Perilous Times

Ray Agnew was Rising Star, Texas’ affable and generous grocer. In a 2000 square foot store on Main Street, Ray offered as much as he could at a fair price. You either shopped at Agnew’s or you drove 30 miles to get your Campbell’s soup.

One day, Ray decided to send head cashier Betty to the meat department and brought Bob up from hacking meat to run the register. An hour after the switcheroo, the town mayor walked in and crowed “Where’s Betty?” 

“Makin’ hamburger,” groused Bob, covered in blood and doling out S&H Greenstamps.

“Well, I don’t like that one little bit,” scowled the mayor who immediately went back to his cheap paneled office and wrote up a $250,00 fine against Ray Agnew for… “for disturbin’ mah peace.”

Sound ridiculous… “disturbing” even? Did this really happen or is Clark H Smith just hyperbolizin’ again?

In fact, this DID happen. No, Ray Agnew never switched staff and he never got fined.  But that doesn’t mean it didn’t happen. In fact, it happened just last week. NBA Totalitarian Commish, David Stern, fined the San Antonio Spurs a quarter mil for not taking his top players on a road trip.

And I’m fine with that. The A in NBA stands for “association”.  Although the individual teams are franchises, they still belong to a closed association which gets to make and enforce its own rules… regardless of whether they make sense or seem fair “in the real world”. The NBA is not the real world. It’s a fake world of made-up rules. Don’t judge it. Everyone in the NBA signed off on the fake rules.

The “Agnew Problem” becomes a problem when these things DO happen in the real world - specifically, when government tells you that you have to do things because, well… because the government says so.

No surprise, our next illustration comes from France – and it’s no pretend story as much as you might think it should be. The mayor of Lhéraule has decreed that visitors to the town hall will be asked to leave the building if they do not say ‘hello’ or ‘thank you’ to staff. Can he do that?

He actually admits he can’t: “There is no law in France that forces people to say hello, and there’s no judge who will condemn someone for not saying it.”

So the mayor admits that his cheese stinks, his wine is sour, and his edicts are unsupported legally. Tough truffles, he’s committed to enforcing a practice that is patently unconstitutional. Let's see how that plays out.

Incroyable!! Well, yes, a political leader mandating unconstitutional actions is quite incredible. But, my friend, it is happening… and not just in rural France.

President Obama takes a dim view of the US Constitution.  He sees it as a charter or negative liberties because it doesn’t “say what the federal government or state government must do on your behalf”. We’ve actually seen through Obamacare that Obama believes the Constitution is weak because it doesn’t say what the government can make you do – such as buy a product or service. Just like a French town mayor demanding politeness by an edict that contravenes the real-world rules, Obama’s “individual mandate” edict also offends the US Constitution. Unlike the pretend rules of David Stern’s association, Obama actually has a set of real rules to which he, and the rest of us, are accountable.

(Pssst, don’t try to tell me the individual purchase mandate was upheld by the Supreme Court. You know it was not. A “tax” was upheld by the Court and Obama denies it’s a tax. Finé.)

I once had the gross displeasure to work with a young man fresh from Canadia – America’s Cap. He was from the French side of the cap. Here in America, he was a youth pastor shaping young American minds. He once notably uttered that "Communism is enforced Christianity". Yup, Jesus was something like Karl Marx’s older brother and everything that Jesus taught us was the underpinning of the beauty that is Communism. (I can happily tell you I personally orchestrated his firing.)

Maybe that’s all Christianity is, a bunch of rules about sharing, but Christianity is also a take it or leave it proposition. There’s NO RULE that says you have to believe in it. And even if there was a rule, like being polite in a French town hall, it doesn’t mean you believe it in your heart.

America is neither Christian nor French… nor the NBA. Even those in power cannot unilaterally impose made-up behaviors on American citizens. We have a Constitution that, whether or not you believe in it, controls what the government can do to us.

We’re still, if barely, are a land where the Ray Agnew’s of the world can run their store the way they like, but we’ve also seen where an American president has set aside the Constitution he doesn’t believe in.  We live in perilous times. Throughout history, such circumstances did not end well.

Clark H Smith