Tag Archives: brucegust

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Daily Broadside | Back in the Saddle Edition

Daily Verse | Proverbs 8:13
To fear the Lord is to hate evil.

Tuesday’s Reading: Proverbs 10-13

Happy Tuesday and welcome back, me!

My family and I had a good two-week vacation to the east coast where we spent time in the sun and surf off of South Carolina. The more time we spend there the more we think we’d like to live there someday.

Someday. But not today.

My thanks to Bruce Gust for his engaging and upbeat writing on A Biblical Approach to Politics. I’m blessed to have him as a long-time friend and brother in Christ who comes at life in much the same way I do. I’m hoping you found his thinking and insight as helpful to you as I did.

So, did anything happen while I was out?

LOL JK.

Bruce mentioned one of the main developments in the opening to his blog post yesterday that happened right after I left: the Supreme Court overturning Roe v. Wade and sending the matter of abortion back to the states.

I won’t rehash the news here except to note that it’s particularly mesmerizing to watch the progressive leviathan writhe in agony when political or cultural decisions don’t go their way, thrashing in the extremes and then, once the cameras are off, standing up and going back to what they do best: criticizing and destroying anything good and noble out of their hatred for anything we’d consider normal.

Are women really going to “die” if a State prohibits abortion? Nope. Pregnancy is not a disease and abortion is never necessary to save the life of a mother. Are States that prohibit abortion “forcing” women to carry their pregnancy to term? Nope. The body does that. Pregnancy is a naturally-occurring process that, based on the current world population, has happened at least 8 billion times. Killing a baby in utero is unnatural and used to be considered an appalling crime against humanity.

Let’s just call abortion what it is: after-the-fact contraception.

Let’s also call Roe v. Wade what it was: a wrongly decided, unconstitutional court case wielding nothing but “raw judicial power” that invented a right — and the law to support it — out of whole cloth. Or, as Samuel Alito put it, writing for the majority:

Not only was there no support for such a constitutional right until shortly before Roe, but abortion had long been a crime in every single State. At common law, abortion was criminal in at least some stages of pregnancy and was regarded as unlawful and could have very serious consequences at all stages. American law followed the common law until a wave of statutory restrictions in the 1800s expanded criminal liability for abortions. By the time of the adoption of the Fourteenth Amendment, three-quarters of the States had made abortion a crime at any stage of pregnancy, and the remaining States would soon follow …

Roe was egregiously wrong from the start. Its reasoning was exceptionally weak, and the decision has had damaging consequences. And far from bringing about a national settlement of the abortion issue, Roe and Casey have enflamed debate and deepened division. It is time to heed the Constitution and return the issue of abortion to the people’s elected representatives …

Roe found that the Constitution implicitly conferred a right to obtain an abortion, but it failed to ground its decision in text, history, or precedent. It relied on an erroneous historical narrative; it devoted great attention to and presumably relied on matters that have no bearing on the meaning of the Constitution; it disregarded the fundamental difference between the precedents on which it relied and the question before the Court; it concocted an elaborate set of rules, with different restrictions for each trimester of pregnancy, but it did not explain how this veritable code could be teased out of anything in the Constitution, the history of abortion laws, prior precedent, or any other cited source; and its most important rule (that States cannot protect fetal life prior to ‘viability’) was never raised by any Opinion of the Court party and has never been plausibly explained.

A lot of people kept up the fight against abortion for these last 50 years. I remember my youth pastor going to protest at abortion clinics back in the 80s. Those who fought the monstrosity called “abortion” for decades deserve the greatest share of the credit for Roe’s demise.

But there’s another person who deserves great credit, and that is president-in-exile Trump. No matter what you think of him — and opinions vary widely on both sides of the aisle — he said he’d put originalists on the court, and he did. Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett were all appointed by Trump, and all three were key to overturning Roe v. Wade.

Who would have thought it? A big-city billionaire who turned out to be the most pro-life president in history. And his legacy, should he come to the end of his life having served only one term, will live on in the lives of millions who are born as a result of this historic decision made possible by his appointments.

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Daily Broadside | Something, Somewhere, Sometime, Will Have to Give

Daily Verse | Psalm 73:2-3
But as for me, my feet had almost slipped;
    I had nearly lost my foothold.
For I envied the arrogant
    when I saw the prosperity of the wicked.

Friday’s Reading: Psalms 78-83
Saturday’s Reading: Psalms 84-89

It’s Friday and the end of another week in the Brandon Archipelago from where there is no escape. There aren’t any more undiscovered continents to which we can flee the developing tyranny here. The only options are to submit or to join the battle when it comes.

The American cultural and political landscape has been bulldozed and fundamentally reshaped over the last half century. A one-party oligarchy tied to the radical ideology of identity politics controls our major institutions as populist resistance rises. Digital technology continues to reshape human behavior and institutions, causing an escalating war over its control.

The views of roughly half the population of America are increasingly suppressed and delegitimized by most major institutions and media outlets. This difference in opinion is not a mere matter of policy preferences. Americans are divided about what men and women, the family, citizenship, and nation-states are and ought to be, as well as when human life begins.

Few want to admit the reality of the situation, but Americans are now divided over the building blocks and the purpose of human civilization. Many do not consider what underlies all the factionalism amidst the noise, but this does not change the sordid reality. There is no possibility of reconciling this fundamental opposition unless one side or the other wins.

I’m not advocating an insurrection, although I believe that the elites are pressing to provoke one every day. I wouldn’t be surprised if one eventually broke out. A real insurrection, I mean, not a group of unarmed patriotic Americans walking through the halls of Congress as if on a tour.

We’ve already withstood more tyranny and the erosion of our rights than those suffered by the colonists who took up arms at Lexington and Concord and threw tea into Boston harbor. There are so many, we could write a new declaration of independence and a list of grievances similar to what Thomas Jefferson penned some 246 years ago.

Victor Davis Hanson is an accomplished historian and author, and one of my favorite columnists. He’s sounding the alarm, too.

“I hesitate to say this, we’re not in a society ruled by law,” Hanson, a senior fellow with the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, said on “Tucker Carlson Tonight,” referring to attacks on pro-life groups which he argued have largely gone unpunished. “We’re in a revolutionary period like 18th century France or 1920s Russia where the law is fluid and it’s whatever the power to be says it is.”

Our life together is being intentionally battered by cultural Marxists, who are destroying the foundations of an ordered society. We’re up against a triumvirate of institutions working together to create chaos and deprive us of our freedoms: politics, journalism and business.

While the politicians have to maintain the appearance of respecting the Bill of Rights, they are working hand-in-glove with “the press” to suppress news that contradicts the Leftist narrative. How much have you heard about the assassination attempt on Justice Kavanaugh? How about the Hunter Biden story that every outlet dismissed as Russian propaganda?

Big business is on board with the Marxist agenda. Most have embraced LGBTQWERTY+ and gladly implemented Covid policies. Workers who object or refuse to cooperate with their (unconstitutional) demands find themselves at risk of losing their jobs.

In the past, the American Right set out to conserve American institutions and an American way of life through partisan political action and advocacy. The “culture war” was always real, but for the most part it was fought within explicitly political spaces via explicitly political means. Businesses and the economy were considered “neutral” spaces, subject to discipline from shareholders and market demand.

Today, however, few elite professions or corporations allow their members to safely dissent from woke dogma; everyone knows they risk their job and career if they do so publicly. The woke agenda has been grafted into most major corporations. And since culture is made in large part by corporations, mainstream media and culture have largely turned into tools to support one side of the divide.

There’s only so much that rational people will endure. Something, somewhere, sometime, will have to give.

Today is my last post for a couple of weeks as I take some time away to a favorite spot on the east coast. My childhood friend, Bruce Gust, will be filling in for me while I’m gone like he did last year. He’s a solid Christian, a former Marine, a conservative, a husband and father, blogs at Muscular Christianity, and knows what a woman is.

You’re in good hands.

Have a great weekend couple of weeks.