California Ruling - the Second Civil War Escalates - Again

The leftists’ March 21, 2010 vote on Obamacare was the ‘firing on Fort Sumter’ equivalent of the start of America’s Second Civil War. The federal court in Arizona, which stayed implementation of Arizona’s attempt to protect its borders by state level enforcement of border control/immigration laws, is an escalation of this War. And now a federal court judge in California, in striking down as unconstitutional a California ballot initiative upholding marriage as between one man and one woman, has more or less gone nuclear.

We’ve called this America’s Second Civil War, but it’s important to be clear about what’s really at stake. Lots of historians have made the case that America’s first Civil War was about states’ rights, and they can cite a decent body of evidence to support their thesis, especially if their point of view is limited to maybe the last 5-10 years prior to the start of the war. But once historians broaden their time frame, and place the war in the context of human history, it’s obvious that America’s first Civil War was about the morally indefensible institution of human slavery that could not be squared with the morally irrefutable truth of the American Declaration of Independence.

Historians who take a too narrow time frame from which to view America’s Second Civil War may fall into the same traps. They will say it was about a severe recession, the healthcare ‘uninsured’, the need for wealth redistribution between the haves and have-nots, dealing with immigration, and now, maybe gay rights. But it’s much bigger than all these things.

It’s about Christianity’s place in America. If you go deeper, it’s really about the place of the God of Judeo-Christian theology among humankind. And losing this war would take America and the world to a very, very dark place.

Sure, that can sound dramatic, and the instinct of almost everyone is to want to pull back from such stark assessments, and find some intellectually satisfying internal argument by which we convince ourselves that everything’s still ok, and we can go back to doing whatever we were doing with some semblance of normalcy. But there is something about humanity and the advance of its understanding of its relation to God that simply is not allowed a holiday from history. Go far enough afield from this core purpose of life, and we get snapped back into reality with some major whiplash to go along with it.

There is a fundamental question forever rolling around in human consciousness, sometimes at the forefront and other times in the background. Angelo Codevilla, who we mentioned earlier, is not the first to frame this question, but his summary will do:

"At stake are the most important questions: What is the right way for human beings to live? By what standard is anything true or good? Who gets to decide what?”

The answer to this last question is not and never will be: human beings. The Founding Fathers of America knew this. They broke from the tyranny of King George, not with a view of setting up a better tyranny ruled by better kings, but by appealing to “Nature, and Nature’s God” in their proclamation of self-evident truths about the nature of freedom under God, with individual rights given by God and inalienable by men. And they knew the government structure they created, however shrewd and wise in terms of ‘checks and balances’ against human foibles, would never stand the test of time in the absence of a citizenry impelled by religion and morality. As John Adams put it:

“Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.”

Make no mistake—he was speaking of a Judeo-Christian people, applying Judeo-Christian moral teachings to the establishment and maintenance of its culture and society.

The radical left, of which Soros, Obama, Reid, Pelosi, Clinton are but the most visible pieces, personify the human hatred of God—or more specifically, the human hatred of the God of Judeo-Christianity that has been foremost in American culture since the founding of the nation. Doesn’t matter what they may personally profess as to matters of faith, their actions bespeak a brazen, arrogant, tyrannical determination to insert human government in the place of God, and transform the fleeting concepts of political correctness into the moral absolutes by which American society shall be governed.

Nationalized healthcare is a monumental step in this direction. We sounded the alert in “It’s About God, America!!!” The Arizona lawsuit is a fundamental denial that we are individuals created equal in the sight of God. Instead, we are divided into groups and races who hate each other and cheat each other and conspire against each other, and the rule of law is not about the universality of truth but about the raw exercise of power. It’s a statement that we cannot be trusted as the individual image and likeness of God to abide by a law of loving our neighbor as ourselves. We sounded these alerts in “Toward Better Race Relations in America” and “Hispanics are not Lazy, Lawless or Stupid”.

The California ruling is not about the California Constitution or the US Constitution. It’s not about the wording of ballot propositions. It represents the quintessential summoning of godless intellectualism to attempt to overthrow the Judeo-Christian theological and moral underpinnings of marriage between one man and one woman. It may be wrapped in the jargon of ‘law’, but it’s really just a bald attempt of one human being to tell God and His rules to go to hell, because I’m in charge here. In Mr. Codevilla’s formulation, the California judge has decided that he shall decide what is the right way to live, and what is true and good.

And so the Second Civil War continues. Many are astonished at how fast this war is escalating; many are afraid of how it will come out. We believe the pace of escalation is actually a good thing because it brings with it a sort of escalating ‘sunlight’ of truth that exposes the lies for all to see. Once lies are exposed, their end is near.

Human slavery was a lie that could not be reconciled with the God-inspired truth of the Declaration of Independence. Took about 85 years for the lie to be rooted out of the American system. Today’s Second Civil War is about the lie that Judeo-Christian theology is itself a lie; that there is no truth except what some set of elite human beings say it is. This lie is going to be rooted out, too, and much faster. Just watch.

Paul Gable

August 5, 2010