonds and blindness of ignorance and disinvolvement. Our country must be stirred and called to action!

Materialism/Need. I’m combining these two because I believe they are related. Greed, corporate and personal, combined with inevitable dishonesty (the Bible says “the love of money is the root of all evil”) widen the gap between multimillionaires and the multi-millions of hard-working families and retired seniors—not to mention the physically and emotionally handicapped and ill—who can’t pay all their bills or even afford their medicines, even if they work two or three jobs. Well-intentioned politicians keep calling on Big Brother government (the groaning taxpayers, namely, us) to solve the problems with bureaucracy.

Citizens, socialism is not the answer! Social responsibility is—individual, local, and active response to our brother’s needs. And the new revolution must have the sensitivity and heart and will to voluntarily use our vast resources to meet our human needs. The early colonists who gave us this nation knew how to do that; we’ve got to learn how all over again.

Humanism, Immorality, and Godlessness—an unholy trinity. Most Christians believe in a triune God: God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit. Many Old Testament scriptures foreshadow each of these three distinct persons in the same Godhead. But today in America, we are confronted and threatened by an unholy trinity that has sunk its roots deep down into our society: godlessness, immorality, and humanism.

Remove God from public life (as a number of perverse, determined, and well-funded activist groups are doing very effectively), and a cancerous spirit of immorality seeps relentlessly across the land like a poison gas, corrupting all forms of entertainment, encouraging drugs and violence and rampant promiscuity in the streets, in schools, homes, businesses, politics, and even some churches, with the inevitable surrender to humanism. Man rules his own destiny, God is dead, and “if it feels good, do it!” Radio personalities wince when they’re fined for obscenity and sacrilege by the Federal Communications Commission and rail at the President demanding their “First Amendment rights.” But they’re not seeking “free speech”; they’ve had that their whole lives and careers. No, they want “freedom of filth.” Our Founding Fathers would have had them tarred and feathered and whipped in the public square.

In 1952, U.S. Supreme Court Justice William Douglas declared, “The First Amendment does not say that in every respect there shall be a separation of church and state. That is the common sense of the matter. Otherwise, the state and religion would be aliens to each other-hostile, suspicious, and even unfriendly. We are a religious people and our institutions presuppose a Supreme Being. We cannot read into the Bill of Rights such a philosophy of hostility to religion.”

Wise old Ben Franklin, certainly no religious fanatic, said “only a moral and virtuous people are capable of freedom; the more corrupt and vicious a society becomes, the more it has need of masters.”

George Washington clearly and bluntly stated, “religion and morality are the twin pillars of freedom!” And our fourth president, James Madison, to whom many refer as the “father of the Constitution,” said this, “We have staked the whole future of American civilization not on the power of the government, far from it. We have staked the future of our political institutions upon the capacity of each and all of us…to govern ourselves according to the commandments of God. The future of America is not in the Constitution, but in the laws of God upon which this constitution is founded.”

Citizens, the enemy within has already subverted the Constitution and bound us with ever strengthened cords of immorality and indecency and godlessness. We must mount a new revolution and throw them into the sea! Judicial Activism—lawmaking judges, Wyatt Earps who shoot not from the hip but from the bench.

Thomas Jefferson warned us: “Can the liberties of a nation be thought secure when we have removed their only firm basis, a conviction in the minds of the people that these liberties are the gift of God? That they are not to be violated but with His wrath? I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just; that His justice cannot sleep forever.” Jefferson didn’t fear the executive or legislative branches of government; he knew they would obey the citizens who elected them. But we would have to be very watchful lest unelected jurists bind upon us their views, not the expressed will of the people. And look: In just two or three decades, renegades in black robes, ignoring or perverting the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, have been responsible for taking prayer from school children, taking every mention of God from the public square, authorizing 40 million abortions, dictating severe reversals of states’ rights and individual freedoms, and even now they are redefining the institution of “marriage,” flying in the face of all recorded history and the very foundations of society.

Citizens, we need a new Boston Tea Party. Only this time, let’s not waste perfectly good tea. Let’s heave a bunch of black robes into the harbor with some of those vigilante judges in them. It won’t hurt the robes, and the defrocked jurists can swim out and reenroll in Constitution 101!

Fellow citizens, fellow Americans: Our forefathers, the early colonists, were decent, hardworking, ordinary people who rose to the challenge that confronted them, threw off the yoke of British bondage and unfair taxation, and established a new republic. Like trichinosis in pork, our muscles and our will have been sapped and weakened by insidious forces from within. Do we still have the will, the vision, the zeal—and the plain old gumption— to stand up to these invaders, root them out, overturn their unconstitutional rulings, and reestablish our republic that represents not just all its citizens, but our traditional morals and guidelines? If we do, let the revolution begin! And God bless America one more time!

Delivered at the Heritage Foundation, November 29, 2006 by Pat Boone.

Pat Boone is a recording artist, entertainer, bestselling author, and a national spokesman for the 60 Plus Association (www.60plus.org).

Posted December 18, 2006 02:39 AM
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