Governor Rick Perry is FED UP With Washington

While topics explored on this blog are not primarily political in nature, as Archbishop Raymond Burke expressed in his pastoral letter (2004), On Our Civic Responsibility for the Common Good, as American citizens, we Catholics have a grave civic responsibility to promote the common good by voting for worthy candidates who uphold the moral law in its integrity.

"As Catholics, informed by the perennial moral teaching of the Church, we bear an especially heavy burden of responsibility for the attacks on human life and the family in our society. If all Catholics in our nation, both Catholic voters and Catholic government leaders, had joined those Catholics and others who upheld and continue to uphold the moral law, the grave evils which plague our society would be lessened and eventually eliminated. We cannot remain silent. We have a most serious obligation to bring the moral law to bear upon our life in society, so that the good of all will be served.” (No. 47)

Governor Rick Perry of Texas has produced, with a little help from some friends' well-documented research, a substantive case against Washington's incompetency and overbearing intrusion into the lives of the American citizenry and what he sees as a serious assault on the tenth amendment, the federal government’s direct attack on the constitutional principles of enumeration of powers.

Fed Up! Our Fight To Save America from Washington is not another narcissistic puff piece we see so much of especially when national elections come around. It is brief (188 pages) but packs a lot of heavily documented facts about the ongoing battles in recent memory on sovereignty issues between Washington and the states. (The U.S. Attorney General's lawsuit against Arizona's enforcement of federal immigration laws is one that comes to mind.)

It’s worthwhile to recall in the chapter about states doing the work of the people how Texas magnanimously and spontaneously came to the aid of the suffering people of New Orleans in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina without any federal guarantee of financial aid.

Governor Perry takes aim equally at the Democratic and Republican Party establishments and the gargantuan executive, congressional, and judicial branches of the federal government. He names names and gives ample examples.

This reader especially appreciated Perry’s insights about the erosion of our nation’s founding moral principles delivered from the hands of nine unelected judges. I highly recommend this book to anyone interested in the future of America and how a conservative governor in one of the largest states in America is changing the game and challenging the ruling class. I leave you with some notable excerpts:

“Our Right to Faith in the Public Square”

“As is reasonably well known now, the Court turned 175 years of American history on its head when in 1962 it ended state-sponsored school prayer in New York and in 1963 ended the reading of the Lord’s Prayer and Bible verses in schools in Pennsylvania. By 1992, the court had extended these restrictions to moments of silence and to prayer at public graduation ceremonies…

“The court itself has created a complex and entirely incomprehensible morass of multipronged tests to determine what is permissible… and otherwise set out on a course to diminish or eliminate religious expression in the public square, ignoring the Founders’ reservation of such decisions to the states.” (pp. 102-103)

“Our Ability to Protect Innocent Life”

“But perhaps no issue and no Supreme Court decision has polarized America more and defined the notion of judicial activism more clearly than the matter of abortion…the Court decided in 1963 that the people of Connecticut were unconstitutionally outlawing the sale of contraceptives, because – it imagined – in the ‘penumbras’ of the Constitution there is a right to privacy that prohibits policy. Penumbras? What total and complete nonsense…

“That the issue is a difficult one and invokes strong emotion makes it no less outrageous that nine unelected judges took it upon themselves to declare when life begins and did so based on total fiction. And perhaps worst of all, the Court’s creation of a right to privacy in the Constitution has become a springboard for even more activism.” (pp. 107-108)

“Our Ability to Define Marriage”

“Leave it to the modern liberal to take an institution  that has served as the bedrock of civilization for thousands of years and find a way to make it controversial…. I believe that in the next five years, the United States Supreme Court will rule that it is unconstitutional to recognize marriage as only between one man and one woman.

“… [T]he Massachusetts Supreme Court struck down that state’s ban on homosexual marriage. There have been numerous such rulings since, including in early 2010 when a federal district judge in Massachusetts struck down significant parts of the federal Defense of Marriage Act…

“Gay marriage will soon be the policy of the United States, irrespective of federalism, the Constitution, or the wishes of the American people. Not because it actually is protected in the Constitution, because judges will declare it so.” (pp. 109-110)

To learn Rick Perry’s prescriptions for taking back the reins of government, well, you’ll have to get a copy of the book to gain insights into his plans… or what may turn out to be the blueprint for the seasoned Texas governor’s election campaign for the Presidency.