How Trump has failed to uphold our creed

By Alan Keyes

In an article published last week, I politely critiqued a headline of an email I received, which welcomed the possibility of "a paradigm shift in America," in which media featuring people "empowered with a Christian worldview" become "the dominant mainstream in television programming." Though I agreed with the proposition that this would be a welcomed prospect, I demurred to the attention-grabbing headline that identified such media as "The Church of Donald Trump." I pointed out that "people who call themselves by the name of Christ are bound to worship in the house of no leader but Christ.... Since they identify their only way of life with Christ, they would not advertise their place of worship under any brand name that might be mistaken to give worth to human wealth, power, and self-willed greatness."

To be sure, the reason I took exception to the headline was not simply theological. My demurral reflected my concern that, when it comes to matters of God-endowed right (i.e., justice according to God's will), the Trump administration has not yet proved that it means to uphold the standard of justice such right requires. That is the standard of Christ's ministry, as America's history proves, since it is also the standard of our nation's foundational creed.

In my recent article, I discuss an exemplary instance of this shortfall:

Now, President Trump's administration has so far steadfastly sought to overturn President Obama's policy of accepting transgendered people into the military. This has somewhat distracted from the fact that, in the wake of the SCOTUS anti-constitutional Obergefell decision, the Trump administration has also, inconsistently, accepted military service by openly practicing homosexuals as a fait accompli. This is in line with candidate Trump's reaction to the decision, of which he inaccurately asserted that "It's law.... It was settled in the Supreme Court. I mean it's done."

But, on account of the plain and explicit language of the Constitution's Ninth Amendment – "The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people":

The SCOTUS...has no constitutional authority to construct some "right" of homosexuals to law-enforced marriage. If the public's right to respect the institution of marriage, as God ordains it, can be denied by judicial fiat, what of the natural parental obligations and concomitant authority that are the basic premise for the unalienable rights of natural family life? People unwilling to disrespect those rights are already being punished for it, by judges and justices hell-bent on vesting the anti-Constitution illogic of the Obergefell decision with the force of law.

...if suppression of respect for God-endowed natural family rights can be enforced as law, what becomes of the parents' right to seek, by all lawful means, to preserve their children's lives, as Alfie Evans' parents sought to do? What becomes of the medical practitioner's right to refrain from participating in the murder of nascent children by abortion? What becomes of the hospital's right to refuse to host or refer people to the houses of ill repute that practice it? Indeed, once the constitutional prohibition against denying the antecedent, God-endowed unalienable rights of the people has been discarded, the suppression of any and all such rights – including the natural right to keep and bear such arms as are required to defend them – will face no limit at all.

The Trump administration's acquiescence in the anti-constitutional jurisprudence of the SCOTUS' Obergefell decision is already bearing bad fruit. For instance, a Southern Baptist Army chaplain faces "a career-ending punishment" because he declined to include a homosexual couple in a "Strong Bonds marriage retreat" under his instruction. For "he knew he could lose his sponsorship with the Southern Baptist Convention if he violated their teachings on marriage. Apparently the Army thinks he should have risked it."

The question for people who contemplate membership in "The Church of Donald Trump" is "What does the commander in chief of the Armed Forces of the United States think?" His Christian constituents expect President Trump to champion religious liberty. But the U.S. Constitution's language protecting "the free exercise of religion" has never been construed to countenance fundamentally unlawful behavior. It does not allow for human sacrifice, for example, unless it be by specious "right" in the abortuaries of the Death Cult. But that exception illustrates the general constitutional crisis inflicted upon our nation by the SCOTUS' increasing routine violations of the Ninth Amendment.

On account of those violations, the regime of protection for our God-endowed rights is being discarded. At first in increments, but now in leaps and bounds, we are being herded toward a regime in which people have no rights government is obliged to respect. The SCOTUS has arrogantly abandoned the transcendent standard of right that is supposed to constrain governmental power in principle. Banishing the authority of God, they now enshrine the fiat power of the courts, on the pretense that whatever rights they invent must be accepted as long as, on the whole, the people acquiesce in them.

Even the late Justice Antonin Scalia embraced this deeply consequential abandonment of respect for God's transcendent authority over human justice. But once we banish the appeal to God, what recourse is left but the contest of raw power, in which those weak enough to lose have no rights but what are measured by the whims of those strong enough to win? The 20th century's record of massive atrocities shows the abominable hell into which this leads us.

The gravest symptom of our progressive enslavement to evil is the proliferation of efforts to suppress our freedom to do what's right. Tragically, too many Americans are forgetting that the righteous use of freedom defines the requisite character for all our rights. It is a definition impossible to sustain once a people casts aside its only true foundation – which is their reverent faith in the goodwill and all-exceeding power of the Creator, God. When that foundation is discarded, the standard of liberty must fall, until it once again lies equal with the dust, beneath the crushing weight of unresisted tyranny.

© Alan Keyes