Comedian Jeff Foxworthy built his career on his ?You May Be a Redneck If...? checklist.

With apologies to Mr. Foxworthy, and those weary of his routine, I invite listeners to review a ?You May Be a Terrorist If...? checklist.

That list is adapted from guidelines published by the Alabama Homeland Security Department, the State of Virginia, and the FBI.

*You may be a terrorist if you support the right to keep and bear arms.

*You may be a terrorist if you are a ?property rights activist.?

*You may be a terrorist if you believe the government defies the Constitution.

*You may be a terrorist if you oppose the UN, and otherwise believe our national independence has been compromised.

*You may be a terrorist if you've been overheard condemning the federal massacres of innocent people at Waco and Ruby Ridge.

*You may be a terrorist if you listen to, and agree with, the Liberty Minute.

All right, I made the last one up. But the point should be clear by now.

Let us stand fast in the liberty wherewith Christ has made us free.

Montana resident Tim Sundles was recently sentenced by a federal court to six days in jail and two years of probation for attempting to kill wolves with poisoned meat. That effort went awry when the pesticide-laced meatballs were eaten a neighbor's pet dogs.

Sundles could properly be charged with negligence. Instead, he was prosecuted under the Endangered Species Act, the federal law through which wolves have been reintroduced to the Mountain States.

Wildlife ecologist Dr. Charles F. Kay observes that ?environmentalists are using wolf recovery and the Endangered Species Act to run ranchers out of the country and to thwart multiple use of public lands....? Renee Askins of the eco-radical Wolf Recovery Fund admits as much: "[W]olf recovery is not about wolves, [Instead] it is about control of the West."

The Endangered Species Act is the product of a worldview inverting that of Genesis: Rather than being God's special creation, human beings are just another species within a democratic biosphere ruled by the high priests of eco-radicalism.

Let us stand fast in the liberty wherewith Christ has made us free.

Last November, 92-year-old Atlanta resident Kathryn Johnson was killed in her home during a no-knock raid conducted by narcotics police.

Hearing intruders tearing the safety bars from her front door, the terrified grandmother grabbed her revolver and blindly fired a few shots at the unseen invaders. The return fire consisted of thirty-nine gunshots, leaving Mrs. Johnson mortally wounded and two officers injured from the crossfire.

The police handcuffed the bleeding and dying grandmother. Failing to find drugs in her home, they planted three small bags of marijuana at the scene. The officers concocted a cover story and then tried to suborn false testimony from an informant to support it.

The cover-up eventually disintegrated, and all three police officers now face criminal charges. None of them, however, will stand trial for felony murder ? which is the charge private sector thugs would face in identical circumstances.

This is just a snapshot of the rampant police corruption resulting from the so-called war on drugs.

Let us stand fast in the liberty wherewith Christ has made us free.

In his January 1776 book Common Sense, Thomas Paine summarized his argument for American independence in one simple but compelling phrase: ?In America, the law is king.?

Americans were once taught that we are a nation ruled by laws, not by men. Harvey C. Mansfield, a professor of government at Harvard University, is certainly old enough to have been exposed to that principle.

Yet in a May 2 Wall Street Journal editorial, the professor embraced the opposite view, arguing that the supposed defects in our constitutional system demonstrate "the need for one-man rule." The rule of law, argues Mansfield, "is inferior to the living intelligence of a wise man on the spot."

From this perspective, the president is entitled to set aside the law whenever, in his judgment, necessity requires such action. This view has been expressed by the Bush administration, although never as candidly as it has by Professor Mansfield.

Lawless rule by one man is tyranny. Our Founding Fathers resisted it. Too many contemporary conservatives embrace it.

Let us stand fast in the liberty wherewith Christ has made us free.

Thursday is National Day of Prayer, and across the nation believers will be urged to pray on behalf of the president and the troops overseas.

It is always appropriate to pray that God will give wisdom to our elected representatives, and vitally necessary that we pray for the safe return of our soldiers.

In offering our petitions we should remember the insight found in Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn: ?You can't pray a lie.? Nor should we pray for the success of ventures that are rooted in lies. That description unmistakably applies to the Iraq War.

The administration clearly knew that Saddam's regime was not as an imminent threat to our country in 2003. It no longer tries to maintain the pretense that the war had anything to do with a fearsome arsenal of nuclear and other unconventional weapons. President Bush has admitted on the record that Saddam had no role in the 9-11 attack.

Unjust war is a grave sin. We should pray that our representatives will have the wisdom and humility to end this war and quickly restore our troops to their families.

While we should never bow slavishly to foreign opinion, it is wise for us to display what the Declaration of Independence calls ?a decent respect to the opinions of mankind....?

Thus we should be concerned by the increasingly negative view of the US held by citizens of countries that are our closest allies.

A poll of international travelers conducted by the Discover America Partnership found that 70 percent of respondents feared US officials more than terrorists or criminals. Sixty-six percent expressed concern that they could be detained at a US airport for some trivial mistake. More than half described customs and homeland security officials as rude.

These findings do not just reflect scare stories in the media, but word-of-mouth accounts of tourists from countries like England, Australia, and New Zealand being harassed, detained, and even strip-searched for no good reason. .

It is sometimes a blessing to see ourselves as others do. People abroad who share our political heritage, and wish us well, see our nation becoming a police state.

Let us stand fast in the liberty wherewith Christ has made us free.

Retired diplomat Dan Simpson is an ardent supporter of civilian disarmament. He is quite candid in describing what this would entail.
In an April 25 opinion column entitled ?The Disarming of America,? Simpson calls for enactment of federal and state laws making civilian gun ownership a felony punishable by a $1,000 fine and mandatory one-year prison term ? for each weapon.
Americans would be given a month's amnesty to surrender their firearms, after which time:
?Special squads of police would be formed...[.] [O]n a random basis to permit no advance warning, city blocks and stretches of suburban and rural areas would be cordoned off and searches carried out in every business, dwelling, and empty building.?
Thereafter, individuals would be subject to searches at any time, and summary arrest and prosecution should they be found with guns.
What Simpson describes has been implemented before ? in Cambodia in 1975, and Rwanda in 1993, just before each country succumbed to genocide.

Let us stand fast in the liberty wherewith Christ has made us free.