Ben Carson had an illustrious career performing delicate brain surgery. He devoted many years of his life to studying and preparing for that work, so that when, in the life of his patients, a crisis came upon them that required his skills, he would have the knowledge, experience and temperament to deal with it. Today surgery in general, and brain surgery in particular, is looked upon with awe, because it involves exacting and delicate work during which a slight slip of the hand can cause damage that ruins the operation, leading to the patient’s immediate death, or such harm as to make the life that follows little better than a living death.
Dr. Carson’s professional training was intended to make sure that he could deal unerringly with situations in which an untrained person would be overwhelmed by the complexity and danger they involve. Thanks to that training, he could work routinely on the razor’s edge that separates healing from killing. Looking into a situation where an untrained eye had not the slightest hint of the path from imminent death to life renewed, he not only saw the path clearly, he had a clear sense of the dangers he would encounter along the way, and the measures required to deal with what a startled layman would react to as unexpected.
I wonder what Dr. Carson would think and feel if he were forced to watch such a layman perform even a “routine” surgery on any patient, much less someone he himself cared about or deeply loved. Hard as it is, however, I suspect I have some inkling of it as I watch him face what are, in fact, the routine challenges of the task he now purports to undertake. He is offering himself as the best choice for the office of President of the United States. He is appealing for the support of Americans who are committed to conserving the republican form of government the U.S. Constitution requires every important government official in the United State to uphold. That support is, at this stage in the electoral path he has chosen, indispensable to his chances of victory. To make this appeal, Dr. Carson is claiming to represent conservative views. He therefore presents himself as a Christian, pro-life champion of what some such conservatives call “family values.”
But what may prove to be the elitist faction’s final general offensive against these views is presently fully under way. That offensive aims to eliminate the form of government in which government’s powers are limited in respect of the people mutually committed to “stand firm in the right, as God gives us to see the right”; and in which government derives its powers from their consent, i.e., their willingness conscientiously to exercise the unalienable rights with which they are thus endowed by their Creator.
Given the elitist faction’s general offensive against God-endowed right, in American politics today, any and all such rights are under massive assault. With the co-operation of the GOP’s quisling leadership, as well as a blatantly prejudiced majority on the U.S. Supreme Court, Obama and the Democrats are advancing on every front toward their goal of eliminating them. They are succeeding in the effort to impose a government on the American people that wields unlimited power to do “good” as defined by the socialist/communist ideology of two-party dictatorship.
In this respect, the American people are like a patient facing a life-threatening crisis of our body politic. Unfortunately, Dr. Carson’s skills as a brain surgeon have not prepared him to perform the delicate operation required to deal with this crisis, even when the attack takes the form of routine symptoms anyone familiar with the disease should deal with easily. So, when asked whether he would accept a Muslim as President, he emphatically says “NO,” taking no account of the Constitutional provision that plainly states that “no religious test shall ever be required for any office under the United States.”
There are good and valid arguments against putting anyone in the Office of President known to be deeply committed to an understanding of right, rights and law that violates principles and provisions of the U.S. Constitution. I and others have made those arguments repeatedly. But they must be made in a way that takes account of the Constitution’s words. If not, the result is like that of a surgeon who makes a correct move in an operation, but with a careless slip nicks an artery, or damages the integrity of some vital organ. Is there an organ whose integrity is more vital to the operation of our republican form of government than the Constitution?
In a similar vein, when Dr. Carson was asked for a response to the U.S. Supreme Court’s Obergerfell decision, he took pains to serve his political ambition rather, than America’s principles, by reiterating his opposition to same-sex marriage, for he reached the conclusion that the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision is the “law of the land” and must therefore be enforced.
Aside from the fact that this notion of the Court’s supremacy outside its sphere vitiates the separate and equal status of the different powers of government within their proper spheres, it also ignores the fact that the particular decision in this case involved:
- Blatantly prejudicial words and actions by members of the Court that utterly destroyed any pretense of impartiality, permanently degrading the actual authority of the Court as presently composed.
- Blatantly disparaging the God endowed unalienable rights (e.g., parental authority and responsibility) that attach to the activities of individuals in the context of marriage between a man and a woman.
- Blatant disregard of the plainly stated provisions of the 9th and 10th Amendments to the U.S. Constitution, which puts the U.S. Supreme Court in the position of demanding that State and local government officials contravene the provision of the 14th Amendment that prohibits any state from making or enforcing “any law” that “abridges the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States.”
To say that something is “the law of the land” when it ignores and directly contravenes the U.S. Constitution, which is “the supreme law of the land,” is patently absurd. Abraham Lincoln understood this when he opposed the view that the U.S. Supreme Court’s Dred Scott decision, enforcing slavery in all the States, was the law of the land. Lincoln did so even though it was generally accepted in his day that state laws enforcing the terms of slavery were constitutionally valid. Would Dr. Carson have opposed Lincoln? Would he have contended that Dred Scott was the law of the land, even though it violated the premises of unalienable right that ultimately uphold the legitimate authority by which the people of the United States ordain and establish the Constitution?
Dr. Ben Carson is obviously no Abraham Lincoln. Lincoln was not a man whose educational credentials instantly proved his superior intellect. But Lincoln was a man who had studied to apply common sense and moral reasoning in an effort to think through and apply America’s founding principles, as articulated in the Declaration of Independence. He was a man who had pondered the lessons of tyranny, and the self-evident truths that demand that any American statesman worthy of the name, act with the understanding that freedom becomes the broad road to absolute despotism when liberty is misconstrued to include the enforcement of actions that interfere with, disparage or violate the exercise of God-endowed unalienable right.
Tragically, many so-called Republicans have been steeped in the elitist faction’s disdain for the premises of America’s liberty, as set forth in the Declaration of Independence. They share Dr. Carson’s self-proclaimed “pragmatism” in this disrespect. They agree with him when he compares giving priority to issues of moral principle like abortion and so-called “gay marriage” to scraping barnacles off the hull of a sinking ship. They join him in believing that it’s more important to “get things done” than to insist that what is done accords with the Creator’s program for right, rights and liberty. They look forward with satisfaction to the administrative tyranny with which the elitist faction aims to replace our Constitution. They shrink from the egalitarian character of government of, by, and for people committed to the exercise of right.
Like Obama, Dr. Carson covers this abandonment of American principle with a mask that abuses the moral capital amassed in the course of black American history. To one such as myself, this similarity is one more reason to lament, as a true tragedy, the ongoing demise of America’s true birthright of liberty. And one more reason to go on with the work of upholding, in our politics, a true sense of that birthright– no matter what the personal cost.