http://www.archangelinstitute.org/celebrating-martin-luther-king-jr-it-is-good-he-did-not-try-to-get-into-the-indiana-bar/

http://www.archangelinstitute.org/celebrating-martin-luther-king-jr-%e2%80%94-just-a-postmodern-heretic-himself/

http://www.archangelinstitute.org/celebrating-martin-luther-king-jr-by-standing-up-to-injustice/

http://www.archangelinstitute.org/what-the-world-need-now-is/

http://www.archangelinstitute.org/elena-kagan-is-no-mlk/

The Net is buzzing with rumors of preparation for martial law.

Michigan U.S. Congressman John Dingell claims that the nationalization of the health care delivery system — including the mental health authorities like Dr. Elizabeth Bowman and Dr.  Stephen Ross — is needed “to control the people.” Click here for that interview.

(As one already so “controlled”  I can offer an expert opinion on Big Brother’s love.  It ain’t warm and fuzzy.  See the Brown v. Bowman category on this website for details.)

And now another bill on marking us all with national identity cards:  http://thehill.com/homenews/senate/95235-democrats-spark-alarm-with-call-for-national-id-card

As we have reported, persecution can break out in America faster than anyone realizes.  Trust me, I know first hand.  Here is my claim to that title:  http://www.archangelinstitute.org/a-post-modern-heresy-trial-post-2-what-my-inquisitors-most-wanted-to-hear/

Here are warnings of a coming storm:  http://www.archangelinstitute.org/is-matyrdom-coming-to-america/

http://www.archangelinstitute.org/gathering-storm-clouds-on-the-horizon/

It is enough to cause me to rerun the following post from last summer:
I (Bryan) attended a seminar put on by the National Association of Attorneys General in Washington, D.C., a few years ago. The FTC (Federal Trade Commission) sent some attorneys over to brief us on the ever growing problem of identity theft and bank fraud. They spoke of biometrics — systems that tied identify directly to the person. Physical descriptions have been so used since the dawn of time. (Cain? Oh, he is the fellow with the pronounced brow ridge over there. Genesis 4:16) Gender (assuming there are only two), height, weight, eye color, etc. In the last century we discovered finger, thumb and hand prints. After that it was iris patterns and facial recognition software.

Most all of this was discussed by the FTC agents. They then spoke of a future system that would guarantee that merchants would never be fooled by identity theft, assuring a much more certain economy. Especially for online trading.

Afterward I sought them out and asked this question: “Given personal computers with fingerprint access, am I correct that all of the technology now exists to solve this problem, it is only the political will to make it happen that is lacking?”

Yes, was the reply.

And, I asked, “is that political will not a concern about a Big Brother State, and especially given the writings found in the last book of the Bible about a mark to buy and sell?”

Yes, they admitted, that is the source of much of the social resistance to biometrics.

I then told my friends that the system would come out of the East, for Asia had no such platform of individual rights, fear of Big Brother and concern about divine revelation via the Bible.

At the risk of thinking stereotypically, I have to share my opinion that this verse just does not mean all that much to the governments of China or India:

And he causeth all, both small and great, rich and poor, free and bond, to receive a mark in their right hand, or in their foreheads: And that no man might buy or sell, save he that had the mark, or the name of the beast, or the number of his name…and his number is Six hundred & sixty-six. (Rev.13:15-18)

Click here for a news report on that I see as a major plank in the the soon coming global biometric plan. It is already begun in China and India. Here is how it will spread: First on paper, and then as implants. The global positioning satellites are flying overhead. The technology is here. As “terror” and identity fraud spreads across the dying West such biometrics will also spread. First as the “census” to get all enrolled, just like before the first coming of Christ, and then as a database tied to the government’s internet to track us all for purposes of social control.

Need some inspiration after all of that? May I suggest a careful reading of this?

*** end of post from last June

LOOKS LIKE CONGRESS MIGHT HAVE A PLAN TO GET US CAUGHT UP WITH THE EAST ON THE TAGGING OF PEOPLE PROCESS.

If you are an Indiana attorney or ever think you would like to become one then you should take the time to pray and reflect before signing the Manhattan Declaration, which you can go to by clicking here.

That fine work of Christian Resistance ends on this high (as in Higher Law) note:

As Christians, we take seriously the Biblical admonition to respect and obey those in authority. We believe in law and in the rule of law. We recognize the duty to comply with laws whether we happen to like them or not, unless the laws are gravely unjust or require those subject to them to do something unjust or otherwise immoral. The biblical purpose of law is to preserve order and serve justice and the common good; yet laws that are unjust—and especially laws that purport to compel citizens to do what is unjust—undermine the common good, rather than serve it.

Going back to the earliest days of the church, Christians have refused to compromise their proclamation of the gospel. In Acts 4, Peter and John were ordered to stop preaching. Their answer was, “Judge for yourselves whether it is right in God’s sight to obey you rather than God. For we cannot help speaking about what we have seen and heard.” Through the centuries, Christianity has taught that civil disobedience is not only permitted, but sometimes required. There is no more eloquent defense of the rights and duties of religious conscience than the one offered by Martin Luther King, Jr., in his Letter from a Birmingham Jail. Writing from an explicitly Christian perspective, and citing Christian writers such as Augustine and Aquinas, King taught that just laws elevate and ennoble human beings because they are rooted in the moral law whose ultimate source is God Himself. Unjust laws degrade human beings. Inasmuch as they can claim no authority beyond sheer human will, they lack any power to bind in conscience. King’s willingness to go to jail, rather than comply with legal injustice, was exemplary and inspiring.

Because we honor justice and the common good, we will not comply with any edict that purports to compel our institutions to participate in abortions, embryo-destructive research, assisted suicide and euthanasia, or any other anti-life act; nor will we bend to any rule purporting to force us to bless immoral sexual partnerships, treat them as marriages or the equivalent, or refrain from proclaiming the truth, as we know it, about morality and immorality and marriage and the family.

We will fully and ungrudgingly render to Caesar what is Caesar’s. But under no circumstances will we render to Caesar what is God’s.

ONCE AGAIN, A WORD OF WARNING.  SIGNING THIS PLEDGE MAY GET A PERSON DISBARRED IN INDIANA. 

WANT PROOF?  STAY TUNED.   AND COME TO OUR DECEMBER 8 BANQUET.

The lengthy story in red that follows was in the Washington Times this morning … and then mysteriously removed.

This (click here, later) scaled down story replaced it.

Here is the one that went down the Orwellian memory hole, with bold highlights:

Religious leaders vow civil disobedience on anti-life issues

More than 150 leaders across a spectrum of conservative
Christianity on Friday released a 4,700-word document vowing
civil disobedience if they are forced to take part in
“anti-life acts” or bless gay marriages.

Called the “Manhattan Declaration,” the six-page,
single-spaced document was drafted by Prison Fellowship
founder Charles Colson, an evangelical, and Princeton
University professor Robert P. George, a Roman Catholic, and
included a bevy of Catholic, Anglican and Orthodox bishops,
archbishops and cardinals as signatories along with dozens
of clergy and laity.

Archbishop of Washington Donald W. Wuerl is one of the
signatories.

“Throughout the centuries, Christianity has taught that
civil disobedience is not only permitted, but sometimes
required,” says the document which cited civil rights icon
Martin Luther King and his willingness to go to jail for his
beliefs.

“Because we honor justice and the common good,” it states,
“we will not comply with any edict that purports to compel
our institutions to participate in abortions,
embryo-destructive research, assisted suicide or euthanasia
or any other anti-life act; nor will we bend to any rule
purporting to force us to bless immoral sexual partnerships,
treat them as marriages or the equivalent, or refrain from
proclaiming the truth, as we know it, about morality and
immorality and marriage and the family.”

When pressed to say what sorts of civil disobedience the
writers were proposing, its originators were vague on the
details at Friday’s news conference during which the
document was released.

“We certainly hope it doesn’t come to that,” said Mr.
George, who added that he has represented a West Virginia
resident who has refused to pay a portion of her state
income tax that funds abortions. “However, we see case after
case of challenges to religious liberty,” such as compelling
pharmacists to carry abortifacient drugs or health care
workers to assist in abortions, he added.

“When the limits of conscience are reached and you cannot
comply, it’s better to suffer a wrong than to do it,” he
said.

There are at least 224 million Christians in the United
States, according to the Web site Adherents.com.

The document, which was drafted over the summer, is being
released at a time of high stress for many of the groups
that signed it. The Archdiocese of Washington is under fire
for saying it will not comply with a pending D.C. law that
would force the Catholic Church to give health benefits or
adoption services to same-sex couples.

Archbishop Wuerl, who attended the news conference, said it
was a “joy” to welcome the religious leaders at the news
conference and emphasized that their task “is to change
human hearts. That is how society is changed.”

Philadelphia Cardinal Justin Rigali, one of the signers,
said people’s consciences must be formed first.

“The institution of marriage is at risk of being redefined
at its very essence,” he said. “Justice demands that we not
remain silent in face of these threats.”

However, he twice dodged a reporter’s question about whether
it would be a mortal sin for a politician to vote for a
national health care bill that obligates taxpayers to pay
for abortions.

Several speakers said the document was moral, not political,
in nature and that the bulk of it defines three core issues:
life, marriage and religious liberty.

“This is truly a matter of the heart,” said the Rev. Robert
Sirico, founder of the Michigan-based Acton Institute. “To
portray it as something other is to mischaracterize our
intentions.”

But the Rev. Barry W. Lynn, executive director of
Washington-based Americans United for Separation of Church
and State, said the document was very political.

“I am optimistic that the people in the pews will not heed
their leaders’ misguided call to action,” he said. “Polls
show that most churchgoers do not want to see their faith
politicized. But I am also well aware that religious leaders
have vast lobbying power that cannot be ignored.”

The document does portray a gloomy picture of the current
political situation, citing the “pro-abortion ideology
[that] prevails today in our government.“

It adds, “The present administration is led and staffed by
those who want to make abortions legal at any stage of fetal
development and who want to provide abortions at taxpayer
expense. Majorities in both houses [of Congress] hold
pro-abortion views.”

The first 148 signatures include Southern Baptists,
Anglicans, the Orthodox Church of America (OCA), members of
Reformed, evangelical, Hispanic Protestant, Church of God in
Christ, Antiochian Orthodox and Evangelical Free Church
traditions plus the executives of numerous parachurch
ministries.

There were only a handful of Presbyterians, United
Methodists and Pentecostals, and no apparent signatories
from Seventh-day Adventist, Messianic Jewish and Episcopal
churches.

Here at the ArchAngel Institute we have been foreshadowing this battle for more than two years now.  In fact, our Executive Director, Bryan J. Brown, is shoulder deep in this battle.  Come to our December 8 banquet to hear much about this.  Also check out our category “Refuse, resist or rebel” for more on this subject, including Church teaching.

Parents the world over have objected to teachings found in the local public schools.  Whether it be atheistic evolution, amoral sexuality or radical politics – most all objections fall upon deaf ears.

Few such cases are ever won.

NOT SO when a doctrine of secularization is brought to court!

Hitler ordered the crucifixes removed as well — see cite at end of this article.

The European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) ruled Tuesday (11/3) that Italy’s display of crucifixes in public schools was in violation of the European Convention on Human Rights’ protection of the rights to education and freedom of religion.

The applicant, Ms. Soile Lautsi, petitioned the Court after Italy had rejected her requests to take down crucifixes that were prominently displayed in her children’s classrooms in accordance with Royal Decrees dating from the 1920’s. Responding to Italy’s argument that crucifixes had become a symbol of secular Italian history and culture, the Court relied on its former holding in Buscarini et al. v. Saint-Marin that the social and historical meaning of a text used in oath-taking did not deprive the text of its religious character. The Court noted that the crucifixes could easily be interpreted as religious signs and that children could feel that their school environment was Catholic; this point was further aggravated by the fact that Catholicism was the majority religion in Italy. As students could not avoid the classrooms without undue hardship, the Court found that the presence of the crucifixes thus interfered with the right of parents to educate their children in accordance with their convictions, and the right of children to believe or not to believe.

The Court awarded the applicant 5,000 euros for moral damage, considering that a mere declaratory judgment would not be sufficient as Italy had not expressed its readiness to review the relevant Royal Decrees.

SOURCE

A previous European Court ruled that those who refused to obey such “Royal Decrees” must be sentenced to death for “aiding and abetting the enemy in the betrayal of the fatherland and for plotting high treason.” Blessed Maria Restituta, inspire us in these dark hours.

ROSENBERG LIVES AGAIN IN EUROPE –  (sans the adoration of Mein Kampf.   That vacuum will likely soon be filled.)

WILL YOU OBEY SUCH A ROYAL DECREE, MODERN CHRISTIAN?

Today’s Psalm seems especially motivational.  People just do not talk like this anymore, most being far too concerned about how they will sound to the elites leading us toward a Brave New World  …  but one does not have to go back too many generations to find such zeal for the Law of God.  (And pockets of resistance are yet among us!)

Responsorial Psalm
Ps 119:53, 61, 134, 150, 155, 158

R.  Give me life, O Lord, and I will do your commands.
Indignation seizes me because of the wicked
who forsake your law.
R.        Give me life, O Lord, and I will do your commands.
Though the snares of the wicked are twined about me,
your law I have not forgotten.
R.        Give me life, O Lord, and I will do your commands.
Redeem me from the oppression of men,
that I may keep your precepts.
R.        Give me life, O Lord, and I will do your commands.
I am attacked by malicious persecutors
who are far from your law.
R.        Give me life, O Lord, and I will do your commands.
Far from sinners is salvation,
because they seek not your statutes.
R.        Give me life, O Lord, and I will do your commands.
I beheld the apostates with loathing,
because they kept not to your promise.
R.        Give me life, O Lord, and I will do your commands.

In the next series of posts the ArchAngel Institute presents a letter from an American prisoner of conscience.  This letter was written from a county jail by a Christian held in contempt by the federal court seventeen years ago.  The prisoner was held for refusing to pledge obedience to a judge-made law that he knew to be both unconstitutional (as was later held by the U.S. Supreme Court) and violative of his conscience.   The prisoner was held without hope of release short of making a pledge that offended his Faith.

A classic church-state conflict for this individual.

As such this letter is very much onpoint with the mission of the Institute.   We exist to further Christian activism and support Christians who are suffering persecution for the Faith.  This particular Christian activist got caught up in the federal system as he attempted to rescue an 83 year old great grandmother from rough handling during a false arrest.  She was later acquitted. 

The case that formed the backdrop for this letter and incarceration was Women’s Health Care, PA (George Tiller) v. Operation Rescue-National, 91-1303K, filed during the “Summer of Mercy” in Wichita in 1991.  The great grandmother who was roughly arrested was doing nothing other than standing, peacefully, with a pro-life sign on a local dentist’s  parking lot (that she had gained permission to stand upon).  When the police attempted to make her move — at the request of the local abortionist – this grand lady stood her ground.  She was soon placed under arrest, hands cuffed behind her back, confused and hurt in the back seat of a squad car without the benefit of her necessary medicines.  

When the Christian activist attempted to reason with the police he was arrested himself, and then alleged by abortionist George Tiller to have violated a federal injunction.

This letter to a federal judge will be presented without commentary over the next week.   Those wishing to post rebuttal to bring balance and thus help us impress the IRS are urged to do so.  Unfortunately Judge Patrick Kelly never answered this letter and now cannot do so due to his death.  (RIP)

This same Christian activist finds himself in a similar situation at the present.  Thus the look to the past to build Faith for the present.

This site previously presented, in six posts, Bryan Brown’s 1992 letter from a Kansas jail to federal judge Patrick Kelly (RIP).

That letter can now be viewed in the Angel vault, click  here and click on the text to enlarge.

activist
noun

1. one who is politically active in the role of a citizen; especially, one who campaigns for change

“One who takes an active part, usually as a volunteer, in a political party or interest group. Because activism is costly, activists are unusual people. Either they enjoy political activity for its own sake, or they have off-median views which give them an incentive to pull the party or interest group towards the position they favour, rather than the position it would take to maximize its vote or influence.

source:  Political Dictionary: “activist”

DO YOU CONSIDER YOURSELF A CHRISTIAN?  An active Christian?

“If you were accused of being a Christian, would there be enough evidence to convict you?”

CHRISTIANS ARE SOCIAL (THE KINGDOM OF GOD) AND POLITICAL (JESUS IS LORD) ACTIVISTS BY DEFINITION.

If you are neither, then maybe … (insert quiet reflection here)

If you, rather, are an unusual person seeking change, one who the ruling elite dubs dangerous, or idiosyncratic, or a misfit, or even evil, well then, you might just fit this bill of fare:

But ye are a chosen generation, a royal priesthood, an holy nation, a peculiar people; that ye should shew forth the praises of him who hath called you out of darkness into his marvellous light;Which in time past were not a people, but are now the people of God: which had not obtained mercy, but now have obtained mercy.  Dearly beloved, I beseech you as strangers and pilgrims, abstain from fleshly lusts, which war against the soul;  Having your conversation honest among the Gentiles: that, whereas they speak against you as evildoers, they may by your good works, which they shall behold, glorify God in the day of visitation.

I Peter 2 (KJV)

(Written to a generation accused of treason against the gods and empire due to their refusal to “go with the flow.”)

This is mere foreshadowing, stay tuned for follow-up …

This post concludes the background on the legal infanticide of the Baby Doe case.  This post is, like the others that came before it in this past week, taken directly from our series on civil disobedience last summer.  See the June – August archives for more on this necessary topic.

Baby Doe was born on April 9, 1982.  April 9 is also Passover this year and Maundy Thursday  — a rare and unusual paring of religious dates.  Such significance!  Our Lord and Saviour celebrated Passover on Maundy Thursday and was crucified as the Lamb of God, the fulfilment of the Passover, on the next day.

On April 9, 2009 this site will present an interview with the Indiana judge who signed the papers and established the “due process” that paved the way for that baby’s painfilled demise.   We will present this interview devotionally.

For more on the Passover/Easter connection see our posts from Lent 2008.

We have been working with the Baby Doe event from two decades past as our example of good government gone bad. Numerous other examples could be sited, and will be in the posts to come. I am building on the Baby Doe order because it helped me in my formation as a Christian Activist.

Others have been inspired to consider the same by the example of Franz Jagerstatter, who refused to serve in the nazi army and was executed for his faith-filled answer of “Nein!” to the Uberstate. Click here for more on this man of great courage.

The Christian Church was not born to serve as a bastion of banality for lukewarm status quo social orders. In its worst years it has been pressed into such service, but that is not the intent of the Church’s Head, Jesus the Christ. He calls His Church to engage on social issues, for social issues are issues of Faith.

The Church is to preserve what is best in any social order, which is to say that which is in keeping with Natural Law, and to confront that which is raised up against Natural Law and the Revealed Will of the Creator.

Examples are not difficult to come by, although they are, at times, difficult to agree upon. If the Church was left behind without leaders with true authority then the plan was a recipe for disharmony and disunity.

Thankfully the Church has been graced with offices and leadership.

So has the government. But what happens when leadership fails to follow the Natural Law or the Revealed Will of God?

What is the Christian to do when ordered to assist in wrongdoing?

Like any and all Christian nurses and doctors ordered to ignore the cries of Baby Doe.

Here is the ancient and accepted teaching of the Christian Church:

Those early Roman Christians had to right to conscientious objection, said the Apostles. No such right, said the Empire. The Empire won in the coliseum but lost in history. Although the great grandchildren of those who triumphed over Roman paganism look to be rethinking all of the issues and look to be resurrecting the gory glory that was Rome.

Do pharmacists, doctors, lawyers, psychologists, judges, policemen, social workers and other professionals enjoy the right to object to participating in acts contrary to Church teaching in our current social situation? How about parents? Do they enjoy such rights? Yes, but not for long if the political correctness movement continues to push its “diversity of morality” platforms on a post-Christian social order.

Rampant Christian persecution could fall upon us all much faster than many realize.

Readers might want to bookmark the above Church teaching. It could come in quite handy in the years set before us.

This post continues our background on the legal killing of a newborn baby with Down’s Syndrome and a blocked esophagus in Bloomington, Indiana almost 27 years ago. 

Because the court-ordered dehydration of a newborn in Bloomington, Indiana figured highly into my own formation as a constitutional law attorney (I was licensed in Kansas 14 years after Baby Doe was ‘lawfully’ killed) I am using his execution as a platform to address significant issues of law and policy affecting all Americans today.

Like this:

The judicially-decreed death rattle of Baby Doe, and of countless babies like him (born and unborn) raises important questions: What is the foundation for the law and what purpose should it serve?

These questions are among the most important any individual can ask of her social order. For that reason they are largely ignored in this amusement-driven culture.

Notre Dame Professor Emeritus Charles Rice, a friend of the Institute, refuses to ignore these crucial questions. One of his best books is 50 Questions on the Natural Law: What it is & Why we need it. (Ignatius Press, ISBN No. 0-89870-454-5, click here to order).

In this very readable work (it is written for laymen) Professor Rice defines such crucial terms as legal positivism and natural law, breaking them down to an understandable level.

“Natural law will seem mysterious if we forget that everything has a law built into its nature….The natural law is the story of how things work. … Morality is governed by a law built into the nature of man and knowable by reason…. Let us say upfront that the natural law makes no ultimate sense without God as its author. The natural law provides a guide through which we can safely and rightly choose to love God by acting in accord with our nature and by helping others to do the same…. The natural law provides an objective standard of right and wrong….. if an enacted law is contrary to the natural law, it is not even a law. It is void, an act of violence rather than law. The natural law is therefore a standard for the state as well as for its citizens.”

50 Questions, excerpts from paragraph 3: “But what is natural law?”

Natural law assumes a Creator who leads us to Reason. Legal positivism is a child of the Enlightenment, and thus assumes no Creator and demands Reason to lead us to affirm that atheistic assumption. (See Romans 1)

Professor Rice quotes Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger to make this point: “The fundamental dogma of the Enlightenment is that man must overcome the prejudices inherited from tradition; he must have the boldness to free himself from every authority in order to think on his own, using nothing but reason.”

50 Questions at p.36, quoting a 1991 address by the current Pope.

Positivism led Europe into a nightmare, and is taking America to the same dark place. Rice turns to a German legal scholar for the following quote: “Positivism, with its thesis that ‘[the] law is [the] law’ has made German jurists and lawyers defenseless against laws of arbitrary or criminal content. Positivism simply holds that a law is valid because it is successfully enforced.”

Rice quoting Henrich Rommen, Natural Law in Decisions on the Federal Supreme Court and the of the Constitutional Courts in Germany, 4 Natural Law Forum, (1959).

Germany rejected Natural Law and embraced Positivism in the years following World War I. Hitler’s dictates were the law, and the law was the law. Dissidents, be they Christian conscientious objectors, Generals who recognized strategic folly or brave pastors like Dietrich Bonhoeffer were all dealt with in very rough fashion.

At the end of the road Gernany’s new found faith did not serve her well.

Baby Doe’s death rattle, which came as the Indiana Supreme Court stood guard over that dying boy’s tortured body, was a signal to Indiana and all of America that this nation was crawling down the God-denying corridor that led our German cousins to trial at Nuremberg.

Indiana was embracing this new found faith, as signaled by a human sacrifice. The sacrifice of a Baby Doe.

Many have stood against this apostasy from the Christian faith these past four decades. One of the goals of the ArchAngel Institute is to memorialize those who so stood and to prepare all for a future that will ask for more Faith and Courage in the face of godless statism. If we do not return to moral sanity quite soon then our collective insanity will claim more careers, more families and even more lives.

The next post will present to the teaching of the Church on the taking the stand against godlessness in high places.

Postscript: The art in this post is a poster from 1930’s Germany informing the reader of the high cost of keeping the handicapped alive. Hilter, like the Indiana Supreme Court, had a final solution for those like Baby Doe.