Yesterday’s sermon from the Reverend Glenn Beck was a revelation into the source of the rights enjoyed by the American people. His examination of these holy endowments was undertaken with his customary superficiality.
The sermon began with Beck chastising Sen. Tom Harkin (D-IA) for his determination to treat health care as a right. That blasphemy was too much for Beck to endure.
Beck: Harkin is declaring Congress as God, because we all know where the rights come from. If you read the Declaration of Independence there’s a phrase from the Declaration of Independence on where those rights come from. You may have heard it before. It goes something like this: We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. […] God is the grantor of rights. No one else.
This is going to come as a surprise to Constitutional scholars and legal experts. According to Beck, it was God who established freedom of speech. And the bearing of arms is also a gift from the Most High. And apparently God didn’t take kindly to the quartering of troops, but He did insist on jury trials and reasonable bail. These rights are just a few that are enumerated in the Bill of Rights whose preamble begins with…
RESOLVED by the Senate and House of Representatives of the United States of America, in Congress assembled, two thirds of both Houses concurring, that the following Articles be proposed to the Legislatures of the several States…
Apparently these lawmakers think that they are the grantors of rights. And they continued to believe that as they persisted in drafting additional amendments to the Constitution and passing thousands of other laws. Amongst these are rights like being permitted to vote if you’re a woman or not having to be a slave. God must have overlooked those rights when the Constitution was originally ratified. Or maybe He didn’t consider them unalienable. At any rate, it’s a good thing that legislators got around to cleaning up God’s mess.
The only difference between health care being a right and it being a profit center for greedy, compassionless corporations is the passage of a bill and the signature of a president. It doesn’t require God’s endorsement. That’s a political framework more aligned with the Taliban than with democracy. Maybe that’s why Beck doesn’t understand it. After all, “democracy” has many of the same letters as “Democrat.” Hmm? Coincidence?
The Declaration of Independence gave specific examples of what the framers considered to be unalienable rights (life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness). They were all general principles that the framers regarded as foundational to a free society. However, the actual rights were established by legislators and citizens who were decidedly mortal, contrary to Beck’s assertion that no one else but God can grant rights. Beck’s inability to comprehend the role of law is boundless. This should come as no surprise to anyone who has heard his interpretation of law.
For instance, lately Beck has escalated his rhetorical ravings to maligning progressives as … I’ll give you one guess … that’s right, fascists (what else?). In a hilarious fit of befuddlement he has taken to charging that progressives were responsible for Prohibition. Never mind that it was largely church-based temperance groups who campaigned for the 18th Amendment, and the enacting legislation, the Volstead Act, was proposed by Andrew Volstead, a Minnesota Republican. That bill was subsequently vetoed by Woodrow Wilson, whom Beck regards as the father of modern progressivism and whom Beck has called “One evil SOB.”
So contrary to Beck’s claim, it was religious fundamentalists and Republicans who gave us Prohibition, in spite of Wilson’s veto, which was over-ridden by Congress. And the kicker is that, when the nation realized its mistake, it was Heber J. Grant, an apostle in the Church of Latter-day Saints (Beck’s Mormon Church), and the LDS who led the fight against repealing the 18th Amendment. Once again, reality is diametrically opposed to Beck’s perverse perception of it. But he is devoted to his dementia. The more absurd, the tighter he grips. Until he he ends up spewing nonsense like this:
Beck: More and more Americans are finding themselves where I am. In a place where you don’t want to believe the stuff that you now do. Even the stuff that you would have thought a year ago was crazy town. But you do believe it because you’re honest with yourself. You promised yourself, as I have, to seek the truth no matter how many times you think about it. No matter how many times you think, “Oh my gosh, what does this mean to my future or the future to my children.” If it makes me a pariah, so be it. It is the truth, not stuff I want to believe. But everything is in jeopardy. Our children’s future is at stake.
Yes, Glenn is stuck believing things from crazy town that he doesn’t want to believe. He seeks the truth no matter how many times he has to think about it. And he manages somehow to carry on though everything is in jeopardy. On the plus side, it’s fortunate that he is comfortable being a pariah.
