Paul Ryan channels John Locke
It was a remarkable event on many levels when last Saturday morning Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney finally announced his vice-presidential running mate, Rep. Paul Ryan, in a speech in Norfolk, Va. Besides satisfying Romney’s disillusioned, conservative base, Ryan’s speech was a pure philosophical moment. As the Wisconsin congressman delivered his acceptance speech, the audience heard words it hadn’t heard on a national stage since Ronald Reagan 30 years ago. If you think Ryan’s words regarding the natural contract between government, man and God sounded a lot like the constitutional framers, you were on to something.
Ryan said to thunderous applause:
“But America is more than just a place … it’s an idea. It’s the only country founded on an idea. Our rights come from nature and God, not government. We promise equal opportunity, not equal outcomes. This idea is founded on the principles of liberty, freedom, free enterprise, self-determination and government by consent of the governed.”
In what the Blaze called a “direct conceptual channeling,” Ryan’s speech freely quoted the words of John Locke (1632-1704), the great English political philosopher whose Second Treatise of Civil Government (1690) greatly affected the ideas of America’s Founding Fathers and directed how the framers insisted on an integration between legality and morality, politics and God and, most importantly of course, church and state. Ryan’s speech channeling Locke was a magnificent demonstration of the essential founding principles of the nation.
In Locke’s Second Treatise on Government, he wrote that “freedom of men under government is to have a standing rule to live by but as freedom of nature is, to be under no other restraint but the law of nature and God.” That’s where Thomas Jefferson got what I consider the eight most important words of the Declaration of Independence: “… the law of Nature and of Nature’s God.”
In my 2002 book, “The Inseparability of Law and Morality: The Constitution, Natural Law and the Rule of Law,” I answer the question: What writers and writings most influenced the constitutional framers? I wrote: “To answer this question, University of Houston political science professors Donald Lutz and Charles Hyneman in 1985 published a monumental study that took them 10 years to bring together. They amassed over 15,000 items, including 2,200 books, newspaper articles, pamphlets and monographs of political materials written between1760-1805 and discovered that the three writers the constitutional framers quoted from the most often were: 1) Barron Montesquieu (1689-1755), 2) William Blackstone (1723-80), and 3) John Locke (1632-1704). Incidentally, all of these men were strong adherents of Natural Law philosophy, which believed in an inseparable connection between law and morality.”
Category: Uncategorized
The eBook ON GARD, OBAMA, YOU ARE AN UNCONSTITUTIONAL PRESIDENT BECAUSE YOU ARE NOT A NATURAL-BORN CITIZEN, WHICH I SHALL PROVE BEYOND A REASONABLE DOUBT, available at Amazon, shows that Emer de Vattel had a greater impact than Locke on the Constitution and even more on the Declaration of Independence. It also proves that Obama is an unconstitutional president, which perhaps Ryan would have learned had he not returned a complimentary copy based on Congressional rules banning the acceptance of it.
The eBook ON GARD, OBAMA, YOU ARE AN UNCONSTITUTIONAL PRESIDENT BECAUSE YOU ARE NOT A NATURAL-BORN CITIZEN, WHICH I SHALL PROVE BEYOND A REASONABLE DOUBT, available at Amazon, shows that Emer de Vattel had a greater impact than Locke on the Constitution and even more on the Declaration of Independence. It also proves that Obama is an unconstitutional president, which perhaps Ryan would have learned had he not returned a complimentary copy based on Congressional rules banning the acceptance of it.
The eBook ON GARD, OBAMA, YOU ARE AN UNCONSTITUTIONAL PRESIDENT BECAUSE YOU ARE NOT A NATURAL-BORN CITIZEN, WHICH I SHALL PROVE BEYOND A REASONABLE DOUBT, available at Amazon, shows that Emer de Vattel had a greater impact than Locke on the Constitution and even more on the Declaration of Independence. It also proves that Obama is an unconstitutional president, which perhaps Ryan would have learned had he not returned a complimentary copy based on Congressional rules banning the acceptance of it.