The Republican Club of Sun City NEWSLETTER

September 2012 Everett Schmidt, Editor Sun City Texas

TEXAS AGRICULTURE COMMISSIONER TO ADDRESS CLUB

Todd Staples, Texas Commissioner of Agriculture, will address the club during its meeting scheduled for Thursday, September 20 in the ballroom of the Social Center in Sun City.

Now in his second term as Agriculture Commissioner, Staples has been a member of the Texas House and Senate. During his tenure as a legislator, he chaired the Senate Transportation and Homeland Security Committee and the Republican Caucus. He sponsored the state constitutional amendment defining marriage as being between one man and one woman, and successfully carried the Congressional redistricting bill.

Among his top priorities are those relating to the securing of the Texas border from the life-threatening dangers resulting from drug dealers and human smugglers crossing Texas soil.

The topic of his address is the effects of the federal government on private property rights, agriculture, and our future food supply.

The Social Period, Dinner and Program. A social period will begin at 6:00 PM. The dinner will begin at 6:30 PM, and will be followed by the program. The dinner will consist of meat loaf, green beans, buttered potatoes and salad.

Cost. Cost is $16 per person. Checks made out to The Republican Club of Sun City should be mailed to: The Republican Club of Sun City, 1530 Sun City Blvd., Suite 120, Box 227, Georgetown, TX 78633.
The deadline for payment or reservations is Friday, September 14.

Club treasurer Dorothy Carlyle has set up a special collection box on her front porch at 173 Whispering Wind for individuals wishing to hand-deliver payments, provided delivery is made by the Friday deadline. For information about reservations, contact Dorothy at 864-0353 or dcarlyle@suddenlink.net

VISITORS ARE WELCOME!

“SGT. SAM” COX TO ADDRESS CLUB IN OCTOBER

The October 13 club meeting is the one immediately preceding the early voting period which will begin October 22. It is the election which is generally regarded as the most important of our lifetimes.

“Sgt. Sam” Cox, our speaker, is one of the panelists heard on an early morning talk show. Being conservative, well-informed, opinionated, combative and witty, he possesses the characteristics needed by a person in the media who engages others in frequent heated exchanges about topics controversial and important. Those characteristics may be exactly what is needed to fire up club members and others to vote Republican.

He (along with fellow panelists Mark and Ed) can be heard on KLBJ 590 AM and KLBJ 99.7 FM daily, M – F, from 5:30 AM to 10:00 AM. A “best of” series of broadcasts can be heard on Saturday nights from 7 – 9 PM.

OTHER CLUB NEWS

The process for electing next year’s club officers – President, First Vice President (for programs), Second Vice President (for membership), secretary and treasurer – is now underway. It consists of these steps: (1) in September, the president appoints a Nominating Committee. This year it consists of Julian Bucher, Robert Fears, Harlow Fisher, and Bernie Miller; (2) in October, the Nominating Committee submits its recommendations; (3) in November, the club votes on nominations from the Nominating Committee or from the floor.

Romney-Ryan yard signs, buttons and bumper stickers are available at the County Party Headquarters, 716 S. Rock St. A donation of $5 for each yard sign and $1 for each button or bumper sticker is requested. NOTE: These items will be available at the September 20 club meeting for a similar donation.

Club vice president Brenda Leisey reports that current club membership is 246.

Club president Harlow Fisher reports that he was able to schedule seven club meetings in the ballroom of the Social Center during the 2013. The dates of those meetings are:

Thursday, January 10 Thursday, February 21 Thursday, March 14

Thursday, May 9 Thursday, September 5 Thursday, October 31 Thursday, November 14

NOTICE OF PROPOSED BYLAW ADDITION
Notice is hereby provided that the following proposed added by law will be presented to the club for its approval during

the meeting of October 18:

Article IV – Membership; Section 4 – Non-Member

A resident or non-resident of Sun City who does not pay annual dues shall be considered a Non-Member. Non-Members may attend only a maximum of two (2) General Membership Meetings in any fiscal year at their own expense. However, Non-Members who are registered Republicans and actively campaigning in Republican Primaries, in general elections or in special elections may attend any General Membership Meetings at their own expense.

A DAY TO CELEBRATE: SEPTEMBER 17, CONSTITUTION DAY Foreword. The U. S. Constitution, having been signed by delegates to a Constitutional Convention on September 17, 1787, will become 225 years old this coming September 17. While it is a highly respected

document, its anniversary will, unfortunately, go virtually unnoticed, if past history is an indicator.
There is unfortunate symbolism in that non-recognition, that being said because the greatness of that document seems not to be sufficiently understood or appreciated by the general public, or explained in educational institutions. And members of Congress and members of the judicial branch, in a growing number of instances, seem to be making their oath of office pledging to defend the Constitution but a perfunctory, pointless

ritual.

Yet today, when a great many citizens, out of fear for the future of the country, cry for help, almost inevitably they will say the solution for the nation’s woes is to “FOLLOW THE CONSTITUTION!” But before the Constitution can be followed it must first be revered and be given some historical context.

The purpose of this report, therefore, is to help fill that need. In addition to discussion of the Constitution, there is a discussion of the Declaration of Independence which is to be considered a part of the Constitution.

The Importance of a Written Constitution. Thomas Jefferson observed that “our peculiar security is in the possession of a written Constitution.” What he was saying was that the U. S. Constitution did not arise out of an age-old custom and legal usage or court decisions as was the case with the British Constitution which is basically a collection of assorted documents such as the Magna Carta, Petition of Rights, certain acts of Parliament, various customs, etc. The U. S. Constitution, in contrast, is not a common law instrument; hence, it is not legally subject to change by construction or change in custom. In can be changed only by formal amendment.

What is the Constitution’s primary feature? Author Clarence Carson says: “Perhaps …it is that it not only prescribes the form and operation of government, but it places substantive restrictions and limitations on the exercise of governmental power . . . “ (emphasis added)

The Declaration-Constitution Relationship. Former Attorney General Edwin Meese comments on the relationship between the Constitution and the Declaration: “Part of the reason for the Constitution’s enduring strength is that it is the complement of the Declaration of Independence. The Declaration provided the philosophical basis for a government that exercises legitimate power by ‘the consent of the governed,’ and it defined the conditions of a free people, whose rights and liberty are derived from their Creator. The Constitution delineated the structure of government and the rules for its operation, consistent with the creed of human liberty proclaimed in the Declaration.”

But not everyone – including recently-confirmed Justice Kagen – will agree with that assessment on grounds that the two documents are separate instruments. However, historian David Barton reports that the courts have ruled several times that the two documents cannot be separated.

Similarly, author Matthew Spalding notes the unusual method by which the Constitution is dated (two dates are shown) in Article VII where signatures are shown: “the Seventeenth Day of September in the year of our Lord” 1787, “and the Independence of the United States of America the Twelfth.” (emphasis added) He then goes on to explain: “The language here is neither insignificant nor unintentional: these dates serve to place the document in the context of the religious traditions of Western civilization and, at the same time, to link it to the regime principles proclaimed in the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution having been written in the twelfth year after July 1776.”

It is absolutely essential to know that the Declaration indicates that certain of our rights come from a

Creator (not politicians), and that there exists beyond the laws of man, a natural law, a pre-existing law.

SOME ENEMIES OF THE CONSTITUTION

A Welfare State Instigated by Congress. There appears to be general agreement among most informed citizens that the federal government’s debt and the unfunded mandates (Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid) it has spawned are out of control and constitute an endangerment to the nation. Yet, while states can promulgate welfare programs, there is no Constitutional provision providing authority for the federal government to do so. Nevertheless, some members of Congress assert there is such authority, primarily citing the “general welfare” clause in the Constitution. The unjustified use of that citation, however, was anticipated more than 200 years ago when some of our founding fathers admonished us to guard against such interpretation. Said James Madison, the father of the Constitution, in regard to the General Welfare clause: “The Government is [then] no longer a limited one.” Said Thomas Jefferson: “Congress does not possess unlimited powers to provide for the general welfare, but were restrained to those specifically enumerated.”

Unprotected Property Rights. The founders, according to a report of the Cato Institute, drew upon the common law for a concept of property, including money, which should prevail in the new nation and which is a doctrine of the Constitution. That concept is encapsulated in the following quote by one of the nation’s founders, John Adams: “The moment the idea is admitted into society that property is not as sacred as the laws of God, and that there is not a force of law and public justice to protect it, anarchy and tyranny commence.”

Compassion as a Intimidating Factor. For many politicians an intimidating, yet significant philosophical question emerges: Should not compassion for others and concern for the general welfare of the population subordinate the tenets of the Constitution, particularly with respect to private property and liberty? Congressman Ron Paul, Congress’ strictest observer of the Constitution, addresses that question:

Although those who hunger for power are small in number, it’s easy to entice the masses into believing that government can provide for everyone’s needs and safety. Yet the others who continue to produce are misled into believing that they must accept the system or be labeled selfish and lacking compassion. To do this, they accept the idea that a person’s need, desires or demands equate to rights. Thus we hear from those who say they object to the welfare/socialist state that they nevertheless accept the fact that the few truly in need deserve help from the government. They claim it’s only abuse of the system that must be stopped. This concedes the intellectual and moral argument that a need is equal to a right now referred to as an “entitlement.” No one should be entitled or have a right to someone’s else’s labor.

This idea opens the door to the special interests to manipulate the system to their advantage at the expense of all others. Without this understanding, liberty cannot exist.

Darwinism and a “Living” Constitution. President Woodrow Wilson may have been the first president to promote the concept of a “living” Constitution. He believed that the evolutionary process espoused by Charles Darwin in regard to biology should also be in effect with respect to Constitutional matters. Author Marvin Olasky reports that Wilson, when he ran for president, suggested that the candidates were not Taft, Roosevelt and himself, but Isaac Newton and Charles Darwin. American was in trouble Wilson declared

because some people had the “Newtonian” view that government should have an unchanging constitutional foundation, somewhat like “the law of gravitation.” He argued that government “falls under the theory of organic life . . . Living political constitutions must be Darwinian in structure and in practice. Society is a living organism and must obey the laws of life.”

Law schools, similarly believing that law should evolve, established the case law method of study which meant that the study of case law takes precedence over the study of the Constitution.

President Obama’s Concept. Given his proclivity to take unauthorized actions, President Obama indicates a contempt for the Constitution. Indeed, like Wilson and others, he indicates he knows better than our nation’s founders. Note the following quote of Obama on one of his favorite subjects – the distribution of wealth – in which he is implicitly (if not explicitly) critical of possibly the most basic principle of our Constitution: Government is to be restrained in what it can do. Note Obama’s contrary view: “But the Supreme Court never ventured into the issues of redistribution of wealth, and of more basic issues as political and economic justice to society . . .It didn’t break free from the essential constraints that were placed by the Founding Father in the

Constitution . . . “ (emphasis added)

THE EFFECTS OF SAME-SEX COUPLES ON THE CHILDREN THEY RAISE

The National Review had the following report on a once-prevailing and unchallenged view about a controversial issue:

In 2005, the American Psychological Association (APA) issued a statement saying that
“the evidence to date suggests that home environments provided by lesbian and gay parents are as likely as those provided by heterosexual parents to support and enable children’s psychosocial growth.” There was “not a single study” to find the children of gay and lesbian parents “to be disadvantaged in any significant respect.”

State and federal courts have relied on this and other similar reports to throw out attempts to define marriage as being between one man and one woman. Two examples from National Review:

• The chief justice of the Iowa supreme court, throwing out the state’s law defining marriage as the union of a man and a woman, relied on the same evidence. He wrote that “sexual orientation and gender have no effect on children raised by same-sex couples, and same-sex couples can raise children as well as opposite-sex couples.” The view that children need a mother and a father is “largely unsupported by reliable scientific studies.” (emphasis added)
• Federal Judge Vaughn Walker produced a similar, but even more confident, “finding of fact” in the course of throwing out a California voter initiative codifying the standard definition of marriage: “Children raised by gay or lesbian parents are as likely as children raised by heterosexual parents to be healthy, successful and well adjusted. The research supporting this conclusion is accepted beyond serious debate in the field of developmental psychology.” (emphasis added)But recently, there has been criticism of the studies used by the courts. Loren Marks of Louisiana State University zeros in on the APA’s 2005 Statement, contending that, although the APA cited 59 published studies, more than three-fourths of the studies “are based on small non-representative, convenience samples of fewer that 100 participants.” After citing additional flaws, she concludes, “Not one of the 59 studies referenced . . .compares a large, random, representative sample of lesbian or gay parents and their children with a large, random, representative sample of married persons and their children.”

  Mark Regnerus of the University of Texas, in his comprehensive research, provides evidence contradicting the APA’s contention that children raised by same-sex couples were not disadvantaged.

  Regnerus, in his study titled New Family Structure, utilized methods which corrected those used in earlier studies. Dwarfing the breadth of earlier studies, Regnerus interviewed 15,000 adults aged 18-39 and asked dozens of questions about their lives.

  National Review reports the results of his study were depressing, a sampling of which follows:

• Young adults who reported that their fathers had had same-sex relationships were more likely than any others groups studied to be involved in crime; those who said their mothers had had such relationships were second most likely. Those who had lesbian mothers (defined, again, as mothers who had same- sex relationships) were almost four times more likely than those raised by still-married biological parents to be on public assistance.
• Young adults with gay fathers were five times as likely as those raised by their biological parents to report having recently had suicidal thoughts; those with lesbian mothers were more than twice as likely. Rates of sexually transmitted infections were much higher for those with gay or lesbian parents. Those with lesbian mothers reported that as children they were touched sexually by adults at a rate more than 11 times as high as the rate among those raised by their biological parents – and a rate almost twice as high as that of the next-highest group, those raised in stepfamilies. They also reported the hightest rate of any group for being forced to have sex against their will. Those with gay fathers ranked second. As usual, children raised by their biological parents had the best statistics.As is to be expected, Regnerus’ study was attacked by the homosexual community. A charge of scientific misconduct on the part of Regnerus resulted in a peer-reviewed investigation of the author’s methodology. However, subsequently, a memorandum from UT Austin “declares that none of the allegations of scientific

misconduct from [the complainant] were substantiated in any fashion.”
Perhaps one should reflect on the possible significance of the Regnerus study had it been made

available at the time an Iowa supreme court and a federal judge in California used the flawed earlier research to thwart the will of the citizens of those two states, to seemingly be oblivious to natural law and to the traditions and wisdom of thousands of years of history, and to be oblivious to the harm which appears to have befallen numerous children.

SOME SURPRISING STATISTICS

What is the fastest growing faith in the world today? Is it Islam? The answer, according to James Rutz, author of Mega Shift, is that “biblically-inspired, evangelical Christianity is sweeping through places like China, Africa, India and Southeast Asia – making it, by far, the fastest growing faith on the planet.”

He explains that Christianity is overlooked as the fastest-growing faith in the world because most surveys look at the traditional Protestant denominations and the Roman Catholic Church while ignoring Christian believers who have no part of either.

According to the author, until 1960, Western evangelicals outnumbered non-Western evangelicals – mostly Latinos, blacks and Asians – by two to one. As of 2000, non-Western evangelicals outnumbered Westerners by four to one. That moved to seven to one this year.

Hundreds of millions of these Christians are simply not associated with the institutional churches at all. They meet in homes. They meet underground. They meet in caves. They meet, the author says, in secret.

There is another possible surprise for the reader. Europe is not the only entity experiencing a demographic decline. So too is Islam, according to David Goldman, author of How Civilizations Die (And Why Islam is Dying Too). In reviewing this book, a National Review reviewer states: “Exactly how Muslim women are managing to avoid pregnancy sans contraception is a mystery.”

Why might Muslim women be so adverse to reproduction? In Goldman’s view, the answer is repression. Goldman asks what Muslim woman, after seeing how other women live via television and other media, wouldn’t say, “To hell with this”?

Concludes Goldman: The Islamic world will soon be as elderly as the industrialized world, but it will not be industrialized.

STATES ACT TO WIN BACK LAND GRABBED BY THE FEDS

The fact that our nation has more than 300 millions inhabitants, is reportedly growing by one million legal immigrants and illegal aliens per year, and has a birthrate sustaining the population means that land available for settling by people is beginning to grow scarce. There is a reason for that problem: Government.

An article in NewsMax reports a fact which may not be widely known: The federal government owns nearly a third of all the land in the United States, land which encompasses more acreage that the land mass of France, Spain, Germany, Finland and Italy combined. And while some of that land houses military bases and parks, the majority of that land remains completely barren and unpopulated.

Several states, dogged by chronically high unemployment and tight budgets, are fighting to get their lost land back. Utah, for example, enacted a bill this year giving the federal government a deadline of December 2014 to relinquish control of all public lands, thereby probably triggering a coming ugly legal battle.

The amount of land owned by the federal government in Utah is formidable: 67%. But the government owns an even larger portion of the land in Nevada: a whopping 81%.

Following is a chart showing the 10 states with the highest percentage of federal land ownership:

Nevada 81% Utah 67% Alaska 62% Idaho 62% Oregon 53% Wyoming 48% California 48% Arizona 42% Colorado 36% New Mexico 35%

Uttered Upon the Adoption of the Constitution BEN FRANKLIN’S POIGNANT REFLECTIONS

The fact that the Constitutional Convention took place some 225 years ago tends to mitigate our understanding of the human drama which must have existed then as the consequential events of those days unfolded.

Fortunately, Benjamin Franklin, who was 81 at the time and ailing, left for posterity a letter he read to the convention at the time of the final vote. The letter reveals some internal torment he had about the the wisdom of some of the provisions of the Constitution. His touching comments, excerpted below, reveal a humility which could well serve all of us – including the current President who apparently rejects many of that documents tenets – as a beacon to follow.

I confess that there are several parts of the constitution which I do not at present approve,
but I am not sure I shall never approve them: For having lived long, I have experienced many instances of being obliged by better information, or fuller consideration, to change opinions even
on important subjects, which I once thought right, but found to be otherwise. It is therefore that
the older I grow, the more apt I am to doubt my own judgment, and to pay more respect to themselves judgment of others . . .

For when you assemble a number of men to have the advantage of their joint wisdom, you inevitably assemble with those men, all their prejudices, their passions, their errors of opinions, their local interests, and their selfish views. From such an assembly can a perfect production be expected?

It therefore astonishes me, Sir, to find this system approaching so near to perfection as it does; and I think it will astonish our enemies, who are waiting with confidence to hear that our councils are confounded like those of the Builders of Babel; and that our States are on the point of separation, only to meet hereafter for the purpose of cutting one another'[s throats. Thus I consent, Sir, to this Constitution because I expect no better, and because I am not sure, that it is not the best.

James Madison, upon noting that so many difficulties had been surmounted with such unanimity, observed: “It is impossible for a man of pious reflection not to perceive in it a finger of that Almighty hand which has been so frequently and signally extended to our relief in the critical stages of the revolution.”