Filed under: Northwest Ordinance

The Morality of Civility

"'Tis substantially true that virtue or morality is a necessary spring of popular government.  Who that is a sincere friend to it, can look with Indifference upon attempts to shake the foundation of the fabric?" (George Washington, Farewell Address, 1796).*

 

The Northwest Ordinance is a rock-solid example of the nonsectarian religious predicate embraced as constitutional law.  When the Articles of Confederation was replaced by the new Constitution, the Northwest Ordinance was passed again and became effective under the new Constitution.  George Washington signed the Northwest Ordinance back into law on August 7, 1789.  Article III specified "Religion, morality, and knowledge, being necessary to good government and the happiness of mankind, schools and the means of education, shall forever be encouraged."**  During this same period of time (July 17 to August 7, 1789), the same men who had implemented the Northwest Ordinance were writing the First Amendment to the Constitution [prohibiting government officials from interfering with religious freedom, printing press and education competition].

 

Even some atheists and skeptics realize the inviolate nature of what Americans call the "laws of God and creation's nature."  Ernest Renan, the agnostic, warned his friends: "Let us enjoy the liberty of the sons of God, but let us take care lest we become accomplices in the diminution of virtue which would menace society if Christianity were to grow weak.  What should we do without it?  If Rationalism wishes to govern the world without regard to the religious needs of the soul, the experience of the French Revolution is there to teach us the consequences of such a blunder."***

 

History summarizes the nature of war against responsible citizen self-rule and liberty.  When Whittaker Chambers left the Communist party, he feared that the world would succumb to the parasitic nature of socialistic promises.  He said that the only hope was to discover "a power of faith which will provide mans' mind, at an intensity, with the same two certainties: a reason to live and reason to die."**** President Reagan angered leftist sympathizers in American media and universities by using the word "evil."  On March 8, 1983, Reagan said the Cold War would "never be decided by bombs and rockets…"  We would prevail because of belief in God.  What is teaching moral revisionism (objected to by over 90 percent of taxpayers, teachers, and administrators) now accomplishing in student minds' in captive public schools?  Reagan concluded, the strength to prevail "is not material but spiritual."*****

 

*http://avalon.law.yale.edu/18th_century/washing.asp

**http://teachingamericanhistory.org/library/index.asp?document=48

***http://www.scribd.com/doc/79320764/HISTORY-OF-CHRISTIANITY

****http://www.heritage.org/research/reports/2001/04/whittaker-chambers-man-of-co...

*****http://usa.usembassy.de/etexts/speeches/evilempire.htm

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Every Citizen Has Power to Advance Liberty in November

Support legislative candidates who recognize the benefit of routing taxpayer revenues for education directly to parents or other guardians.  They may then choose homeschool, private school or a charter school that reflects their values.  Texas legislators are now even backing "charter colleges."  They could be "core curriculum charters" that would offer "great books seminars," including courses on Bible, Renaissance, Reformation and, of course, American values resident in the Declaration of Independence.  Charter colleges would receive per-student funding as charter K-12 do now.*

 

Elect people to serve on school boards who will insist that the unique and specific American principles for government be taught.  In 1877, the United States government printing office published The Organic Laws of the United States of America.  Ben Poole, who was then clerk of printing records, compiled the documentation under an order by the U.S. Senate.  The Organic Laws of the United States of America lists the Declaration of Independence, Articles of Confederation, Northwest Ordinance and the Constitution on the United States.  Share this study with your school board.

 

Support candidates at federal and state levels who agree to work for the appointment of judges who respect the original meaning of the Constitution.  "Judge Robert H. Bork describes the enormous damage that activist judges have inflicted on America in his book, Coercing Virtue: The Worldwide Rule of Judges.  The courts are often dominated by faux intellectuals of the Left who, unable to persuade the people or the legislators, 'avoid the verdict of the ballot box' by engaging in 'politics masquerading as law.'  We are 'increasingly governed not by law or elected representatives, but by unelected, unrepresentative, unaccountable committees of lawyers applying no law other than their own will.'"**

 

Work for and elect senators and representatives to the U.S. Congress who will reassert their duty to represent the people and restore the Constitutional provisions for restricting the role of federal judges.  The Constitution is a rule of law document, not a rule by unelected judges.  In terms of how authority manifests itself over time, the two contrasts represent the distinction between representative government of, by and for the people and the tyranny of authoritarianism.  In terms of philosophy, the two represent the distinction between the Creator-based Declaration of Independence and the evils of old European secular philosophy.  When the traditional American sovereignty of man under God over government was adopted on July 4, 1776, it reversed the historical inevitability of authoritarian carnage.

 

"Now more than ever before, the people are responsible for the character of their Congress.  If that body be ignorant, reckless and corrupt, it is because the people tolerate ignorance, recklessness and corruption.  If it be intelligent, brave and pure, it is because the people demand these high qualities to represent them in the national legislature… If the next centennial does not find us a great nation… it will be because those who represent the enterprise, the culture, and the morality of the nation do not aid in controlling the political forces."***

 

 

Timthumb

*Quotes from Marvin Olasky, "Academic Perestroika," World, December 5, 2009, www.worldmag.com/marvinolasky?ndxpage=3.

**Phyllis Schlafly, The Supremacists:  The Tyranny of Judges and How to Stop It (Dallas: Spence Publishing Company, 2004), 14.

***James Garfield, the twentieth president of the United States, 1877 (http://www.propertyrightsresearch.org/presidential_quotes.htm).>

 

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For more information or to purchase Restoring Education Central to American Greatness:

http://bookstore.iuniverse.com/Products/SKU-000185969/Restoring-Education-Cen...

http://www.amazon.com/Restoring-Education-Greatness-Principles-Liberated/dp/1...

http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/restoring-education-david-a-norris/1103308053...

 

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The Paper Trail of Our Constitution II

In 1776, on February 28, George Washington acknowledged a poem written in his honor and sent to him by Phillis Wheatley.  "To His Excellency General Washington"   was the title.  This occurred before the Declaration of Independence was completed and accepted by the Continental Congress.  Who was Phillis Wheatley?  She had been captured in Senegal/Gambia at the age of seven or eight and sold in Boston to John and Susanna Wheatley.  They treated her lovingly as a daughter and taught her to read and write; she even learned Latin.  An accomplished poet, she was an admirer of the minister George Whitefield and a strong supporter of independence from Great Britain.

 

The Northwest Ordinance passed in 1787 by the Continental Congress was helpful as the new constitution was drafted.  It specified the requirements of territories seeking statehood.  The ordinance declared:  "The fundamental principles of civil and religious liberty, which form the basis whereon these republics, their laws, and constitutions are erected; to fix and establish those principles as the basis of all laws, constitutions, and governments, which forever hereafter shall be formed in the said territory: to provide also for the establishment of States, and permanent government therein, and for their admission to a share in the federal councils on an equal footing with the original States, at as early periods as may be consistent with the general interest."*

 

Also known as the Freedom Ordinance, the Northwest Ordinance is a rock-solid example of the nonsectarian religious predicate embraced as constitutional law.  When the Articles of Confederation was replaced by a new constitution, the Northwest Ordinance was passed again and became effective under the Constitution.  George Washington signed the Northwest Ordinance back into law on August 7, 1789.  The ordinance also prohibited slavery in any new state, and Article III specified that "Religion, morality, and knowledge, being necessary to good government and the happiness of mankind, schools and the means of education, shall forever be encouraged."**

 

"During this same period of time (July 17 to August 7, 1789), the same men who had implemented the Northwest Ordinance were writing the First Amendment to the Constitution [prohibiting government officials from interfering with religious freedom, printing press and education competition]."***

 

In 1792, James Madison, in his Essay, Who Are the Keepers of the People's Liberties?, said, "Although all men are born free, and all nations might be so, yet too true it is, that slavery has been the general lot of the human race.  Ignorant--they have been cheated; asleep--they have been surprised; divided--the yoke has been forced upon them.  But what is the lesson?  That because the people may betray themselves, they ought to give themselves up, blindfold, to those who have an interest in betraying them?  Rather conclude that the people ought to be enlightened, to be awakened, to be united."  Madison served as the fourth president of the United States and is considered to be the principal author of the United States Constitution.  In 1788, he wrote over a third of the Federalist Papers, still the most influential commentary on the Constitution.  James Madison wrote the first ten amendments to the Constitution, also known as the Bill of Rights.  

 

The Declaration of Independence condemned slavery, but it took a war to make it enforceable.  On January 1, 1863, near the end of that war, Abraham Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation that reversed its momentum.

 

"The consequence is, that happiness of society is the first law of every government.  The people have a right to insist that this rule be observed; and are entitled to demand a moral security that the legislature will observe it.  If they have not the first right, they are slaves; if they have not the second right [moral security], they are, every moment, exposed to slavery" (U.S. Supreme Court Justice James Wilson, Lectures, 1790-91).


Phillis_wheatley

Phillis Wheatley

1753? - 1784

 

*Education Resources Information Center website, ED285786.  Teaching about the US Constitution and the Northwest Ordinance.

**http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Daniel_Webster

***David Barton, Education and the Founding Fathers (Aledo, Texas: Wallbuilder Press, 1993), 4.

****http://www.archives.gov/exhibits/featured_documents/emancipation_proclamation...

 

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NOTE ~ more information on Wheatley at http://www.enotes.com/his-excellency and http://www.lkwdpl.org/wihohio/whea-phi.htm

 

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