In late January, fifth-grade students at Reese Road Elementary School in Frankfort, New York, celebrated ?Law Enforcement Day? by being run through simulated arrests. Students were fingerprinted and subjected to biometric scans. The personal information obtained will remain in police databases ? just in case.

Describing the event to the local newspaper, the school principal gushed: ?This program is so valuable for life lessons.... [I]t lets [students] know that, yes, these law enforcement officials are here to help them, but if the kids make wrong choices, they're also here to punish them.?

Actually, the only lesson taught here is that of submission to the State, irrespective of whether its power is exercised in a morally and constitutionally appropriate fashion.

Education in ?right choices? must begin with teaching respect for God's law and God-given individual rights. It will also cultivate a proper suspicion about government power, and the character to resist unlawful exercise of that power when necessary.

Students not taught those lessons are being prepared for slavery.

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

Idaho State Representative JoAnn Wood, who chairs the House Transportation Committee, has been excoriated as a ?dictator? for bottling up a highway safety bill intended to tighten laws governing seat belt and child safety seat use.

Rep. Wood's critics complain that she had denied the state nearly $1 million in federal highway funds offered as a reward for enacting the measure.

?The federal funding is only there if we do what they want,? explained Wood.

Exactly. If we take Washington's nickel, we get their noose as well.

Wood's act was intended to resist the continued centralization of power in Washington. Bribing states with lucrative highway safety funds is among the most effective tools Washington has for federalizing law enforcement.

The August 2005 federal transportation bill, for example, contained huge sums to promote roadblocks and checkpoints and to encourage impounding and seizing automobiles on very slender pretexts. The Bush administration has explicitly acknowledged that police agencies receiving federal subsides, however small, are under federal control.

Assailed by of the parasite class, Rep. Wood deserves the gratitude of those determined to stand fast in the liberty wherewith Christ has made us free.

Derek Hale of Manassas, Virginia retired from the Marines in January 2006 after two tours of duty in Iraq.

Last November 6, Derek was killed by police in Wilmington, Delaware. He had traveled there with members of his motorcycle club to promote the Toys for Tots program. Unknown to Derek, who had no criminal record of any kind, he had been under surveillance as part of a drug investigation.

According to witnesses, Derek was surrounded by a dozen police and hit with three Taser blasts and then shot three times at point-blank range. He displayed no aggressive or uncooperative behavior; paralyzed by the Taser, he couldn't comply with an order to remove his hands from his pockets.

Police officials described this as ?resisting arrest? and adequate justification for the use of lethal force.

A lawsuit has been filed by the Rutherford Institute on behalf of Derek's widow and parents against the police agencies responsible for this atrocity.

Derek survived Iraq. It was the embryonic American police state that killed him.

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

How can America regain control of its borders? One approach would be to remove the perverse incentives that drive illegal immigration.

Economist Mark Thornton points out that the current wave of immigration from Mexico
has a lot to do with the housing bubble created by the Federal Reserve, which has drawn countless laborers north of the border to work in construction.

?[I]mmigrants have a powerful economic incentive to move to America ? lavish government benefits plus good-paying jobs that are the result of the housing bubble,? writes Tornton.

Ending welfare subsidies and reestablishing a sound currency, though beneficial, wouldn't be a complete solution. It's worth noting, however, that before the welfare state, America attracted and absorbed a far larger immigrant influx, in proportionate terms, that we're facing now: In the 1850s, annual immigration was about 1.6 percent of the total population, as compared with 0.25 percent today.

It's doubtful that any effort to interdict illegal immigration will work as long as we have an inflation-based economy and the world's largest welfare state.

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

Any time government declares war on an impersonal enemy, the real target is freedom. This is true whether we're discussing the so-called war on terror or its predecessor, the war on drugs.

Several weeks ago, Boise's NBC affiliate KTVB profiled an ex-convict named Dave Lanphier who describes himself as hopelessly addicted to methamphetamine. Viewers were told that Lanphier symbolizes the ?meth crisis? afflicting Treasure Valley. He urged that government do ?anything? it could to fight meth.

In a passing comment that should have been the focus of the story, KTVB acknowledged that Lanphier first became addicted to meth while he was in prison ? where the drug was cheap and easy to obtain.

What this means is that the Treasure Valley could literally be turned into an open-air prison, and those determined to consume meth will do so.
Trying to control what goes into the bodies of addicts simply won't work; their hearts need to be changed, and that task doesn't fall within the State's jurisdiction.
Let us stand fast in the liberty wherewith Christ has made us free.

The words of John Adams are stark and unavoidable: ?Great is the guilt of an unnecessary war.?

Joseph Galloway, co-author of the Vietnam saga ?We Were Soldiers Once ? And Young,? describes Iraq as a ?war in the wrong place, against the wrong people, at the wrong time ? conducted by a president who got every bit of it wrong.?

Andrew Stephens of Britain's New Statesman observes that the expense of caring for severely wounded Iraq veterans will drive the price tag of the war to over 2.5 trillion dollars.

On March 12, Salon reported that ?a unit of the Army's 3rd Infantry Division... is deploying troops with serious injuries and other medical problems, including GIs who doctors have said are medically unfit for battle. Some are too injured to wear their body armor....?

To understand the ultimate cost of this misadventure we turn to James Madison's warning:
?No nation can preserve its freedom in the midst of continual warfare.?

Let us end that un-Godly war immediately, and stand fast in the liberty wherewith Christ has made us free.

Under the common law, citizens have a right to resist illegal armed intrusions by agents of the state.

Last week, Florida Circuit Judge Rick De Furia validated that right in a case involving John Coffin, a Sarasota County resident who beat two sheriff's deputies after they trespassed on his property and attacked his wife, dislocating her shoulder.

?Law enforcement was responsible for the chain of events here,? wrote Judge De Furia, who pointed out that the officers ? who were there to deliver a temporary restraining order ? had broken the law by entering the property without a warrant.

?What took place in the house was unfortunate,? De Furia concluded, ?but Mr. Coffin ... had a right to resist.?

This was not the first time Coffin ? a 56-year-old heart patient ? has been victimized by illicit State violence. In 2003 he was pepper-sprayed and then beaten severely by a club-wielding policeman who mistakenly believed that Coffin's license plate tag was bogus.

The right to resist is what separates a citizen from a subject.

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

In her 1943 essay entitled ?The Humanitarian With the Guillotine,? Isabel Patterson wrote:

?Most of the harm in the world is done by good people, and not by accident, lapse, or omission. It is the result of their deliberate actions, long persevered in, which they hold to be motivated by high ideals toward virtuous ends? [I]n periods when millions are slaughtered, when torture is practiced, starvation enforced, oppression made a policy ... it must be at the behest of very many good people, and even by their direct action, for what they consider a worthy object.?

What Patterson described was the inevitable result of man's sin nature when coupled with political power. Jesus taught that there is none who is genuinely good save One. This is why Thomas Jefferson warned: ?In matters of power, let us hear no more of confidence in man, but bind him down from mischief by the chains of the constitution.?

When those metaphorical chains are broken, the literal chains of tyranny are quickly forged.

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

Will Grigg?s Liberty Minute

March 15, 2007

Writing in 1785, James Madison, often called the Father of the US Constitution, warned that Americans must ?take alarm at the first experiment on our liberties.?

?The freemen of America did not wait until usurped power had strengthened itself in exercise, and entangled the questions in precedents; they saw all the consequences in the principle, and they avoided the consequences by denying the principle.?

The wisest men of the founding generation understood that seemingly trivial excise taxes being placed on various items, from sugar to tea to printed paper, were insidious acts through which the distant British parliament was stealthily stealing American freedom.

The patriot leaders were not satisfied when specific taxes were repealed, because Parliament still claimed the power, in principle, to regulate and tax the colonies as they saw fit. It was to abolish that tyrannical principle, as much as any existing abuse, that the Revolutionary War was fought.

Contemporary Americans should apply the Founders' wisdom by fighting government policies that are tyrannical in principle, before they inflict tangible abuses.

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