Clarence Thomas' Gift to America

Clarity: It is "Elitists and the Masses" vs. "We the People"

The war in America today isn’t racial and it isn’t exclusively Republican vs. Democrat. It’s between a Declaration of Independence-based way of life built on individual freedom and responsibility under God vs. godless elitism that seeks to rule and control the masses. (For further background, see our earlier essay, "It's About God, America!!!').

US Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas’ concurring opinion in the recent 2nd Amendment gun rights case (McDonald v. Chicago) is truly a gift to all Americans, and most especially black Americans, that will help clear the battle-lines of this war. (Read the entire opinion for yourself, here; Thomas' opinion starts on page 67 of the pdf file). The left-wing media will of course ignore everything having to do with Thomas, but as is now universally true, the American people have many ways to find and learn about these things. Rush Limbaugh gave the Court’s decision, Thomas’ opinion and the underlying rationale a lot of play, and we think the reverberations are going to be significant across much more than the gun rights issue.

Without getting tangled in a morass of legal mumbo jumbo, the Court’s decision essentially affirmed that the 2nd Amendment to the US Constitution, a part of the ten amendments known as the Bill of Rights, confers upon individual citizens of all the United States the right to keep and bear arms.

The Court’s decision is important and should have been a no-brainer, because any student of human history ought to have known that the founders considered the right to keep and bear arms as fundamental to the preservation of American liberty. In the simplest of terms, when the government owns all the guns, ‘we the people’ are not free.

But the real gift to America was in Justice Thomas’ willingness to give readers an American history lesson as it related to gun rights and slavery.

The ending of the Civil War and the freeing of the slaves were by no means the end of race-based bigotry. “Involuntary servitude” could be legally abolished, but bigotry is an attitude of thought that takes time and spiritual growth and maturity to truly diminish and ultimately disappear. The upshot was that in the South there were many efforts to retain slavery in a de facto sense, not the least of which was to deny newly freed slaves the right to bear arms.

It doesn’t take a whole lot of insight to understand that if you’re a former slave now working for pay on the plantation, but the plantation owner has all the guns and you can’t buy one even if you want one—you’re not too far removed from actual slavery. You don’t have any power to defend yourself against arbitrary, capricious, controlling racist behavior. And so the early fights over the meaning of the Constitution’s post-Civil War 14th Amendment—which intended to confer upon all citizens, including newly freed slaves, the rights guaranteed by the Bill of Rights—had gun rights advocates on the side of the freed slaves, and gun control advocates on the side of those wanting to preserve de facto slavery.

Fast forward to today, and the camps are the same, but the de facto slavery that gun control advocates ultimately seek now transcends skin color and simply seeks a subservient general population.

Given the actual history, black Americans ought to be firmly in the camp of gun rights activists instead of in lockstep alignment with the liberal elitists (mostly Democrats) who are consistently on the side of gun control. Black Americans ought to grasp better than others what it means to be defenseless in the face of an elitist power structure that controls who can and can’t own guns. Justice Thomas’ opinion shines the light of truth on this history, and it will cause a rethinking among serious black leaders. The re-thinking may go on quietly and behind the scenes, but it will happen.

And for those really paying attention, the same light may enlighten the abortion debate. The history of abortion in America shows a large portion of the pro-abortion debate to have been the outgrowth of the vilest of racist bigotry, dressed up in and hidden by the godless left’s combination of Darwinism and ‘eugenics’ and ‘birth control’ and even forced sterilization concepts. Again, in the simplest of terms, blacks were thought to be genetically inferior and shouldn’t be allowed to procreate outside of some form of elitist control.

The abortion debate of today is of course far past this history; the strongest (and steadily growing) anti-abortion forces are typically white Christians of one denomination or another; and the fiercest pro-abortion politician in the country is its black President, Barack Obama. And so again, the light is on as to the nature of the actual war being fought.

The spirit of the Declaration of Independence simply cannot be squared with Darwinism, eugenics or forced sterilization toward anyone, regardless of skin color. If all men (and women) are created equal by one Creator, that is final. If all men and women are endowed by this Creator with the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, that is final. There is no place for a group of elitists to step in and decide who shall be allowed to procreate; elitists are not the Creator and they do not have the right or power to take away inalienable rights given by the Creator.

That is why abortion is fundamentally at odds with America’s founding documents, and why Roe v. Wade was and still is one the most ridiculously flawed and over-reaching Constitutional decision ever made by the Supreme Court. (Even left-wingers, when they are drunken with enough truth serum of one kind or another, readily admit that the idea that the Court’s venture into ‘tri-mesters’ of pregnancy as the foundation for legalized abortion is wildly untethered to anything in the text or history of the Constitution.)

Again, given the actual history, black Americans ought to be much more closely aligned with those opposing abortion, which is undeniably the conservative side of the Republican Party. Black Americans also ought to rally to the side of affirming the spirit of the Declaration of Independence, which denies the possibility of racial or gender-based superiority or inferiority—and this, too, is the conservative, ‘tea party’ side of the Republican Party.

We’ll see how brightly and broadly the light of Clarence Thomas’ opinion in McDonald v. Chicago will shine. We think its reach and influence may be truly historic. It is preposterous that black Americans vote in lockstep with liberal elitist Democrats who’ve demonstrated over and over in gun rights, abortion and in many other issues, the unrelenting attitude of seeing blacks as part of the masses who have to be kept in their (lower) place. Justice Thomas has delivered a gift that may yet break the lockstep.

Paul Gable

July 5, 2010