• Self-appointed elite are taking away our rights

  • So has it always been that the arrogance of officialdom, and the self-appointed elite know what is best for their fellow citizens.
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  • Dec. 27 — To the Editor:
    Once on this continent and in these now-sovereign states, the arrogance of power held sway over a people learning to be self-sufficient and experimenting with self government. The heavy-handed arrogance of aristocracy and a king who thought he was God finally caused the spark of liberty to burst forth into a flame and set the colonies afire. Men, farmers, shopkeepers, doctors, sailors left their occupations to learn the arts of war so that they could be free men in a free land. We have enjoyed this freedom from that time, 'til now.
    In this day, the old affront to freedom, the arrogance of power of those who are self-appointed to run others' lives again has broken out like a new wave of the black death that once nearly wiped out Europe. Only now, it is not men's bodies that are to be buried, it is their rights as free citizens to be able to live as they please and to order their own lives that is in danger of burial. This burial is under the dirty soil of officialdom, bureaucrats, mindless regulations, minute rules and a self-serving new aristocracy in Washington, D.C., that cares little for their oaths to protect and defend the Constitution and the rights it was meant to give to a free people.
    We now have myriad agencies with the power to make laws through the rule-making process, thus legislation is made without the elected Legislature. We now have a president who, when he cannot get the Legislature to pass a law he wants, rules by executive order and bypasses the rule of law. When laws have been passed by the houses of Congress and are in force, President Barack Obama decides not that it is his sworn duty to uphold and enforce these laws, but that he can and will selectively enforce those he likes and refuse to enforce those with which he disagrees. This makes the law of none effect and the elected Legislature, for all practical purposes, an unnecessary body.
    Will we allow freedom bought with so high a price and a Constitution so precious to a free people to be taken away one executive order at a time, and one new bureaucratic rule after another? "Obamacare" is just the latest in the long link of chains forged to entangle a free people in the yoke of bondage. The president celebrates freedom for South Africa at the funeral of Nelson Mandela, while at home, he and his officials hammer out the latest links in the chains they shackle us all with. We, the people, were promised jobs, lower-cost health care, lower federal deficits, a more transparent government, etc. We have received, instead, an arrogant elite who considers us inferior and incompetent to rule ourselves.
    In another area of our lives, which is vital to a free people, is the right to property. James Madison, then a congressman, in an essay to a New York newspaper, said, "A man has a property in his opinions and the free communication of them. He has a property of peculiar value in his religious opinions, and in the profession and practice dictated by them."
    Today, this government and its courts have trampled over the property, the opinion, the practices of the Catholic Church, and of those persons holding beliefs that in conscience prohibits them from serving in the matter of homosexual practices — i.e. a baker being fined for his failure to provide a cake for a homosexual wedding, the private innkeeper who cannot, under religious conscience, provide lodging to homosexual couples. In the long list of wrongs, lies and chains forged upon a free people, the greatest outrage is the attack on a man's freedom of conscience — the most basic of all rights.
    James Madison understood this; President Obama either does not, or chooses to disregard that right for his own agenda.
    William D. Tappan
    Eliot, Maine
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