This op-ed was written by Joe Fockler, District Captain for Convention of States Colorado.
In anticipation of the Church’s celebration of Christ’s death and resurrection, there is a biblical story that the Christian faithful are invited to read and contemplate this season.
That story is the story of Moses and the deliverance of the children of Israel from their bondage in Egypt. The life of Moses foreshadows the life of Christ, who secured for all mankind a far greater deliverance.
Moses was a Hebrew prophet, teacher, and leader who is generally represented by historians and biblical scholars to have lived in the 13th century BCE (before the Common Era). Born of a priestly family and raised by a Pharaoh’s daughter (due to some strange circumstances), Moses compiled a not-too-shabby resume over his lifetime.
He single-handedly confronted an oppressive Egyptian government. He successfully delivered the people of Israel from slavery. He had a personal/working relationship with Yahweh the God of Israel.
He delivered the Ten Commandments as Israel’s governing Constitution, and he was the chief organizer of that new nation’s religious and civil traditions.
Not surprisingly the singular figure of Moses has become a universal symbol of deliverance from any and all evil forces in the world, both personal and corporate, that would seek to deny to any individual or group of people the unalienable rights of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness to which all men are endowed by their Creator.
Sound familiar?
One of the best known and beloved political figures in the 20th century is Martin Luther King, Jr. We all know King as the remarkable force behind the civil rights movement that delivered an end to racial segregation in the United States. King motivated his generation to fight against racial injustice and to seek the liberty that our country and our country’s Constitution had promised them.
King was a great preacher and orator and found a dynamic analogy for his message in the biblical story of the Exodus. Using that story King brought unity in his struggle for civil rights, gave all of us who identified with his message the confidence to personally engage in the fight against racial injustice, and helped us all to understand that this fight would not be easy.
Our generation faces a different kind of threat to our liberties. A big and ever-expanding federal government has reduced the states to mere regional districts. We now have centralized government in the District of Columbia, Supreme Court justices who routinely rewrite the Constitution rather than interpret the Constitution as given, and an executive branch that changes our national direction every eight years depending on the agenda of the political party that is in power.
Thomas Jefferson wrote a letter to Abigail Adams expressing his anger over violations of the Constitution that he was witnessing in his own time. It speaks to our own time as well.
“The Constitution…meant that its coordinate branches should be checks on each other. But the opinion (the reference here is to Marbury v. Madison) which gives to the judges the right to decide what laws are constitutional and what not, not only for themselves in their own sphere of action but for the Legislature and Executive also in their spheres, would make the Judiciary a despotic branch.” -Letter to Abigail Adams, September 11, 1804
Today the federal government has the power to regulate endless forms of private economic activity (1942 Wickard v. Filburn). It has banned prayer, nativity scenes, and crosses, among other forms of religious expression, in the public square in states and localities across the nation (1947 Everson v. Board of Education.) The more dominant and intrusive the government becomes in our lives, the less freedom we have to live true to the values and principles of liberty.
The Pharaohs of Moses’s day demanded that the Israelites make more brick with less straw and so made their life in Egypt more burdensome by the day. The framers of our Constitution provided us with a much better way to live…if we would keep it.
The Constitution that protects our individual liberties is but a generation away from being dissolved by the big government ideology that has established itself in both our political parties.
It’s a big problem that is difficult to fight in any traditional sense of the word. The American people, however, do have a solution. In fact, we have a solution as big as the problem.
Article V of the Constitution delivers to We the People with a way to address what Congress is unwilling to and to begin to restore our Constitution to its original intent.
