Revolution by Judicial Fiat

/3 Comments/in , /by

While a common view is that social conservatives have “lost” the culture war, little other result was possible due to the power of the U.S. Supreme Court. This point was made clear at a presentation at the Family Research Council on May 8, which reviewed the judicial decisions issued, political moves made, and ideological positions taken in the mid-twentieth century that led to the current collapse of marriage, morality, and the family.

William Duncan , Director of the Marriage Law Foundation (with a mission of re-affirming traditional definition of marriage as union of one man and one woman), offered one of three presentations, his focusing on the Supreme Court’s decisions which preceded its decisions on homosexuality in the 1990s and 2000s.

Duncan began by noting common judicial opinion about marriage and the family before the sexual revolution, citing a 1952 decision from the California Supreme Court in which marriage was held to be “a great deal more than a contract, ‘the family is the basic unit of our society, the center of personal affections … it channels biological drives that might otherwise become destructive, it insures the care and education of children in a stable environment, it established continuity from one generation to another.’” Although it would be the 1970s before there was a radical departure from this understanding, the 1960s saw the decisive shift that made everything that came after it possible.

Language such as that of the 1952 California decision dropped out of usage at the U.S. Supreme Court, and a new understanding of marriage and the family was foreshadowed in the 1965 Griswold vs. Connecticut decision. This decision, the result of a lawsuit by Planned Parenthood, declared a Connecticut law prohibiting artificial contraception to be unconstitutional. This was found to violate a “right of privacy” which was held to exist in a marital relationship. Although speaking favorably of marriage, Duncan noted that the Griswold decision backed away from the concept of marriage as a permanent union of man and woman, and referring to it as an “association” which would “hopefully” endure. Earlier court decisions would have referred to marriage as a “union” or an “institution,” Duncan said. In addition to downgrading the understanding of marriage from a vital union which forms “the basic unit of society,” and concerned with children, the Griswold decision strengthened the right of sexual choice, saying that the choice of a married couple to use contraception is protected by the intimate nature of marriage, and is grounded in a law “older than the Bill of Rights” (and thus presumably older than the Constitution), although it was buttressed with broad statements held to point to a right to privacy drawn from the First, Fourth, Fifth, and Ninth Amendments to the Constitution. The right of privacy was thus made a constitutional doctrine, and violation of it a violation of the person, although at this point, this powerful new constitutional doctrine was kept within the marriage relationship, indeed, it was in some measure justified by being a right that pertained to marriage.

The truly radical departure from the traditional understanding of marriage and morality occurred in 1972, Duncan observed, in the Eisenstadt vs. Baird decision. This decision extended the constitutional “right of privacy,” which gave a right to use contraception, to cases of non-marital intercourse. This was done by declaring the “right of privacy” to be an individual right, not one that could be restricted to marriage. And to do that, the court deconstructed the traditional idea of marriage. The court denied that a marriage was an “independent entity, with a mind and heart of its own,” but remains the association of two individuals, a radical departure from the traditional Christian doctrine, derived from the words of Jesus, that two persons become one in the union of marriage (Matt. 19:4-6; Mk. 10:6-9). To state the obvious, giving any sort of rights or dignity or respect to non-marital intercourse, which in Christian and other traditional morality is regarded as among the gravest of sins, was a truly radical departure from the past. The decision did not directly invalidate laws against fornication or adultery, however, but the right to contraception becomes a right fundamental to personhood whether a person is married or not. Thus, Duncan claimed, the Eisenstadt decision reduced marriage and the family to “a mere lifestyle choice.” The right of sexual choice that the Eisenstadt decision introduced is “an individual right, not the right of an entity of two people who have joined together in a binding union.”

The Supreme Court’s subsequent decisions pertaining to sexual relations were shocking to a large part of the American public, but “the logic relentlessly follows from” this radical departure from the traditional understanding of marriage and morality, according to Duncan. Some of the most radical decisions of great import today quickly followed. The Roe vs. Wade and Doe vs. Bolton decisions (both issued in 1973), which established a constitutional right to abortion were based on the (now individual) right to privacy, a right to choice in child bearing the state was held to infringe upon by prohibiting abortion. In the Department of Agriculture vs. Moreno case, (also issued in 1973), the court voided a Congressional provision restricting food stamps to only those families composed of members related to one another. Nontraditional (“hippie”) families were excluded. The court did not challenge the use of families, rather than individuals, as the recipients of food stamps, but found unconstitutional the restriction of food stamps to natural families. Although use of the natural family as a criterion to receive food stamps would be very reasonable in a pre-1960s environment, both to prevent fraud and to reinforce the ideal of the natural family, the court held the law resulted from “a bare desire to harm” persons living in these non-traditional relationships. With traditional marriage and the family no longer an ideal in law due to the Eisenstadt decision, it was held that only unwarranted hostility could explain Congressional intent. This decision was crucial to decisions in recent years finding laws resisting the advance of homosexuality to be based on “impermissible animus.” Other decisions found laws requiring spousal consent to abortion to be unconstitutional, and laws which tend to inhibit access to contraceptives (including abortion) to be unconstitutional. This, Duncan said, shifted the right to abortion from a “negative right” (not to be restrained from aborting a child) to a positive right (to have access to abortion guaranteed).

The concept of marriage as nothing more than a personal expression of autonomous individuals reached an apogee in the Planned Parenthood vs. Casey decision (1992), which sustained the earlier Roe vs. Wade decision, and which infamously declared that the liberty guaranteed by the Constitution involves the right to define one’s own reality and existence. A completely unworkable principle as regards life in general, it is used by the court to protect the individual from the consequences of his or her sexual choices. Marriage becomes simply a choice of “two autonomous individuals” to engage in a joint project of “self expression and self creation.” Today’s “contraceptive mandate,” imposed by the Health and Human Services Administration as part of the implementation of the Affordable Care Act (Obamacare), which requires employers to pay for contraceptives and abortion inducing drugs regardless of their conscience convictions, follows the earlier issued court decisions aimed at protecting individuals from the consequences their sexual choices, Duncan noted.

It might be added to Duncan’s comments that this understanding of sexual choice as a “positive right” highlights the most disturbing aspect of the post-1960s marriage and morality jurisprudence, namely that is animated by a moral spirit which is not merely non-Christian, but really anti-Christian. By reasonably claiming that what violates marriage violates the person, and then dubiously claiming that the choice of contraception is obviously derived from that, the court made denial and punishment of sexual choice to be immoral and oppressive, an attack on the person. By extending this right outside of marriage as an individual right, a wholesale attack on Christian sexual morality was possible, since in Biblical morality, all sexual activity outside of marriage is shameful and due punishment. The court’s later (1990s and beyond) abortion and homosexuality decisions especially are notable for their tone of scolding the American public; the Casey decision implying that the public is lawless if it doesn’t accept court prescribed morality, the Romer, Lawrence and Windsor cases pertaining to homosexuality attacking the public for “irrational hate” and impermissibly enshrining Judeo-Christian morality in law. But holding sexual choice to be a matter above public decision making is a natural result of holding that any restriction on this choice is a personal attack, forbidden by a law “older than the Bill of Rights.”

Through these decisions, the Supreme Court has made itself “the ultimate arbiter of what marriage and family means, and what policies the states are allowed to pursue, and the federal government as well.” Duncan held that the true principle the Supreme Court has followed in its sex, marriage, and family decisions since the 1960s is the principle annunciated by Vladimir Lenin: “the success of the revolution is the supreme law.”

While Christians and social conservatives may lament national apostasy from God and His revelation, we need to remember that the result of the sexual revolution is only partly, and not decisively, the result of changing public beliefs and practices. The reason the sexual revolution prevailed is that it was imposed on the nation by the Supreme Court, and the inability of social conservatives over a number of years to decisively change the composition of the court. But however the sexual revolutionaries prevailed, and they did so undemocratically, it cannot change the truth of God’s revelation. For the non-religious or nominally religious, the success of the sexual revolution may be welcomed or regretted, but in any case accepted as final. But what Christians have always been involved in is not a mere political struggle, or even a cultural struggle. In those cases, there comes a time to accept defeat. Our non-negotiable commitment is to obey God, and so what we are engaged in is a religious struggle, which can therefore never be abandoned. The imposition of a sexual ethic hostile to the Biblical revelation gives believers the possibility of displaying the truth about marriage, sexuality, and the family as, Duncan concluded, “a pearl against a black background.” (See “Revolution by Judicial Fiat”, originally posted HERE)

Follow Joe Miller on Twitter HERE and Facebook HERE.

Anarchy, Tyranny and the 2016 Election [+video]

/4 Comments/in , /by

Like most of you, I haven’t settled on a presidential candidate. I’d like to say that each of the Republican contenders has something to recommend him. But then I’d remember four of the most terrifying words in the English language: “George Pataki” and “Lindsey Graham,” and I’d have to go splash some cold water on my face and mutter a prayer.

Nobody’s perfect. The only candidates who check off each box on my list of “non-negotiable” issues (abortion, marriage, religious liberty, and immigration control) carry other attributes that render them less appealing, such as “laughably unelectable” or “only running to land a book deal and a talk show.”

In an ideal world, we’d be permitted to take the most valuable stance from each contender, and assimilate them all into a single, flawless entity whom we could follow. Like the Borg. But neither the Borg nor Cthulhu has announced this year, so we must go with some lesser evil.

Welcome to life. The desires, delusions and legitimate idiosyncrasies of other sovereign human beings are constant barriers to our grabbing everything we want and hoarding it in our basement, or putting our neighbors into drab matching uniforms and forcing them to do patriotic gymnastics. We must learn to tolerate other people’s “absurd” beliefs and “disgusting” choices in return for their putting up with ours. We rely on good manners and common decency most of the time to blunt the clashes among us, and only when those civil habits fail us must we turn to the cops and the lawyers, and the threat of fines and prison.

Our country’s founders called such an arrangement “ordered liberty.” Think of it as the golden mean, or the sweet spot somewhere between “Somali warlords fighting over who gets to steal your farm” and “North Korean soldiers staring coldly at you through the barbed wire.”

But for Americans in 2015, neither total anarchy nor absolute tyranny are the real dangers. The real danger is rather a creative amalgam of both, in which the government doesn’t do the short list of things that it’s supposed to, but steps right up and takes over a long list of tasks it has no business trying. A nation ruled by such a hybrid system would:

Leave its borders porous to human traffickers, but keep troops in dozens of other countries, guaranteeing their security.

Use the state to grind down the basic institutions of civil society on which its own democracy was built, while pouring money into civil society initiatives in foreign autocracies to try to build up democracy there.

Try to restrict political speech aimed at influencing elections and legislation, but allow all kinds of pornography to wash over its young people.

Permit and even fund the termination of innocent children, but refuse to execute murderers and terrorists.

Meddle in the child-rearing choices of well-ordered married couples, but lavishly subsidize teenagers who got pregnant.

Admit thousands of refugees who belonged to a religion incompatible with its constitution and culture, while rejecting those with the tolerant faith of its founding.

Accept thousands of immigrants holding that intolerant faith, which teaches them the duty of religious war, then deal with the imported threat by spying on the private conversations and correspondence of all its citizens.

Help to overthrow foreign regimes that repress that hostile religion, and put into power extremist movements that wish to impose it everywhere by force.

Batter and recklessly redefine the most basic institution of society, marriage, and make the legal covenant on which it’s based completely unenforceable through no-fault divorce — while luring millions of young people, as the price of getting educated, into inescapable, sacred commitments of crippling debt to the government.

Does any of that sound familiar?

It would take a radical candidate, one who saw back to the roots (radix) of the American system, to cut through the sick tangle of sentimental bad ideas and counterproductive policies that have made our government a dangerous parasite upon the country. Just a few days ago, here at The Stream, Jason Jones called for a leader with exactly such a vision, and laid out some criteria we could use to recognize him if he steps forward.

Such a candidate won’t be “perfect.” His priorities might be confused. But if he sees clearly that progressive ideology has made our government itself America’s most intractable, ruinous problem, he will be solidly on the right track. Then it’s our job to educate him and keep him honest. We will do that through old-fashioned politics, putting pressure even on our friends when they are tempted to sell out our interests. Every one of our nation’s founders considered the growth of our own government more dangerous because more likely than an invasion by foreign powers. It is time to admit that they were right. (See “Anarchy, Tyranny and the 2016 Election”, originally posted HERE)

[Listen to this recent interview with the article’s author]

Follow Joe Miller on Twitter HERE and Facebook HERE.

Baltimore Professor: White People Need to Personally Give All Their Money to Black People…

/62 Comments/in , /by

Yes, you read that title correctly.

Unfortunately some of you were born white. Guilty. All that money you’re making? If you’re white, you didn’t earn that. Somebody else made that happen.

So here’s what you should do. Take that extra savings you have, or money you were saving for a family trip to Disney World, and give it away. Not to starving children or to the Red Cross, though. You’re supposed to find a black person, any black person, and deposit that money directly into their bank account. Solely because they are black. Does that sound racist in and of itself?

Your white privilege is showing.

Now, lest ye think we deserve a boatload of hatemail for suggesting such a thing, we direct you to the source of this utter lunacy: Lawrence Brown. Mr. Brown is an assistant professor in the Public Health Department at Morgan State University in Baltimore. This leftist activist teaches that black Americans require reparations, that America is still segregated, and black Americans continue to suffer from the historical trauma of white supremacist America.

His solution to these perceived problems? Take your white privilege money (which he defines as “unearned” if you are white), and give it to a black person. Because you’re personally responsible for slavery and need to pay. Or something. Seriously. See below.

5) My new criteria for white allies is gonna be: “How much are you using your whiteness to LITERALLY eliminate the racial wealth gap?”

— Lawrence Brown (@BmoreDoc) June 1, 2015

Again, for someone who claims to fight against racism, I don’t think I’ve quite seen anyone speak in such sweeping generalities. What say you? When you head to the bank this evening, will you be making a withdrawal of your unearned money to deposit in a black person’s account… because, privilege? (See “Baltimore Professor: White People Need to Personally Give All Their Money to Black People…”, originally posted HERE)

Follow Joe Miller on Twitter HERE and Facebook HERE.

Building the Resistance to Same-Sex Marriage: The Fourteenth Amendment Does Not Mandate Same-Sex Marriage

/4 Comments/in , /by

Within the month, the nation will receive the opinion of the U.S. Supreme Court as to whether the U.S. Constitution requires all of the states to jettison their domestic laws and sanction same-sex marriage. Numerous federal judges have so ruled, and most states have simply yielded to those federal court decisions. In a few cases, beginning with Vermont and Massachusetts, state courts ruled for same sex marriage, and state officials have accepted passively those decisions as well.

Generally, courts have ruled for same-sex marriage using either the “due process clause” or the “equal protection clause” of the Fourteenth Amendment, or both. That raises a simple question: is it really possible that when the Fourteenth Amendment was ratified in 1868 the framers intended that it sanction same-sex marriage? Of course not. The U.S. Constitution says nothing about same-sex marriage. Then, how could the Constitution be manipulated to support a decision in favor of same-sex marriage? Well it has not been easy. The Constitutional case for same-sex marriage is pathetically weak — unless you adopt the notion of an “evolving” Constitution — which is, of course, the polar opposite of the notion of our “written” Constitution.

There are actually four cases, all from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit, which have been consolidated for decision in the U.S. Supreme Court — Obergefell, DeBoer, Tanco, and Bourke. If you would like to know more about how this case developed, a great deal of information, and links to all documents, is available on SCOTUSblog. The amicus curiae brief which we filed in the Sixth Circuit in support of traditional marriage is available, as is the amicus curiae brief which we filed in the U.S. Supreme Court.

The opinion by Judge Sutton of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit — upholding traditional marriage against five challenges in four states — begins with a remarkable observation that should have resolved the case in that once sentence, but did not. Judge Sutton points out that “[n]obody in this case … argues that the people who adopted the Fourteenth Amendment understood it to require the States to change the definition of marriage.” DeBoer v. Snyder, 772 F.3d 388, 403 (6th Cir. 2014) (emphasis added).

Laymen logically deduce that if the Fourteenth Amendment as written had nothing to do with same-sex marriage, that’s the end of the matter. After all, Justice Douglas succinctly described the Amendment in his autobiography: “The Fourteenth Amendment was passed to give blacks first-class citizenship.” William O. Douglas, The Court Years, p. 154 (Random House: 1980). But for those lawyers who want unelected judges to set the public policy of our nation, it simply doesn’t matter what the Framers intended. And neither does it matter to many judges who are all too willing to give effect to their own political views. Discovering the “authorial intent” of the Framers is only a small part of their concern — a step they sometimes skip over entirely.

Recently, Justice Alito observed that “[s]ame-sex marriage presents a highly emotional … question … but not a difficult question of constitutional law.” United States v. Windsor, 570 U.S. ___, 133 S.Ct. 2675, 2714 (2013) (Alito, J., dissenting):

The Constitution does not guarantee the right to enter into a same-sex marriage. Indeed, no provision of the Constitution speaks to the issue. It is beyond dispute that the right to same-sex marriage is not deeply rooted in this Nation’s history and tradition. [Id. at 2714-15.]

Therefore, Justice Alito explained that challengers to traditional marriage:

seek … not the protection of a deeply rooted right but the recognition of a very new right, and they seek this innovation not from a legislative body elected by the people, but from unelected judges. [Id. at 2715.]

If we are now considering a new right, one could legitimately ask when and where did this new right come from. Indeed, during oral argument in the case of Hollingsworth v. Perry, Justice Scalia asked this very question to same-sex marriage champion lawyer Ted Olson:

Justice Scalia: “When did it become unconstitutional to prohibit gays from marrying?… Was it always unconstitutional?”

Ted Olson: “It was [un]constitutional when we — as a culture determined that sexual orientation is a characteristic of individuals that they cannot control…”

Justice Scalia: “I see. When did that happen?…”

Ted Olson: “There’s no specific date in time. This is an evolutionary cycle.”

Of course, a written constitution that is subject to evolutionary change is no longer a written constitution. A constitution that is always evolving provides no fixed guarantees for the rights of the people. If the “Due Process Clause” of the Fourteenth Amendment can morph into a mandate for homosexual marriage, then the “right to keep and bear arms” can become a right to call the police when attacked. Once we abandon the author’s meaning of a text, we are left treating the U.S. Constitution as poetry, asking “what does the Constitution mean to me?”

Unable to ground their challenge in the Fourteenth Amendment as written, the advocates of same-sex marriage have used an assemblage of fabrications, purportedly derived from this Court’s precedents, but without any support in fact or law.

One of the briefs in the Supreme Court asserted that the High Court has already established that “[t]he right to marry the person of one’s choice is a fundamental freedom.” The claim is patently false.

To the contrary, the Supreme Court has always assumed that marriage law was originally governed by the common law which required consummation between one male and one female. See Maynard v. Hill, 125 U.S. 190, 213 (1888). See also 1 William Blackstone, Commentaries on the Laws of England, 424 (Univ. Of Chi. Facsimile ed.: 1765).

The Court in Maynard explained: “though formed by contract … the relation of husband and wife, deriv[ed] both its rights and duties from a source higher than any contract of which the parties are capable, and, as to these, uncontrollable by any contract which they can make.” And “[w]hen formed,” the Court continued, the relation between husband and wife was “no more a contract than ‘fatherhood’ or ‘sonship’ is a contract.” Instead, marriage “partakes more of the character of an institution regulated and controlled by public authority, upon principles of public policy, for the benefit of the community.” Thus, it is just pretense to claim that the Supreme Court previously established the right “to marry the person of one’s choice.”

Any such claim is a total fabrication designed to hide the fact that at the time the nation was founded not only was same-sex marriage not legally sanctioned, but sexual relations between men constituted, as Sir William Blackstone declared, “the infamous crime against nature[,] a disgrace to human nature,” and punishable by death. 4 Blackstone’s Commentaries at 215-16.

In addition to this condemnation of “unnatural” sexual coupling, the English common law of marriage exclusively adopted the Biblical matrimonial order. First, the common law limited the relationship to one between “husband and wife,” that is, “baron and feme.” I Blackstone’s Commentaries at 421. And second, the common law made “voidable” any union between a man and a woman under the “canonical disabilities” of “consanguinity, or relation by blood; and affinity, or relation by marriage.” Id. at 422. Thus, it is wildly false for Petitioners to presume, as they have, that there is a well-established right to marry any person of one’s choice.

The same-sex marriage proponents now ask the Supreme Court to take the nation one step further away from our written constitution, by fundamentally changing the meaning of its text based on the will of a bare majority of five lawyers serving on this Court, rather than complying with the exclusive process for amending the Constitution, as set out in its Article V. Freed from textual constraint, Professor Lino Graglia has observed that:

[o]ver the past half-century the justices have chosen to make themselves the final lawmakers on most basic issues of domestic social policy in American society. These include issues literally of life and death … and issues of public morality…. In essence, the Court now performs in the American system of government a role similar to that performed by the Grand Council of Ayatollahs in the Iranian system…. [L. Graglia, “Constitutional Law Without the Constitution: The Supreme Court’s Remaking of America,” in “A Country I Do Not Recognize” (R. Bork ed., Hoover Press 2005).]

Nearly two decades ago, Justice Scalia warned:

[t]his Court has no business imposing upon all Americans the resolution favored by the elite class from which the Members of this institution are selected, pronouncing that “animosity” toward homosexuality … is evil. [Romer v. Evans, 517 U.S. 620, 636 (1996) (Scalia, J., dissenting).]

And, exactly as Justice Scalia predicted in Romer, the American people have seen a flurry of judicial opinions with “no foundation in American constitutional law” overturning laws which were “designed to prevent piecemeal deterioration of the sexual morality” desired by the People. These court opinions together constitute what he described as “acts, not of judicial judgment, but of political will.” Id. at 653.

As such, they are not just “bad law,” but as Blackstone stated, they are “not law” at all.

________________________________________________

Herbert W. Titus taught Constitutional Law for 26 years, and concluded his academic career as the Founding Dean of Regent Law School. William J. Olson served in three positions in the Reagan Administration. Together they have filed over 80 briefs in the U.S. Supreme Court, and dozens more in lower courts, addressing important public policy issues. They now practice law together at William J. Olson, P.C. They can be reached at [email protected] or twitter.com/Olsonlaw.

This article is part of a series on “Building Resistance to Same-Sex Marriage.” Should you want to help support this important work, contributions may be made to the U.S. Justice Foundation.

Permission is freely granted to publish, copy, reproduce, distribute, or excerpt from this article for any purpose.

Follow Joe Miller on Twitter HERE and Facebook HERE.

US Politics Preclude Sane War-Fighting [+video]

/4 Comments/in , /by

The Limited-war Premise

With the advent of nuclear weapons, many civilian think-tank warfare theorists and liberal politicians believed that direct superpower confrontation had become too dangerous to contemplate. Thus was born “limited-war” in the national lexicon of strategic thinking when the Korean War broke out in 1950, and President Truman limited the war objectives and means in order to avoid nuclear confrontation with the Soviet Union. The Korean War began the change in the American concept of war away from total war, or what was called at the time “general war,” to a form of war that was more “civilized” and “less dangerous” in the minds of politicians and social scientists.

The problem of limited-war from an American national interest standpoint was that it assumed all U.S. enemies would likewise be restrained in objectives and means. This fanciful social science assumption rested on the unproven belief that no foreign national leader in his right mind would dare oppose America, following its World War II victory, once U.S. willingness to fight was made clear.

However, the advocates of limited-war never came to grips with what would happen if an enemy refused to “play” by limited-war “rules.” In other words, how and when would limited-war be concluded when the enemy was pursuing uncompromising total war objectives, but with limited means (that is, means short of triggering nuclear attack), and the U.S. was in contrast erroneously waging a war for negotiable, limited objectives with limited means? This resulting mismatch of U.S. limited-war objectives versus enemy total war objectives spawned the modern version of asymmetrical insurgent warfare, which has bedeviled the U.S. since mid 20th century when the U.S. limited-war strategic doctrine was adopted.

In 1961 President Kennedy and his civilian social-science theorists rewrote the U.S. rules of war, conceiving and implementing a formal limited-war doctrine they dubbed “Flexible Response” to counter Soviet client-proxy warfare. It was at this point that we completely departed from the strategic thinking that had won World War II.

The change in national strategic mindset was profound. The fundamental change in the U.S. approach to warfare now had at its essence the new approach that America would answer enemy aggression against its interests with just a limited force response that was “proportional” to the threat, thus inculcating the institutional idea in the U.S. national security infrastructure that American military responses should only be gradually escalated according to the perceived immediate seriousness of the crisis. Crisis management replaced strategic thinking in the top levels of the U.S. Government.

The operative concept was that an enemy would “receive the message” that the U.S. intended to act militarily to defend its interests, and therefore, would be deterred from escalating the crisis further. Then, after it was clear to the enemy that his war objectives could not be attained, negotiations would ensue that would end the crisis. “Message sending” to the enemy through gradual escalation became an integral part of U.S. national security thinking and strategy. So, U.S. limited-war strategic doctrine is not geared to defeat the enemy, only to get the enemy to negotiate or temporarily withdraw from the battlefield. Of course, by not eliminating the enemy’s aggressor forces, the conflict is just put on hold until the enemy deems it advantageous to reinitiate aggression against U.S. interests, as Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan have conclusively demonstrated.

What it really suggests is a mind-set that believed the whole of mankind operated under the same set of values, which American politicians have. In other words, according to the mindset of American politicians, there is nothing really worth fighting for until the end. So, in the view of U.S. political policy-makers and academic social science advisors, total dedication to nationalist goals (North Vietnamese) or religious zeal (Muslims) are subject to compromise. After all, if that was the view of the American political leadership, they concluded, it must be the view of our enemies.

The first principle of warfare, which is that in order to prevail in armed conflict overwhelming kinetic force must be employed as quickly as possible to prevent increases in enemy power, was thus completely excluded from the U.S. warfare repertoire. That decisive force exclusion was a major fatal fallacy in limited-war strategic doctrine because it assumes the American people would support an open-ended war where the termination is completely determined by the enemy’s decision to discontinue hostilities.

Therefore, limited-war strategic doctrine totally cedes initiative and control of the war to the enemy.

The eventual fall of Saigon in 1975 was due in part to dragging the war out as opposed to destroying the enemy capability to continue the war that was located in North Vietnam and not in the South Vietnamese jungle where the U.S. mistakenly fought its limited-war.

As the commander of all U.S. forces in the Pacific Theater, Admiral U.S. Grant Sharp, noted in his memoire, Strategy for Defeat: Vietnam in Retrospect:

Once the decision was made to participate in this war and engage Americans in the military conflict, I believe we should have taken the steps necessary to end the war successfully in the shortest possible time. It was folly to commit Americans to combat and then force them to fight without utilizing the means we so richly possessed to win an early victory. It is my firm belief, however, that we did exactly that by not using our air and naval power to its full effectiveness . . . . . We could have brought the Vietnam War to a successful conclusion in short order, early in the game, once the decision had been made by the civilian leadership to engage with US forces. All we needed to do was assemble the necessary force and then use it the way it was designed to be used . . . By 1966 we had the full measure of air power to do the job, and our ground forces were strong enough that in combination with such air power properly applied we could have forced Hanoi to give up its efforts to take over South Vietnam. But authority to use our air power to this end was simply not forthcoming.

How Wars Are Successfully Concluded

As Prussian General Carl von Clausewitz in his masterwork, On War, makes clear, war reduced to the most fundamental equation is:

WAR = MOTIVATION (psychic forces) + CAPABILITY (physical forces).

Historical war MOTIVATIONs have been religious, politico-nationalist, geo-strategic, economic, and revanchist, while CAPABILITY is composed of manpower, firepower, and re-supplying that manpower and firepower, which is logistics. Remove one or both of these MOTIVATION and CAPABILITY factors in war, and the war is over in short order. It should be noted that in war, a combatant must not only attempt to destroy the opponent’s MOTIVATION and CAPABILITY; it is also imperative to safeguard one’s own MOTIVATION and CAPABILITY. Unfortunately the U.S. has consistently failed to protect MOTIVATION on its side, that is, public support for the war.

Again, Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan have conclusively demonstrated this failure and the sad results.

Obviously preparing to destroy an enemy’s MOTIVATION and/or CAPABILITY is dependent on the enemy’s existential interests and the character of his fighting forces. In considering the various international conflict MOTIVATIONs, religious and politico-ideological rationales have historically produced more vicious and sustained combat than those wars that have been conducted for secular justifications unrelated to belief systems, such as for geo-strategic and/or economic gains. Material goals are more readily forsaken than are belief goals. This very important motivational differentiation has been over-looked by our political class increasingly in every conflict since the end of World War II. American politicians and the public tend to think of war in terms of “one size fits all.”

As a result Americans only see war through a U.S. cultural prism, while strategic objectives of U.S. Islamic enemies, like the jihadist, non-negotiable propagation of the Islamic religion and Islamic Sharia religious law, are consistently ignored or downplayed. U.S. policy-makers make the irrational assumption based on their secular beliefs that, because we will limit our warfare objectives and efforts, so will those we are fighting.

Another basic aspect of war where American government policy-makers, who set the politico-military parameters of U.S. wars, have been totally misguided is in the timing of termination of hostilities. The appropriate point to end combat is when the enemy knows he is defeated because he has lost the will and means to fight. But in 2003 U.S. Government policy-makers stopped the fighting in Operation Iraqi Freedom and began repairing battle damage to Iraqi civilian infrastructure while, undaunted, the enemy was in fact transitioning from conventional to unconventional insurgent warfare.

These U.S. policy-makers misinterpreted capturing the enemy capital, Baghdad, and vanquishing enemy main force formations of Republican Guards as the equivalent of capturing Berlin and Tokyo and the total decimations of German and Japanese militaries and war industries. When U.S. and allied forces entered those enemy capitals in 1945, there was no doubt in German and Japanese minds that they had been completely defeated. Their will to fight and their means to fight were gone. U.S. governmental policy of unconditional surrender in a ‘total war’ ensured that victory was achieved with the destruction of enemy MOTIVATION-psychic forces and CAPABILITY-physical forces. While enemy CAPABILITY was severely damaged in Iraq in 2003, enemy MOTIVATION was as strong as ever.

Why U.S. Politics Preclude Sane War-Fighting

For whatever reason or reasons, be they cowardice, arrogant hubris, or just old-fashioned stupidity, U.S. political policy-makers since World War II have consistently not focused U.S. war efforts against what Clausewitz termed the enemy’s “centers of gravity.” These centers of gravity are the sources of strength; the destruction of which yield crippling effects on the enemy’s war-making MOTIVATION and/or CAPABILITY.

Instead, as noted above, limited and gradual force application has been used for “message sending” to induce the enemy to negotiate by blunting the enemy’s aggression and fighting him to a stalemate. This approach to warfare is the essence of U.S. limited-war strategic doctrine. From the national politicians’ point of view, such restraint in warfare is the intellectually enlightened and the prudent way of war. And also from the politicians’ perspective, it permits a cautious, incremental approach that is meant to avoid international political dangers, such as provoking decisive hostile reactions from unexpected quarters, as when the Chinese Communists unexpectedly entered the Korean War (although alert, intelligent national leadership would have foreseen it).

While judging the content of a politician’s heart and the intent behind his motivations are solely the province of the deity, it is possible to accurately assess the results of a politician’s policies and decisions and classify them. And when it comes to setting war objectives, strategy, and rules of engagement policy, the U.S. political leadership class has failed miserably since World War II to today in Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan, and in the on-going worldwide world war against Islamic jihad. In each of these wars the U.S. political leaders have not only misjudged the enemies’ MOTIVATION and CAPABILITY, they also misjudged America’s MOTIVATION and CAPABILITY. Sun Tzu forewarned of such ignorance:

If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles. If you know yourself but not the enemy, for every victory gained you will also suffer a defeat. If you know neither the enemy nor yourself, you will succumb in every battle. – Sun Tzu, The Art of War

Due to America’s superior military technology and combat training, U.S. forces have not lost battles, but have lost or are losing the wars instead through U.S. political malfeasance. The final results of the Iraq, Afghanistan, and the on-going worldwide world war against Islamic jihad are not in yet, but the outlook is not good.

In every case the problem has been the same, the U.S. politicians have opted for limited-war strategic doctrine instead of setting the objective of attacking and eliminating the enemies’ centers of gravity, which generate the enemies’ MOTIVATION and CAPABILITY. Although the U.S. military leadership receives war objectives, strategy, and rules of engagement policy from the politicians, they also share blame for the failures because they have institutionalized limited-war strategic doctrine to the point that, even when retired officers are disagreeing with politicians in the public media, they pose their disagreements within the limited-war strategic doctrine framework. In other words, the military establishment has so completely embraced limited-war strategic doctrine that there are no professional military common-sense voices advocating that the U.S. take the offensive and destroy the actual sources of enemy aggression.

There is also a related ancillary problem. Unfortunately, many taxpayers and most politicians are totally illiterate when it comes to the subject of warfare. Judging from the dismal results in the last thirteen years, a similar conclusion might to drawn concerning the U.S. officer corps. In U.S. academia, the study of warfare takes a distant second place behind black and women’s studies, while Reserve Officer Training Courses are shunned by universities. Consequently, only a tiny fraction of the American electorate even know enough to question politicians on the wisdom of limited-war strategic doctrine, or understand its inherent strategic shortcomings.

Surveying American political correctness culture, it is only logical to conclude that the reason why timidity rules U.S. war-fighting is because timidity rules the American political correctness culture. Both of the U.S. national political parties are led by faint-of-heart individuals, lacking character, that are more concerned with their personal fortunes than the nation’s. These characterless political leaders are the genesis of America’s inept war-fighting. And as the saying goes: A democracy gets the leaders it deserves.

However, more to the point, the both the Bush and Obama administrations have remained steadfast in their resolve not to identify the actual enemy to the American people. We are only told that we are fighting non-descript terrorism and terrorists.

Then at rare times, we are told they are radical Islamists who have somehow hijacked the “noble religion of peace.” But had presidents Bush and Obama made clear that our enemy is every nation, every regime, every network, every conspiracy, and every individual who preaches, teaches and advocates Islamic Sharia law, which is a politico-religious ideology bent on world domination, the ability to communicate war goals, progress, and strategy would become infinitely more effective, as would focusing the U.S. war effort. Instead, these presidents and their national security teams insist we are fighting just some kind of violent, non-ideological tactic without faces other than a limited and finite number of fanatical Al Qaeda and Islamic State terrorists. This official governmental dissimulation leads people to wonder why the entire Islamic world actually seems to be on fire and at war with Western Civilization? The American people realize they are being continually lied to, but no political clarifying voice has yet arisen to identify Islamic Sharia as the enemy, regardless whether the Sharia is Sunni or Shia.

Conclusion

U.S. politics, which dictate the nation’s war objectives, strategy, and rules of engagement policy, are dominated by timid political correctness. So, regardless whether the American public wants to attribute U.S. politicians’ behavior to cowardice, arrogant hubris, or just old-fashioned stupidity, American warfare will remain ineffective as long as timid political correctness and self-serving, characterless politicians rule Washington, D.C. Consequently, sanity in U.S. war-fighting is not in America’s immediate future. (See “US Politics Preclude Sane War-Fighting”, originally posted HERE)

Follow Joe Miller on Twitter HERE and Facebook HERE.

“Bombshell Testimony”: The IRS Used This to Hide Information From Congress

/24 Comments/in , /by

New testimony reveals that the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) used “hundreds of attorneys” to hide critical information from Congress’s investigation of the IRS targeting of conservatives.

According to new congressional bombshell testimony today, the IRS set up a previously unknown “special project team” comprised of “hundreds of attorneys,” including the IRS Chief Counsel (one of only two politically appointed positions at the IRS).

The “special project” this team was given? Concealing information from Congress.

The IRS’s director of privacy, governmental liaison, and disclosure division, Mary Howard, testified that soon after the IRS targeting scandal was revealed, the IRS “amassed hundreds of attorneys to go through the documents [requested by Congress] and redact them” . . .

In other words, as soon as the IRS targeting scandal broke, the IRS set up a special team of hundreds of attorneys, including President Obama’s political head of the Chief Counsel’s office, to keep requests for publicly available information away from the person who would normally review those documents and turn them over to Congress and the public. That “special” team then overly redacted, delayed, and determined which documents it wanted Congress to see. (Read more from “The IRS Used This to Hide Information From Congress” HERE)

Follow Joe Miller on Twitter HERE and Facebook HERE.

What Was Stolen?: Massive Cybersecurity Breach Raises Concerns About What Hackers Stole [+video]

/0 Comments/in , /by

A massive hack of government personnel files is being treated as the work of foreign spies who could possibly use the information to sneak their way into more-secure computers and plunder U.S. secrets.

Dan Payne, a senior counterintelligence official for the Director of National Intelligence, told federal employees Friday to change their passwords, put fraud alerts on their credit reports and watch for attempts by foreign intelligence services to exploit them.

“Some of you may think that you are not of interest because you don’t have access to classified information,” he said. “You are mistaken.”

Federal officials said Friday the cyberattack appeared to have emanated in China, but did not point fingers directly at the Chinese government. The Chinese responded saying any accusation would be “irresponsible and unscientific.”

“We know that the attack occurred from somewhere in China, but we don’t know whether it was an individual or a group or a nation-state attack,” said Rep. Jim Langevin, a Rhode Island Democrat and leading voice in Congress on cybersecurity. He added, though that it had “all the hallmarks of a nation-state attack.” (Read more from “What Was Stolen?: Massive Cybersecurity Breach Raises Concerns About What Hackers Stole” HERE)

Follow Joe Miller on Twitter HERE and Facebook HERE.

The Left Is Schizoid on Sexuality‏

/0 Comments/in , /by

The left is hopelessly schizoid on the issue of sexuality. Those on the left celebrate changes in gender but want to criminalize those who help others make changes in sexual orientation.

This is illustrated by two stories currently in the news. One is, of course, the celebrated gender “change” in Bruce Jenner, who now claims to be a woman even though he is still a man in every single solitary cell of his body, and will be until the day he dies.

He has been lionized by the media, celebrated as a hero (or, heroine, as the case may be) and granted an award by ESPN for courage. He has sold a record number of magazines as the cover boy on Vanity Fair . . .

There is now a concerted effort underway to squash all conversion therapy everywhere in the United States. Three states, Oregon, California, and New Jersey, along with Washington D.C., have banned such therapy for minors, and a bill has been introduced in Congress that will ban reparative therapy for anybody of any age everywhere.

The American Psychological Association wrote in 2009, “Enduring change to an individual’s sexual orientation is uncommon.” Well, “uncommon” is hardly the same as “impossible.” The APA’s own report on sexual orientation change says that “for some, sexual-orientation identity is fluid or has an indefinite outcome.” If it’s “fluid,” then logic dictates that change can take place from gay to straight as well as from straight to gay. (Read more from “The Left Is Schizoid on Sexuality‏” HERE)

Follow Joe Miller on Twitter HERE and Facebook HERE.

Why Is Obama Keeping Obamatrade’s New Global Governance Secret?

/1 Comment/in , /by

Photo Credit: Breitbart Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-AL), the chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee’s subcommittee on Immigration and the National Interest, has written a scathing new letter to President Barack Obama pressuring him to explain why Obamatrade has been so secretive.

“On May 6th of this year, I sent you a letter (enclosed) regarding your request for Congress to grant you fast-track executive authority,” Session wrote to Obama on Friday in a letter provided exclusively to Breitbart News ahead of its public release. “Under fast-track, Congress transfers its authority to the executive and agrees to give up several of its most basic powers.

“These concessions include: the power to write legislation, the power to amend legislation, the power to fully consider legislation on the floor, the power to keep debate open until Senate cloture is invoked, and the constitutional requirement that treaties receive a two-thirds vote.

“The latter is especially important since, having been to the closed room to review the secret text of the Trans-Pacific Partnership, it is clear it more closely resembles a treaty than a trade deal” . . .

The letter hones in on the new global governance, as Sessions calls it, that would be created by the Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP)—which would almost certainly be approved by Congress should the House of Representatives vote in favor of Trade Promotion Authority (TPA) to fast track TPP and other trade deals. TPA, which passed the Senate a couple weeks ago, would ensure—barring some unforeseen development—the congressional approval of TPP, and collectively the two have become known as Obamatrade. (Read more from “Why Is Obama Keeping Obamatrade’s New Global Governance Secret?” HERE)

Follow Joe Miller on Twitter HERE and Facebook HERE.

Apple CEO Tim Cook Makes Stand on Data Privacy and the Country’s ‘Founding Principles’

/0 Comments/in , /by

In a blistering speech given to the Washington, D.C.-based Electronic Privacy Information Center on Tuesday, Apple CEO Tim Cook said that many successful Silicon Valley companies have “built their businesses by lulling their customers into complacency about their personal information.”

“They’re gobbling up everything they can learn about you and trying to monetize it. We think that’s wrong,” he said. “And it’s not the kind of company that Apple wants to be. So we don’t want your data” . . .

He apparently isn’t even a fan of companies leaving a “backdoor” open for law enforcement agencies to utilize because it makes the data inherently less secure. He broke it down like this:

“If you put a key under a mat just for the cops, a burglar can find it, too,” said Cook. ”Criminals are using every technology tool at their disposal to hack into people’s accounts. If they know there is a key hidden somewhere, they won’t stop until they find it” . . .

Further, such practices can have a “chilling effect on our first amendment rights, and undermine our county’s founding principles,” the Apple boss added. (Read more from “Apple CEO Tim Cook Makes It Clear Where He Stands on Data Privacy and the Country’s ‘Founding Principles'” HERE)

Follow Joe Miller on Twitter HERE and Facebook HERE.