Last April, Jared Marcum, a 14-year-old junior high school student from Logan City, West Virginia, was suspended for refusing to take off a t-shirt expressing support for the National Rifle Association. The shirt featured a depiction of a hunting rifle and the phrase, “Protect your right.” The teenager did nothing to provoke or incite any trouble; indeed, it was a teacher who angrily confronted him in the cafeteria who caused a disturbance.

Despite the fact that Marcum had done nothing wrong or disruptive by wearing a t-shirt, he was arrested – by an armed police officer, of course – for supposedly “disrupting the school process.” According to his father, during the student’s detention at the police station, officers went so far as to threaten charging him with making terroristic threat. [Once again, Marcum had said nothing, and done nothing to anyone; he had been on the receiving end of abusive treatment by a teacher who objected to a t-shirt bearing an innocuous political sentiment.]

Rather than displaying the rudimentary adult maturity required to back down and apologize to Marcum and his family, local prosecutors are exhibiting the customary viciousness that typifies their profession by threatening to incarcerate him for a year and impose a $500 fine for the spurious offense of “obstructing an officer.”

In a country ruled by a president who can murder a 16-year-old with a drone, should we be surprised that prosecutors would make a 14-year-old a political prisoner over a t-shirt?

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

In May 2012, William Barboza, a Connecticut resident, was stopped for speeding while driving through the village of Liberty, New York. As an out-of-state resident, Barboza wasn’t aware that the portion of State Route 17 that runs through the tiny village is one of the most notorious speed traps in the state.

Not surprisingly, Barboza wasn’t happy about the ticket. When he mailed his payment to the Sullivan County Court, the 22-year-old included a vulgar message expressing contempt for the town, to which he referred as “Tyranny” rather than “Liberty,” New York. The court rejected his payment and ordered Barboza to make a two-hour trip to attend court. At the October 2012 hearing, a judge upbraided Barboza for his language, and police handcuffed and arrested him for violating the state’s “aggravated harassment” statute. Barboza was booked, fingerprinted, handcuffed to a bench, and forced to pay $200 bail. He has filed a lawsuit against the police officers who arrested him.

The charge was eventually dismissed as facially unconstitutional – but not before Barboza had been humiliated, verbally abused, and forced to make several expensive trips for gratuitous court proceedings.

Tyrannical bullying by arrogant government officials is immeasurably more offensive than vulgar language.

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

June 17, 2013

Utah businessman Jeremy Johnson faces an 86-count federal indictment accusing him of defrauding customers through his once-lucrative internet marketing firm, iWorks. Johnson’s company allegedly lured unwitting customers into signing up for recurring membership fees, and then threatened to place disgruntled customers on a credit blacklist.

As in any other high-profile federal case, prosecutors seized Johnson’s assets and unleashed a torrent of press releases and leaks damaging to Johnson’s reputation. His wife, Sharla Johnson, has fought back by setting up several websites exposing what she regards as official corruption and misbehavior by federal officials.

Although Johnson, who is presently free on bail, is bound by a gag order, his wife is not – but that hasn’t stopped U.S. District Magistrate Judge Paul M. Warner from threatening to send him back to jail unless his wife ceases to publish critical commentary about the federal government on her websites.

If the allegations are true, Johnson swindled people out of an estimated $275 million by offering to help them obtain taxpayer-funded government grants – and then using tactics that mimic the institutional corruption of the government offering those grants. The difference is that the government demands a monopoly on fraud – and is utterly ruthless in pursuing and enforcing that monopoly.

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

When NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden fled to Hong Kong, many observers were puzzled that he would seek sanctuary in a city that is a special administrative region of Communist China.

According to Chinese dissident artist Ai Weiwei, this wasn’t all that surprising, given that the U.S. and China are, in his view, beginning to resemble each other. Weiwei, who lived in the United States for 12 years, describes the NSA’s massive surveillance program as an “abuse of state power” that “goes totally against my understanding of what it means to be a civilized society, and it will be shocking of American citizens allow this to continue.”

Speaking from a different totalitarian tradition and a vastly different perspective, Russian President Vladimir Putin – a veteran of the KGB – has given his enthusiastic support to the NSA’s surveillance program. Comprehensive phone surveillance and internet data-mining, according to Putin, is “the way a civilized society should go about fighting terrorism.” He also applauded the brutal paramilitary tactics increasingly used by U.S. police in dealing with demonstrations. According to Putin, “That’s the way it’s done in the U.S. … and that’s the way it’s done in Russia.”

Under Obama, the United States has become the land of Mao and Lenin, rather than Madison and Jefferson.

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

Every year, hundreds of U.S. citizens are threatened with prosecution for lying to federal agents. Constitutional attorney Harvey Silverglate points out that this often happens because of minor and materially insignificant discrepancies between the citizen’s testimony and a handwritten report of an earlier interview with an FBI agent.

Former Major League baseball star Roger Clemens was threatened with a prison term over supposedly lying to Congress over his alleged steroid use. Lying to federal investigators or during Congressional testimony is thus treated as a grave criminal offense – unless, apparently, it is done by the Director of National Intelligence.

During a Senate Intelligence Committee Hearing in March, Senator Ron Wyden of Oregon asked James Clapper, the Director of National Intelligence: “Does the NSA collect any type of data on millions or hundreds of millions of Americans?” Clapper’s reply was: “No, sir” – a statement that is now known to be a direct, conscious lie, as he subsequently admitted.

Republican Congressman Justin Amash of Michigan has called for Clapper’s resignation for lying under oath. That would require Clapper to display integrity he obviously doesn’t possess. If this were a society of laws, Clapper would be prosecuted for perjury. Then again, in such a society the NSA wouldn’t exist.

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

June 12, 2013

The Supreme Court has quietly dismissed a lawsuit filed by a U.S. Navy veteran named Donald Vance who was illegally imprisoned and tortured by the government he served.

In 2004, during the U.S. occupation of Iraq, Donald Vance went to that country to work as a security contractor. He soon discovered that the company employing him was deeply corrupt and selling weapons to radical Islamist militias. Vance contacted the FBI and began feeding it information about what he found. This prompted military officials to arrest Vance and confine him in an Iraqi dungeon, where he was tortured.

Like foreign nationals who had been detained in Iraq and Afghanistan, Vance was told by his captors not to disclose what had been done to him. To his credit, once he was home Vance – along with a fellow detained named Nathan Ertel -- contacted an attorney and filed a lawsuit against Rumsfeld. The7th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals insisted that Rumsfeld could not be held responsible for the crimes committed by his subordinates – who, in turn, insisted that they weren’t liable for carrying out crimes that were authorized by their superiors. Those perverse, mutually reinforcing claims of immunity have been tacitly ratified by the U.S. Supreme Court.

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

June 11, 2013

When Boulder, Colorado resident Chrissy Smiley returned to her condo after walking her dog, she was stunned to find a card from a police officer on her dining room table. When she called the department she was informed that the fact she had left a sliding door unlocked and partially open constituted “probable cause” to conduct a welfare check, Smiley recalled to the Boulder Camera newspaper. The Boulder Police Department insists that entering what they call “unsecured residences” is “standard operating procedure” and that it will continue.

In Stillwater, Minnesota Sonya Sylos was startled to find a sheriff’s deputy and two police officers who had entered her home at 2:00 a.m. without a warrant or permission. The officers said they wanted to talk with Sylos about her son, who was not a criminal suspect but was allegedly a friend of another individual who had fled from police during a traffic stop. Their questioning persisted even after Sylos told them they did not have permission to be in her home.

In the garrison state America has become, the police – like their Soviet and Nazi forebears -- assume that they no longer need permission to invade our homes or otherwise inflict their uninvited attention upon us.

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

While waiting for a flight at Washington’s Dulles Airport, Foreign Policy Analyst Steve Clemons of The Atlantic magazine overheard four men he identified as intelligence officers talking about killing the NSA whistleblower who revealed that agency’s pervasive surveillance of American phone calls and electronic communications.

 The men, who had attended a conference for intelligence professionals, made references to having the whistleblower “disappeared,” which refers to an extra-judicial assassination. Clemons characterized their remarks as “bravado,” but during an era in which U.S. citizens have been targeted for drone strikes such remarks can’t be dismissed as mere whimsy.

The apparent source of the leaks is 29-year-old NSA contract employee Edward Snowden. He told the Guardian of London that he leaked the information in the hope that public exposure would lead to political and legal action to rein in the surveillance state. Currently living in Hong Kong, Snowden said that he seeks asylum from any country that supports privacy and freedom of speech – and that he doesn’t expect he will ever see home again. Comments of the kind made by the intelligence officers at Dulles Airport underscore his concerns – and suggest one dreadful way his prediction could come true.

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