Will Grigg?s Liberty Minute

July 10, 2012

More than sixty years ago, The New Yorker magazine published a short story by Shirley Jackson entitled ?The Lottery.? Residents of the small village described in the story drew lots in an annual ritual that ended with the winner being stoned to death.

During the Vietnam War, that story obtained a grim resonance as the federal draft lottery selected young men to serve a potentially fatal term of military enslavement.

Gen. Stanley McChrystal, former commander of NATO troops in Afghanistan, has demanded the re-instatement of conscription, insisting that it should be made universal in order to avoid what he considers the inequity of the Vietnam-era approach to military servitude.

?I think we ought to have a draft,?McChrystal declared during the 2012 Aspen Ideas Festival. ?I think if a nation goes to war, every town, every city needs to be at risk. You make that decision and everybody has skin in the game.?

McChrystal?s use of a gambling metaphor is telling, if inadequate: When those who presume to rule us decide to go to war, they don?t have any ?skin? in the game; instead, they are gambling with the lives of other people.

Conscription is unconstitutional and anti-Biblical ? and, in a word, anti-American.

Let us take back the liberty wherewith Christ has made us free.