Teens for Liberty

“I pledge allegiance to the Flag of the United States of America and to the Republic for which it stands, one nation, under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.” 

    The original Pledge of Allegiance was written by Francis Bellamy.  He wrote The Pledge for a popular children’s magazine The Youth’s Companion as part of the National Public-School Celebration of Columbus Day.   It originally read like this,” I pledge allegiance to my Flag and to the Republic for which it stands one nation indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.”   It stayed this way for 66 years until a man named Louis A. Bowman saw the need to add “under God” to the pledge.  He knew that a nation that lacked God was a nation heading for troubled waters.   Louis knew that it was not the United States government that governed America;  it was God himself who set our laws into place and more importantly hardwired morals and absolute truths into us. 

             You see a government isn’t here to necessarily make new rules, just enforce them.  The reason is simple, God has already given us our rules that we need to live by!  These rules were molded into us when we were created as humans.  And if that’s not enough has God flat out told us how we need to live our life’s.  It’s called the Ten Commandments!  If Americans actually picked up and read their bibles they would know this!  So that leaves us with this question:  what would happen if God is taken out of our country?   The answer is a simple one: all hell would break loose!  After all, what is a nation without morals? 

          Let’s imagine use our imaginations for a second.  Imagine you are on a cruise of the Atlantic ocean.  While on your cruise, you are going to stop at ten completely separated and isolated islands.  In fact they have no communication between other islands or the rest of civilization.  When you stop at the first one you start to notice something: their pnly laws are those of their morals.  Its illegal to steal, cheat ,lie, kill ect…  After island one you go to number two.  After getting off you begin to see an eerie resemblance to the first island you visited.  They have the same basic laws!  After number two you go to three and notice the same thing, 3 to 4,4 to 5, and on you notice the exact same thing.  Now why is this? God is the reason.  He put these truths into them.    If they are taken out, there would be no differential between good and bad!  Black and white becomes an endless gray.   A murderer would be looked at the same as a hero;  Hitler would be at the same level as George Washington.  Could you imagine?  Without morals people could murder their neighbor, steal a car, bake cookies for their kids, buy a present for their spouse, all this in a days work!!  They wouldn’t know that they did anything wrong at all! 

       America need to realize that we are governed by God and that He is the one who makes our rules and laws.  As Americans it is our reasonability to pick up our Bibles and realize what right and wrong is.  And not only will our morals be clearly defined, we will find Life.  Life that only Jesus Christ our Savior can offer.  Life that was paid for through the murder of an innocent Man.  

~ John 3:16

In the year 1961 the American public school system was a safe heaven for children around the nation. Parents would send their children to school knowing they would never have to worry about them. But when the new year rolled around, the public school system was about to change in a dramatic way.

“Almighty God, we acknowledge our dependence upon Thee, and we beg Thy blessings upon us, our parents, our teachers, and our country.” These were the simple words that children said everyday after entering their school house. This prayer was the foundation of our school system. It kept the children fearing our one true God.

Yet in 1962 a supreme court examined this 22 word prayer and declared it illegal to recite any longer in public schools. This was just the start of the total decline of our public schools. This court case was the first of its kind, one that eliminated prayer in schools, but as we fast forward through history we will see that it most definitely was not the last.

-Just one year later the court case Abington School District v. Schempp found bible reading over the intercom illegal.

-Epperson v. Arkansas, 89 S. Ct. 266 (1968): State statue banning teaching of evolution is unconstitutional. A state cannot alter any element in a course of study in order to promote a religious point of view. A state’s attempt to hide behind a nonreligious motivation will not be given credence unless that state can show a secular reason as the foundation for its actions.

-Lemon v. Kurtzman, 91 S. Ct. 2105 (1971)

Established the three part test for determining if an action of government violates First Amendment’s separation of church and state:
1) the government action must have a secular purpose;
2) its primary purpose must not be to inhibit or to advance religion;
3) there must be no excessive entanglement between government and religion.

-Stone v. Graham, 449 U.S. 39 (1980)

Court finds posting of the Ten Commandments in schools unconstitutional.

-Wallace v. Jaffree, 105 S. Ct. 2479 (1985)

State’s moment of silence at public school statute is unconstitutional where legislative record reveals that motivation for statute was the encouragement of prayer. Court majority silent on whether “pure” moment of silence scheme, with no bias in favor of prayer or any other mental process, would be constitutional.

-Edwards v. Aquillard, 107 S. Ct. 2573 (1987)

Unconstitutional for state to require teaching of “creation science” in all instances in which evolution is taught. Statute had a clear religious motivation.

-Lee v. Weisman, 112 S. Ct. 2649 (1992)

Unconstitutional for a school district to provide any clergy to perform nondenominational prayer at elementary or secondary school graduation. It involves government sponsorship of worship.

-Church of Lukumi Babalu Ave., Inc. v. Hialeah, 113 S. Ct. 2217 (1993)

City’s ban on killing animals for religious sacrifices, while allowing sport killing and hunting, was unconstitutional discrimination against the Santeria religion.

These lawsuits thrive off of one thing: separation of church and state.

The people who back this lawsuits claim that religion in schools and public places are unconstitutional and need to be removed from schools. But there is one thing they conveniently seem to overlook: nowhere in the constitution is separation of church and state found! You can look all you want, but you will never find it! The phrase can actually be found in a LETTER written by Thomas Jefferson FIFTEEN YEARS after the constitution was written. The letter was addressed to the Danbury Baptist Association comforting them that they could continue worshiping as they would. Jefferson said that worship was not a “favor” to them granted by the state, rather it was a right that the state couldn’t infringe upon . ( BECK 287)

In Jefferson’s letter he says that the STATE should stay out of the CHURCH. Not the other way around. Most of our founding fathers were religious men. They recognized the need to fear a God and they saw that God was the one who created them. They based their beliefs off the bible, which they read and studied everyday so that in turn, they could build a nation on God’s principles. A nation that rose above the rest of the world. A nation of freedom and liberty, and most of all, a nation that feared God with all of their hearts.

As I wrap up, here are a few statistics since the prayer has been out of school:

1962:                                            1990:

# of unmarried couples .44(million)                               2.8(million)

Living together:

#of violent crimes in

Schools:                                .25(million)                              1.7(Million)

Pre-marital sex:                     22%                                           70%

Birth rate for unwed Girls(per 1,000)                        13                                         37

Look at the numbers, and look at the facts. The absence of prayer in schools has led to a violent, unmoral nation.

Communism in the 20th Century killed hundreds of millions of people.First, there was Adolf Hitler. Almost everyone knows of how Hitler attempted to achieve world domination through Nazi-Germany, and almost succeeded. We all learn of the atrocities that happened to minorities, particularly Jews, during the Holocaust in Germany.

Most of us have heard of Joseph Stalin, ruler of the Soviet Union during World War II, leader of the Communist Party in the Soviet Union, who fought against the Allied Forces while under a non-aggression pact with Nazi-Germany, and then turned around and fought with the Allied forces in order to defeat Hitler. Joseph Stalin was also responsible for the Holodomor, a horrific incident where the whole country of Ukraine was starved in order to crush their individualist spirit, and some people became so insane that they reverted to cannibalism.

Your history books tell you of Mao Tse Tung, a Dictator who took over the Chinese government, turning it into the People’s Republic of China, a Communist government that the country is still under today.

Mao caused 14 to 20 million deaths from starvation during the ‘Great Leap Forward’, during which farmers were sent to collectivist farms, and anyone who refused to join them was killed. Tens of thousands were killed and millions of lives were ruined during the ‘Cultural Revolution’.  Mao, then  leader of the Communist Party, initiated a political and economic upheaval of the country that led to the country descending near anarchism. When Mao died, he left China in shambles.

Hitler, Stalin and Mao dominate 20th Century history classes, but Che Guevara seemingly does not. Che was a Marxist revolutionary who fought in the Cuban Revolution to overthrow Fidel Castro, the dictator who was then holding power. Many of the early leaders of the Cuban Revolution favored a democratic or democratic-socialist direction for the new Cuba. But not Che, Che held steadfast to his pro-Soviet Faction. his faction was the one who won in the end. Che founded “labor camps”, that were eventually used to kill gays, dissidents, and people infected with AIDS. Che was a murderer and a terrorist. In a famous essay that he wrote, Che expressed several disturbing thoughts, including the following:

“Hatred as an element of struggle; unbending hatred for the enemy, which pushes a human being beyond his natural limitations, making him into an effective, violent, selective, and cold-blooded killing machine. This is what our soldiers must become …”

Che was a killer, whose goal in life was to kill large amounts of people, and kill himself in the process. He spent his days leading several guerrilla movements that impeded the attempts at Democracy in Cuba. He died in 1967, leading a Bolivian guerrilla movement that did not enlist a single Bolivian peasant. Che was a enemy of Latin-American democracy, and also largely responsible for the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people.

But many Americans don’t seem to get this.In recent Hollywood films, such as Walter Salle’s  Motorcycle Diaries, Che is painted out to be a revolutionary hero, while in reality he was an enemy of freedom.  This delusional fascination over Che has climbed to the point  where websites like http://www.moreorless.au.com, that profile heroes and killers of the 20th Century, list Che as a hero. Wikipedia has some pretty words to say about Che:

Over forty years after his execution, Che’s life and legacy still remain a contentious issue. The contradictions of his ethos at various points in his life have created a complex character of unending duality.

As a result of his perceived martyrdom, poetic invocations for class struggle, and desire to create the consciousness of a new man driven by moral rather than material incentives, Guevara evolved into a quintessential icon of leftist-inspired movements. An array of notable individuals have viewed Che Guevara as a hero; for example, Nelson Mandela referred to him as “an inspiration for every human being who loves freedom”

Che’s philosophies were very similar to those held by Hitler, Stalin or Mao, and most Americans wouldn’t think twice about singing praises to Hitler or Mao(Except Anita Dunn). Next time someone tells you that we need to implement communism in some form or fashion here in the united States, explain to them that communism has failed, over and over again, that it does nothing but create death, suffering, and tyranny; and produce tyrants like Che, Mao, Stalin and Hitler.

Below is adapted from a speech that I will be giving to a group of fellow Boy Scouts this Saturday:

Youth and their Impact on America’s Future

Ronald Reagan, our country’s fortieth President, once said that:

“Freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction. We didn’t pass it to our children in the bloodstream. It must be fought for, protected, and handed on for them to do the same, or one day we will spend our sunset years telling our children and our children’s children what it was once like in the United States where men were free –”

The former President was absolutely right.

The future of a great country, in our case America, is constantly in the hands of the next generation of Americans. Thus it is highly important that younger generations are trained to be good stewards of the country that they inherit. It is a citizen’s responsibility to follow critical issues, to raise awareness on any particular areas where changes need to be made in our country, and to vote for leaders who will lead according to the constitutional principles that our nation was founded upon.

Our present generation of young people is severely lacking people with the desire or understanding necessary to effect change in our country in this time when it is greatly needed, and this includes citizens who don’t vote, as well as politicians who make decisions based on how they will effect his or her ratings, rather than how they will effect the country as a whole.

In this speech I want to impress on you the importance of retaking America’s future by getting young people more involved in the political process.

We live in a time when Judeo-Christian values are constantly being attacked in the public realm, and the foundation that our country was built upon is being violently assaulted by those who want to undermine the principles for which early Americans stood for when they formed our country, and of which the present majority continue to uphold.

If American citizens stop caring about the consequences of such attacks, then we will lose our freedoms that so many people have lived and died for. A Harvard IOP survey conducted in the Fall of 2009,which interviewed two thousand Americans ages 18-29, shows disheartening results.

75% of the citizens interviewed said no when asked if they considered themselves to be politically engaged or politically active. 25% of the citizens polled did not even register to vote for the November 4th, 2008 presidential election.

There are dire consequences when almost a whole generation isn’t politically engaged, and large amounts of young people don’t even vote. It’s just as President Reagan said: If a whole generation fails to protect its freedoms, then those freedoms will be taken away.

Perhaps no other group of radical leftists has done more to take away our freedoms than the ACLU (American Civil Liberties Union). The ACLU has been attacking Christian principles since it’s founding by Roger Baldwin in 1920. The American Civil Liberties Union is against everything that we Christians believe in. The Bible, the traditional family, the institution of marriage, even Christmas. Disguised as the protectors of freedom, with a militia of attorneys at its disposal, the ACLU is a force to be reckoned with. Throughout it’s history, the ACLU has done much to further its goal of pushing religion, particularly Christianity, out of the public realm. Some of its recent victories include removing the Ten Commandments from public schools, and legalizing gay marriage in New Hampshire,  Connecticut, Iowa, Massachusetts and Vermont, without the consent of the majority in those states.

The ACLU has been largely successful in it’s anti-God crusade. And I believe that this is because of the lack of public outcry of the ACLU’s actions from Americans in recent years. There is really no other explanation for such an outrage. 96% of Americans when asked will tell you that they believe in a God.

The ACLU and others who want to destroy our liberties will only attempt to do so if they think that they can succeed. If the majority of Americans just stand by and do nothing, then who else is going to protect our liberties?

But there is hope.

When Americans voice their opinions loud enough, they will be heard. When Michael Newdow, an atheist from Sacramento California, called for the Supreme Court to remove the  words “under God” from the Pledge of Allegiance, the ACLU, who would normally be in the thick of the fight, was strangely silent.

It turns out that 9 out of 10 Americans were against the exclusion of the words “under God” in the Pledge. The ACLU knew that the odds were completely against them at the time, so they decided not to get involved, because doing so would risk their already feeble public appeal.

In November 2005, Newdow went on to attack our national motto: “In God We Trust”, protesting that the phrase should not be included on currency and bank notes. In 2006, a Federal Judge rejected this lawsuit as well.

You see, in order to preserve our freedoms, the next generation of Americans, meaning you and me, must show our adversaries,  groups like the ACLU, that we will not allow them to take our freedoms. And if we do so, then we will be triumphant.

So what can we younger people do to protect our liberties?

Well, you can start by getting informed. Get to know the issues that afflict our country, and what needs to be done about it. Get the facts, and form your own opinions.

We may not be able to vote yet, but we can certainly support candidates who will lead effectively. You can send e-mails to your representatives on the local, state, or

national levels. Giving them your input, and telling them how you hope that they will vote on issues that concern you, and who knows, maybe one day in the future you will run for a political office. You would be in a position to put into motion much needed change in our country.

It is common for young people like you and me to feel that we don’t have much to offer in the field of politics, and that we can’t make much of a difference at such a young age.

I personally do not believe that to be true. It is my opinion that the earlier that people start thinking about such things, the better.

In November of 2005, eighteen year old Michael Sessions ran for the position of mayor in Hillsdale Missouri, and succeeded in defeating his 5 1-year-old incumbent, Mayor Douglas Ingles.

Sessions launched his campaign with the $700 that he made at a summer job, one month before the election. Sessions won his campaign with the help of Brandon Thomas, his seventeen-year old campaign manager. Many other younger people were involved in his campaign, and his message is primarily for young people. The teenage mayor still attended high-school when he was first elected mayor,  and now attends Hillsdale College. When he began the job, Michael used his bedroom as his office, earning $250 a month for his services.

“Age has nothing to do with ability,” said Valerie G. Van Opynen, a 49 year old artist, and resident of. “He’s done more good for this city in his first 15 minutes than the last administration ever did. This is the most excited I’ve seen this town in the five years I’ve been here.”

“Age has nothing to do with ability.” This is an important lesson that we should all take to heart.

In 1983, Brian Zimmerman, an 11 year old boy from Crabb, Texas, was elected as mayor of the community with a landslide of 23 votes out of 30 cast. The goal of his campaign was to incorporate the city in order to avoid annexation from neighboring cities such as Houston, although doing so would push him out of his position as Mayor because of Texas State laws prohibiting minors to hold office as mayor.

During his time as mayor of the Crabb community of roughly 200 people, Brian reportedly paved one of the town’s roads.
In 1988, his story was chronicled in a movie called “Lone Star Kid”.

I will admit, this story is a little far fetched, so whether or not you choose to believe in it is your choice. However, if it is, than it is a truly remarkable event.

As you can see, young people can enter the political realm, and can make a difference, either as an active citizen, or even in a political office.

I hope that my speech has shown you the importance of young people to America’s future, and more importantly, to persuade you to be active in the political process throughout your entire life.

Thank you.