What If We Listened to Our Fathers?

Automated transcript of the sermon audio, generated with OpenAI Whisper (small.en). It has not been checked against the recording and may contain errors, especially in names and Scripture references.

Hey, welcome to session two. We knew going into this that there would actually be a significant amount of overlap between Jim’s talk and mine. And Jim has significantly cut into my time. I’m completely OK with that. I know, because I just saw his keynote presentation, that he stopped about 2 thirds of the way through. So I know that he also had a lot of things that he left unsaid. And so hopefully, Jim, I’ll be able to fill in a few of those gaps and things that you wanted to get to. while I will also be drilling down a little bit deeper on a couple of the things that he said. And I have entitled, what if we listened to our fathers write to privacy on the 14th amendment?

And of course, Jim talked a good deal about the 14th amendment. And I’m going to drill down a little bit closer even still. And in many ways, without question, our nation is remarkable. And aside from the significant role of the grace of God, that it is owing to our founding fathers. It’s likely that in some ways, our fathers would be both excited and proud that what they established is still flourishing today, nearly two and a half centuries after its inception. But in other ways, I do think that they would be saddened and surprised to see where we are.

I mean, how could our founding fathers have anticipated regrettable yoking together of both an animosity for Christianity and the God of the Bible with governmental overreach. It’s like vinegar and baking soda. Sure, our founding fathers had problems too. They were men after all. Many of the founding fathers recognized the evils of slavery while owning multiple slaves themselves. So they’d probably be glad that we have outlawed slavery, for instance, many of the Federalists, those who were in favor of a strong central government who championed that strong central government would be delighted today to see the sort of power that is wielded by the legislative, executive, and judicial branches from their seats in Washington. Many of the anti-Federalists who fought hard for the Bill of Rights and the autonomy of the states would probably be crushed to know that we went to war with ourselves over this matter, killing some 600,000 Americans along the way, and ended, as it were, in the sort of union that they feared would become a reality. It has.

To be sure, the Civil War was a tremendous tragedy. But for every American killed in the Civil War, there had been 100 unborn Americans legally murdered in the womb since the legalization of abortion by fiat from our Supreme Court in 1973. And no matter how progressive, it’s hard to imagine any of our founding fathers seeing this as anything but the chastising hand of Almighty God. Our fathers wanted this country to flourish, and this is not possible where we cast off common sense nor plain wisdom. wisdom as we find in the Bible and such wisdom as our founding fathers learned from their fathers and from their pastors, and they took for granted.

I’m not arguing that these men were all faithful Christians, to be sure they were not, but certain of their assumptions and their intellectual starting points were more biblical than ours. They took for granted things that our culture denies. They could also disagree with one another with civility. If you affirmed the Bible in their day, you weren’t dismissed as some kind of Neanderthal. Really the ability to disagree, the ability to compromise and make our country better is something that we have forgotten largely. Both sides screech their own opinions while being largely ignorant of the other. All in a context where we take for granted that it is our right to do that screeching And that right has been purchased at a high cost and established in the First Amendment.

I would ask us to speak and to listen, to be sure, but I would also have us to be informed. If as a citizen you know what the Constitution says, which is supposed to be the Supreme Law of the Land after all, you are able to discern where we have gone wrong. You’ll also be able to identify when you are being asked as a citizen to conform to unconstitutional laws and demands. But here we are, and we didn’t get here overnight. So today, we’re going to remind ourselves exactly how we got where we are today, though I suppose some of you will have heard this before. For some, really, I’m hoping that for all this serves as a sort of refresher or review.

Although in likelihood, some of you will have never heard some of these things before. Then I’d like to make an appeal as to where we go from here. And if you’re not a fan of history, you have my apologies, but it is necessary to help us to connect some of these dots. So please bear with me. The Constitution, as you’re probably aware, is vague in places. And sometimes that is on purpose, as our fathers wanted us to be able to apply wisdom that was appropriate for our generation when trying to interpret it. In this sense, though it is not an inspired text, the Constitution is kind of like the Bible. Although the Bible does not expressly speak to what exactly to do in every context, it does give us insight as to what attitudes and what principles are appropriate for every context.

Likewise, though the Constitution does not expressly say something about abortion, for instance, it does say a lot about protecting citizens and ensuring the flourishing of a people. And given the context in which it was written, it’s silly for us to suppose that any of the drafters didn’t think that those rights apply to unborn Americans as well, even if the language refers to all persons born or naturalized in the United States. But I’ll return to that in a moment. There always have been and there remain two big categories, two big camps when it comes to interpretation of the Constitution. Contextualist and strict constructionists.

Contextualists view the Constitution as a living document. That is, it can itself develop and grow with the people and it must be understood and apply with a particular cultural context of the interpreters. A contextualist will look, for instance, at the 14th Amendment and see an implied principle and apply that as broadly as is necessary for his context despite what the text says. I’m not trying to be glib. This requires interpretation, which is fine, but that interpretation is predictably fluid because it changes according to culture. So again, a contextualist views the Constitution as a living document. A strict constructionist views the Constitution as a dead document.

In fact, the late Justice Antonin Scalia once used this language in a correspondence. I’ll show the quotation in a little while, but he does say, the Constitution that I interpret is a dead document. If the text is dead, it is unchanging and objective. The only interpretation that we must do is to figure out what the framers of the Constitution actually meant. And that does take some interpretation from time to time. Just like we try to interpret the Bible. And our undertaking to interpret the Bible is to try to find out what God meant when He inspired this text. And so you apply different filters to try to make that case or to try to understand that.

in its context historically and all the rest. So of course, those writers of the Constitution were themselves writing in a context too, and their decisions were principled, but ours is the task of identifying what they meant and then applying it to our context or changing the Constitution. So if we understand what it says and we don’t like it, then as a people, we have the ability, it’s hard, but we have the ability to change it. that it’s happened. Now, I think a lot of how we got where we are today can be attributed to our interpretation of the Constitution. Usurpation of authority, governmental overreach, and abdication on the part of all three branches of government have become common in the last 200 years.

The legislative and the executive branches of our government can be charged with overreach for so they have done. And time won’t allow us to list the ways, but it is pretty long, the different ways where the executive branch and the legislative branch have gone too far. But they, however, have not been alone in their overreach. And they haven’t been silent about it either. And I believe that a case can be made, though, also, and not a silent one, about the overreach of the judiciary. I believe that a strong case can be made that the overreach by the Supreme Court surpasses, in fact, that of Congress and of the president.

So that is where we will focus most of our attention for today, considering together a couple of examples in the form of landmark cases. Now, the more I prepared for this, the more overwhelmed I became. I became overwhelmed with the scope of the issue, the brevity of the time. So I’ve just kept going narrower and narrower and narrower. And I’ve narrowed now the discussion to an examination of the interpretation of the 14th Amendment. But even that discussion requires some run up and some context. So first, first, we have to understand that the Supreme Court of the United States is more powerful than our fathers intended for it to be.

Period. It is. The Supreme Court is established in Article III of the Constitution. Article III, Section 1 reads as follows. The judicial power of the United States shall be vested in one Supreme Court and in such inferior courts as the Congress made from time to time ordain and establish. The judges, both of the Supreme and inferior courts, shall hold their offices during good behavior and shall at stated times receive for their service a compensation which shall not be diminished during their continuance in office.” So there you have it. We have a Supreme Court because the Constitution says that we should. As a time out, I’m curious, how many of you have had the good fortune of reading the Constitution?

You’ve actually read it. So I imagine, and how many of you read it in eighth grade? Yeah. So I did, in eighth grade, civics class, and I didn’t read it again until I was teaching omnibus, actually. So that was just over half in the room, I think. And my guess is that is an unrepresentatively high concentration. I would guess that it is not representative of the whole of our American culture. I would guess that fewer than half have actually read it. And those who have read it, the list is even shorter of those who actually would say with confidence that they understand it or that they know it well enough to know when they’re being asked to do something that is in fact unconstitutional.

And it is the job of the Supreme Court to know it and to apply it to our laws. So, what would come clearly as a surprise to our founding fathers though, even in looking at this, would be exactly how powerful the court has become. It was not so at the start. The Supreme Court had a rather unglamorous beginning. It really did. Now, you can make the case that it’s the strongest of the branches of the government and that power is vested in nine unelected persons. You may have heard of the Federalist Papers and the Anti-Federalist Papers. How many of you have heard of the Federalist Papers and the Anti-Federalist Papers?

Okay, awesome. Also, again, I would guess that that is uncommonly high. So the Federalists were those who were in favor of a strong Federal, that is central government, and the Anti-Federalists were opposed to a strong central government. And the Federalist Papers and the Anti-Federalist Papers were just shorthand for the correspondence, in writing where transcripts would have been verbally spoken on the part of the anti-federalists.

During that period of time between when the Constitution was drafted and when it was finally ratified. So the Constitution had been drafted and it’s what we have in articles one through seven now and it then was taken, okay here’s our draft, take it back to the different states and then your own state legislatures will decide whether or not to ratify it. So in the process of hearing, of making those deliberations, the states were audience to kind of this for public consumption debate on the parts of those in favor of a strong central government, the Federalists and the Anti-Federalists. The Federalists were proposing that the Constitution be ratified exactly as it has been drafted didn’t send out.

And then the anti-Federalists were like, no, I don’t think that’s a good idea. We need more protections stated, immortalized in the Constitution, in place to protect the people from the government or to preserve those rights for the states. So those folks were the anti-Federalists And even really, it’s the tweaked and polished amendments then, the ones that the anti-federalists proposed, became the Bill of Rights. And then the Bill of Rights and then the Constitution as it was finally ratified even does stand today as an impressive fruit of spirited debate and compromise. Really, it’s pretty impressive that you have people who disagreed about the role that the central government should have in ensuring certain rights, protecting those rights, and then also those who thought that that was, it was dangerous to vest that kind of power in the federal government, and then that they could engage in hot debate and then come out with what they did is actually really impressive.

And as an aside, that is something that we have lost as well. And I think I was telling Dave this morning that how awesome would it be if our American culture could disagree as well as the Supreme Court does? Because when they do have dissension, they have hot dissension. And they will actually manage to still remain civil with one another. And they recognize that that sort of sharpening is necessary for the good of the people. So I mean, the Supreme Court does experience, does demonstrate overreach today, but also that degree of civility is really impressive and unfortunately rare. Returning now to the Federalist Papers, the reason I give you that context for the Federalist Papers is one of the Federalists, one of the guys who was in favor of a strong central government was a guy named Alexander Hamilton, you might’ve heard of him.

And when talking about the Supreme Court, Court, he said the following. Whoever attentively considers the different departments of power must perceive that in a government in which they are separated from each other, the judiciary, far from the nature of its functions, will always be the least dangerous to the political rights of the Constitution, because it will be least in a capacity to annoy or injure them. It proves incontestably that the judiciary is beyond comparison the weakest of the three departments of power. That it can never attack with success either of the other two. And that all possible care is requisite to enable it to defend itself against their attacks.

It equally proves that though individual oppression may now and then proceed from the courts of justice, the general liberty of the people can never be endangered from that quarter. Let that hang out there for a moment. I mean so long as the judiciary remains truly distinct from the legislature and the I think it’s fairly distinct from the legislature and the executive now, but again, it equally proves that though individual oppression may now and then proceed from the courts of justice, the general liberty of the people can never be endangered from that quarter. That’s a tough case to make even today. Nevertheless, in the early years of the court, it actually heard very few cases.

There is not much prestige associated with it, but all that changed with the appointment of Chief Justice John Marshall in 1801, just the fourth justice in the short life of the court. And in the landmark case, Marbury versus Madison, that was 1803, the court established repeatedly the authority of the court to determine the constitutionality of laws. So if you are really curious, you can ask me during Q&A what Marbury versus Madison was all about. It’s a bit of a complicated case that actually doesn’t pertain to us so much right now, as much as it having provided a context for what did happen with judicial review.

So like I said, it’s fairly complicated. But from the explanation of the ruling, how the court arrived at its decision, Justice Marshall wrote the following. He said, it is emphatically the province and the duty of the judicial department to say what the law is. Now, this was almost revolutionary. And for him to be saying this in 1803, those who apply the rule to particular cases must of necessity expound and interpret that rule. If two laws conflict with each other, the courts must decide on the operation of each. So if a law be in opposition to the Constitution, if both the law and the Constitution apply to a particular case so that the court must either decide that case conformably to the law disregarding the Constitution, or conformably to the Constitution disregarding the law, the court must determine which of these conflicting rules governs the case.

This is the very essence of judicial duty. If then the courts are to regard the Constitution and the Constitution is superior to any ordinary act of the legislature, the Constitution and not such ordinary act must govern the case to which they both apply. And thus, the court established the concept of judicial review, which is something that is taken for granted and with which we are now familiar. Antony and Scalia, I told you I’d quote him in just a moment or I told you a moment ago. He said, the Constitution I interpret is not living but dead. Our first responsibility is not to make sense of the law. He declared.

Our first responsibility is to follow the text of the law. Follow the text. So perhaps Marshall and Scalia may have agreed regarding the court’s duty to follow the Constitution, but I think there’s a good chance they would have disagreed on the court’s powers when it came to interpretation. So now the court takes it upon itself to render judgment where it should remain silent, and it often makes moral judgments along the way.

So like I said, I wanted to establish that the Supreme Court is more powerful than the founding fathers Wanted it to be second with judicial review now established the court has been able to establish laws by fiat or by their own decree To illustrate this point we could look at a whole bunch of Supreme Court cases But I’ll drill down and look at two in particular which have in common their familiarity their landmark status But also their common appeal to the 14th amendment and I’ll just say it now heinous ways So I disagree. So there, I have shown you my cards. But like I said, to limit the scope of the study, because frankly, there’s way too much to consider in one talk, we’re just going to look at the 14th Amendment. And the court’s decision in these two cases was influenced by its interpretation of the 14th Amendment. So first, the cases. We’re going to look at Roe versus Wade and Obergefell versus Hodges, and I know that you know them. So first, Roe versus Wade 1973. I don’t know how many of

you know the context of this one, but it’s not complicated and it’s also, it’s not essential that you know it, it’s more important that you know what happened in the wake of it, but Jane Roe was a Texan, a Texas citizen, and that is a name given to protect the innocent. Her name isn’t actually Jane Roe. She wanted an abortion which was not legal in Texas unless it was to preserve the life of the mother. Any other forsake of convenience, elective abortions were illegal. And so she took official Wade, was his name, the Texas official, to court on grounds that they had denied her 14th Amendment’s right to privacy. So, you know, and she, and so it appealed, through the appeals process up to the Supreme Court.

And this is exerted from the majority opinion, the majority opinion, and it was a seven to two decision by the Supreme Court in Roe versus Wade. And the ruling was then the first trimester of an abortion, No woman should be deprived of, as the first trimester of her pregnancy, no woman should be deprived of an abortion. So this is exerted from the majority of pain, which is rather long, so we just have one paragraph. The Constitution does not explicitly mention any right to privacy, so they lay it out there. They concede that point immediately to their credit, and yet that is also the elephant in the room. The Constitution does not explicitly mention any right to privacy, right of privacy.

The Court has recognized that a right of personal privacy or a guarantee of certain areas or zones of privacy does exist under the Constitution. The Constitution does not explicitly mention any right of privacy. The Court has recognized that a right of personal privacy or a guarantee of certain areas or zones of privacy does exist under the Constitution. So it’s not explicitly stated. What they’re saying is it’s implied and protected. right of privacy, whether it be founded in the 14th Amendment’s concept of personal liberty and restrictions upon state action, as we feel it is, or as the district court determined in the 9th Amendment’s reservation of rights of the people, is broad enough to encompass a woman’s decision whether or not to terminate her pregnancy.

In other words, Lucy Goosey. What’s the diff? And thus, the so-called constitutional right to an abortion is born. It’s a language that many pro-choice advocates use today. Dissenting opinion by Justice Rehnquist. You know him by now. Jim introduced us earlier. He says, because there’s only two of them, the court’s opinion decides that a state may impose virtually no restriction on the performance of abortions during the first trimester of pregnancy. However, no party in the case was currently in her first trimester of pregnancy. Interesting data point. So, they’re establishing by fiat something that actually didn’t apply to the individuals in the case.

Even if there were a plaintiff in this case capable of litigating the issue which the court decides, I would reach a conclusion opposite to that reached by the court. I have difficulty in concluding, as the court does, that the right of privacy is involved in this case. He continues, Texas, by the statute here challenged, bars the performance of a medical abortion by a licensed physician on a plaintiff such as Roe. A transaction resulting in an operation such as this is not private in the ordinary use of that word, nor is the privacy that the court finds here even a distant relative of the freedom from searches and seizures protected by the Fourth Amendment to the Constitution, which the court has referred to as embodying a right to privacy.

If there is a right to privacy that’s explicitly stated in the Constitution, it would be in the Fourth Amendment. Unlawful searches and seizures. They can’t just barge into your house and inspect it without a court order or a warrant, is what he is saying. Let’s keep going. One more. To reach its result, the court necessarily has had to find, within the scope of the 14th Amendment, a right that was apparently completely unknown to the drafters of the amendment. The only conclusion possible from this history is that the drafters did not intend to have the 14th Amendment withdraw from the states the power to legislate with respect to this matter.

Again, that’s called overreach. So the only possible conclusion he states is that it was on purpose that the framers of the Constitution, if they had abortion in mind, they thought this is the sort of thing that the states ought to be able to speak to or legislate on their own or prohibit or what have you. So the decision of the court, however, and this isn’t the Christians biggest problem with this. The Christians biggest problems with this is actually that it violates scripture. So all the yeah buts, what about the decision of the court takes for granted something that Christians deny? Namely, we deny that the unborn baby has no rights himself.

The court takes that for granted. For reasons beyond our own reasoning and intellect, we affirm the value and dignity of every human life because we bear the image of God, and so does every baby in his mother’s womb. As an example, the court said this, the decision vindicates the right of the physician to administer medical treatment according to his professional judgment up to the points where important state interests provide compelling justifications for a direction. Up to those points, the abortion decision in all its aspects is inherently and primarily a medical decision. And basic responsibility for it must rest with the physician.

And there’s so much even in those few lines that we don’t have time to dissect. But there is an assumption, a starting point that the unborn baby has no rights himself, that it is reduced to a medical decision. What about the medical interest of the baby who was sentenced to die an innocent death at the will of the mother by the hand of a healthcare provider? Now the court recognized that the further along a woman got in her pregnancy, the closer the baby got to viability or the ability for the baby to survive outside of his mother’s womb. And with the approaching of viability, then the state’s obligation to treat the baby like a real human actually increased as well.

That’s my language, not theirs. But this is also fraught with all sorts of questions. So again, so if we imagine state’s responsibility to mom, state’s responsibility to baby, like nil, and then over time, then the baby, because he’s increasing of viability, then he’s more entitled to the rights of a citizen. the closer to birth that he gets. Man, that is just a big problem on a bunch of levels. But let’s, for the sake of the discussion, just bear with me, set aside scripture for a moment. When actually is a baby viable? That number is changing all the time. An increasing number like staggering numbers of babies born in the second trimester are surviving today.

It’s fantastic and it’s exciting, and it only confirms what we already knew anyway. They’re humans. Yeah, right. And there were humans before that as well. As far as God is concerned, from the moment of conception, that’s a soul. So the court declared that no woman shall be denied because there was no fixed number for viability. They said, well, at least in the first trimester, we know that the baby is not viable. So no woman shall be denied an abortion in the first trimester. That was the outcome of Roe. And again, at what point is the baby human? The court has no answer for that either. And I think it is safe to say that the most liberal drafters of the Constitution would be greatly dismayed by our normalization of murder.

And a little bit of quick math. Like I said in my opening comments, 100 to 1. For every soldier who died in the Civil War, 100 babies have been legally murdered since 1973. Exhibit B is Obergefell versus Hodges, 2015. So if you know the context of Obergefell, indulge me for a moment. If you don’t, here it is in brief. 14 same-sex couples sued the states of Michigan, Ohio, Tennessee, and Kentucky, all of which states, as Jim mentioned, they were states that had laws that defined marriage the same way that God does, namely one man, one woman. The petitioners claimed that these states were denying their ability to marry or to have their marriages, which are recognized in one state, recognized in another.

So if a homosexual couple is married in one state, they were not necessarily recognized as a married couple across a state line. So again, they claimed that these states were denying their ability to marry or have their marriages recognized in other states, and that this was a violation then of the 14th Amendment. So as you may know, so while Roe v. Wade was a 7-2 decision to our country’s shame, this one was a 5-4 decision also to our country’s shame, but at least a little bit less shameful in that it was at least close, I suppose, if that makes us feel any better. So and that was on June 26, 2015, just in time for my son’s sixth birthday.

So it was not long ago. In an unusual turn, there were four dissenting justices and each one saw fit to write his own dissenting opinion. Guess they had a lot to say. Also, Jim mentioned that in this case, Justice Kennedy was kind of waffling. He was the swing vote. And so while he may have had that go back and forth with Justice Ginsburg, he did end up voting the same way that she did. That was with the majority. Justice Kennedy, who, like I said, was the swing vote in the decision, wrote the following pretty moralistic language as one of the majority. He said, choke on this, in forming a marital union, two people become something greater than once they were, so far so good.

As some of the petitioners in these cases demonstrate, marriage embodies a love that may endure even past death. It would misunderstand these men and women to say that they disrespect the idea of marriage. Their plea is that they do respect it, respect it so deeply that they seek to find its fulfillment for themselves. Their hope is not to be condemned to live in loneliness excluded from one of civilization’s oldest institutions. They ask for equal dignity in the eyes of the law. The Constitution grants them that right. Now, I actually think that’s laughable. And the reason is it presupposes that humans and or the Constitution are actually clear on what defines a marriage.

And evidently, they’re not. The Constitution doesn’t say what it is, and now humans are confused. They are now. They didn’t used to be. It is not respectful of the idea of marriage, to pervert it with homosexuality, any more than it is to pervert it with fornication. Both are not respectful of marriage, they’re abuses or perversions of marriage. They are a perversion of the institution, They’re not doing honor to it. And as I said, the four dissenting judges each wrote their own dissenting opinion with some overlap on the issues. I’ll just quote two of them. And they also were the two justices that Jim quoted as well, although there’s some overlap with Scalia’s quote, but I’ll go first to Justice Roberts.

Justice Roberts said, if you are among the many Americans of whatever sexual orientation who favor expanding same-sex marriage, by all means, celebrate today’s decision. Celebrate the achievement of a desired goal. Celebrate the opportunity for a new expression of commitment to a partner. Celebrate the availability of new benefits, but do not celebrate the Constitution. It had nothing to do with it. I wrote my notes. Zing. Justice Scalia said, the substance of today’s decree is not of immense personal importance to me. Fair enough. The law can recognize as marriage whatever sexual attachments and living arrangements it wishes, and can accord them favorable civil consequences from tax treatments to rights of inheritance.

He’s saying it didn’t. The Constitution doesn’t say that, so don’t misunderstand. It’s of overwhelming importance, however, who it is that rules me. Today’s decree says that my ruler and the ruler of 320 million Americans coast to coast is a majority of nine lawyers on the Supreme Court. Talking to Jim in the lead up to today’s seminar, He said, you can make a case we’ve been living under tyranny for years. And it is actually the unchecked tyranny of the Supreme Court. So faithful Christians are not the only ones who have a problem with this decision. Their justices in the Supreme Court who could see what’s happening.

The same court that was very divided on the outcome. And as Justice Scalia wrote, in some ways we are being ruled by whatever the majority might happen to be of the Supreme Court, in this case, five people. But what about the 14th Amendment? So now we’ve talked about these two cases. Maybe we should look at it. If the court in 1973 and the court in 2015 cited the right to privacy in this decision, then the right to privacy must be pretty clear. It must be front and center. Okay. Look, I know we don’t have a whole lot of time left, But we’re going to read the entirety of the 14th Amendment. It’s five sections and in my notes, it’s just over one page.

We’ll read it together. But the reason is, I don’t want anybody accusing us of saying, you didn’t read the whole thing. Let me give you a hint. If it’s in here, it’s in the first section. But we’ll read them all just to be on the safe side. Let’s go together. 14th Amendment. All persons born or naturalized in the United States and subject to the jurisdiction thereof are citizens of United States and of the state wherein they reside. No state shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States, nor shall any state deprive any person of life, liberty, or property without due process of law, nor deny any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.

Section 2, representatives shall be apportioned among the several states according to their respective numbers, counting the whole number of persons in each state, excluding Indians not taxed, but when the right to vote at any election for the choice of electors for President and Vice President of the United States, representatives in Congress, the Executive and Judicial Office of a state, or the members of the legislature thereof is denied to any of the male inhabitants of such state, being 21 years of age, and citizens of the United States or in any way abridged, except for participation in rebellion or other crime, the basis of representation therein shall be reduced to a proportion which the number of such male citizens shall bear to the whole number of male citizens 21 years of age in such state.

Section three, no person shall be a senator or representative in Congress or elector of president or vice president and vice president, or hold any office, civil or military, under the United States or under any state who, Having previously taken a note as a member of Congress or as an officer of the United States, or as any member of any state legislature, or as an executive or judicial of any state, to support the Constitution of the United States, shall have engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same, or give an aid or comfort to the enemies thereof. But Congress may, by a vote of two thirds of each house, remove such disabilities.

So if Congress says, it’s okay, then even though you’re guilty of treason, you could hold office later on. The validity of the public debt of the United States, authorized by law, including debts incurred for payment of pensions and bounties for services in suppressing insurrection or rebellion, shall not be questioned, but neither the United States nor any state shall assume or pay any debt or obligation incurred in aid of insurrection or rebellion against the United States, or any claim for the loss or emancipation of any slave, but all such debts, obligations, claims shall be held. Illegal and void. This one’s short. The Congress shall have the power to enforce by appropriate legislation the provisions of this article. Now I ask you, where’s the right to privacy? I think it’s a fair question. Now I know that I don’t have a law degree from an Ivy League institution like every one of our Supreme Court justices.

But I don’t see it. The only possible place could be the first section, but I don’t think it’s there. But it has to be, right? I mean, that is what this panel in these two cases retreated to and appealed to to make this decision. So as you kind of round third and head home here, I do have to make one other aside. And I know I said I would talk primarily about the Supreme Court, but I also have to throw Congress under the bus a little bit as well. And we could do it with the president as well. But Congress has also lost its backbone, which doesn’t help matters. Like I said, I won’t talk much about this, but the trend has been increasing.

Our senators and representatives are so busy politicking and protecting their own business, their own interests, that they lack courage to attach their name to a decision lest they find themselves on the wrong side of history. For instance, according to Article I, Section 8 of the Constitution, it does the job of Congress to declare war, which it has not done since World War II. And yet, we have been in a lot of wars. Why do you suppose this is the case? I ask that rhetorically. I think it’s pretty clear. They don’t want their name attached to it because of the accountability associated with it. But what happens when there is a leadership and an initiative void?

Well, somebody will fill it. And in most cases, it has been the one who’s only locked in for four years anyway. So enter the president and the increased power of the executive branch. The president of the United States is more powerful today than our fathers could have fathomed. He’s become powerful both by grasping for power and through the abdication of Congress. So what do we do? Well, true morality is static because it’s consistent with the Bible, or it’s not moral. If it was wrong in 1820, it’s wrong today in 2020. And if it was right in 1820, it’s right today. But sometimes men are wrong, including our political fathers.

The best of men, as they say, are men at best. If we listen to our fathers, we would be better off than we are today. If we would see our culture truly thrive and prosper, we must give attention to what the framers of our Republic had in mind when doing so. And just because someone has his mouth open does not mean that he’s right. It doesn’t mean you have to listen to him either. A hallmark of our liberty is that folks are free to say just about anything, including things that just ain’t so. And if he speaks often enough and loudly enough, He can probably dominate the airwaves when he says those things that just ain’t so.

That’s absolutely the case today with terms like marriage, women’s health, tolerance, discrimination, rights. A marriage according to the one who actually came up with the idea in the first place is between a man and a woman. Women’s health is a terrible nickname for the murder of a baby. Tolerance has no tolerance for those as tolerant as Jesus. itself discriminates against the discriminatory. Rights are given to us by the Creator, not by men or by a misreading of the Constitution. Read the Constitution and know your local laws so that when others tell you what it says, you can know whether or not they’re telling the truth. But I do have a few very simple takeaways like I would implore us all to be grateful because As for my criticism this afternoon, understand that the opportunity to criticize like this is a rare privilege.

And for four-hour different problems, the freedom that is ours is uncommon. And we are free to engage in disagreement to this degree. That is a self-telling. We can also pray. We could throw the passage from Timothy up there that Jim put before us. Only God can change hearts. And what we need most is not better laws, policies, or adherence to the Constitution. We need God to change hearts. I didn’t say we don’t need those things. I said what we don’t need most. What we need most is for God to change hearts. We need to pray that God would enable our leaders to operate according to biblical principles. We need to pray.

For the appointment of Supreme Court justices who will adhere to biblical principles themselves and who actually care about the initial intent of our founding fathers when drafting the document. Vote. In that same Federalist paper number 78, which we referenced earlier, Alexander Hamilton said that the will of the people is superior to the will of the legislature or the judiciary. And he said, where the will of the legislature declared in its statute stands in opposition to the people, declared in the Constitution, the judges ought to be governed by the latter, that is the Constitution, rather than the former, that is the laws.

So he is assuming that the Constitution represents the will of the people as it should. Though it happens that in a number of cases by their own rule and declaration, the Supreme Court has in effect enacted laws by declaring one thing to be constitutional and another to be unconstitutional, the legislature still does not write the laws. I’m sorry, the legislature still does write the laws and the Supreme Court does not. So even now, the Supreme Court cannot actually add to or take away from the Constitution itself. This is done by the will of the people through Congress. So if the people wanted to make abortion illegal in the United States, we actually do have the means of adding it to the Constitution, though it would take an act of God to change enough hearts to make that happen.

And it would require 2-3 majority of both houses. And finally, I would say be courageous and unafraid. Kind of like our Sunday evening series on apologetics, we actually do have the upper hand here. We have the upper ground. Too many Christians today are afraid of being called unloving, or having scripture quoted to them by those who don’t know scripture, or of being ridiculed by ignorant people with terrible arguments which they proclaim very confidently and loudly. That can be intimidating, but like I said, we do have the upper hand. We are operating with the Bible as our guide, and for which we should never apologize, and we also can appeal to the Constitution.

So let’s pray. Father, we are grateful that you have given us your word, which is unchanging. It is inspired. The Constitution is not, but we don’t even know that, and we’re submitting to it. Please help us to be bold and courageous and confident because we are on the winning side. Help us to be faithful to ask you. And we pray that we be used by you to affect cultural change, whether locally or nationally. And we pray this in Christ’s name, amen.