Good Fences Make Good Neighbors - OpEd

In a column about a year ago, somewhat piquantly titled with the inscription at the base of The Statue of Liberty offering refuge for the world’s “Huddled Masses Yearning to Breath Free”, we ended by noting that the moral high ground that stems from the open borders we share with our immediate neighbors must be curbed to meet the post 9/11 reality. “The sense of nationhood begins with the ability to control our borders effectively. Without this we can’t begin to provide the opportunities that have characterized our country for all.”

Since then The Senate and The House of Representatives have passed starkly separate bills. Conference has been delayed while the political forces align. The President has indorsed the Senate version which provides for beefed up border security but limits its penalty to a stiff fine for those illegals already here; The Senate version also contains various bureaucratic hurdles for these immigrants including the applicants’ necessity to demonstrate his/her mastery of English and a requirement to return home years from now for final visa issuance when their turn arrives. The effect of the bill would be that it will greatly extend the period before which any illegal immigrant here now can become a citizen.

House Republicans point out that a rush to citizenship isn’t the issue. Border security is, and the Senate bill does not have its priorities straight. Whatever “guest worker” program is ultimately considered, they insist right now any law must first effectively close the border to illegal entry. The President’s response to this is to authorize dispatch of National Guard troops to our southern border with Mexico for non law enforcement support of our border authorities. About 6000 have already been dispatched, and still the “huddled masses” come in record numbers.

It is like the postal refrain that “neither rain nor snow, nor sleet nor... can deter…” these immigrants. They are unstoppable in their determination to reach freedom’s home. Proving that Democrats are not the only party with a split personality, the House Congressional leaders’ adamant insistence that Border security comes first is met by The Senate sticking to its position that a balanced bill must include a guest worker provision that does not require the 12 million illegals here already to leave. Faced with this lack of unanimity within the majority, The House Conference Managers are slow walking the scheduling of a Conference with the Senate.

There is a very real possibility that while we fiddle, our string may run out. The race for president in Mexico between a big government leftist and a free market capitalist has pitted poor versus affluent and northern province versus southern in a Mexican version of old fashioned New Deal politics. It also threatens to become the Mexican version of our 2000 election.

While Felipe Calderon, who wishes to continue the free market reforms of President Fox and remain aligned with the U.S. has a 1% margin of victory as we approach 98% in poll returns, Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador and his supporters refuse to concede . Street violence and a lengthy period of recount and challenge may occur. Regardless of outcome any prolonged uncertainty is likely to set thousands streaming north to avoid the gathering storms at home and the tightening of the border they see coming in the North. And an Obrador victory would seriously compound the consequences.

The lesson of history is that the failure to control our border creates internal pressures that ultimately can lead to the destabilization of our Republic. Border First! Resident Illegal immigrants second! That has to be our watchword. Our Roman ancestors were beset with a similar dilemma for their “peregrini” and ultimately could not control the hordes at their borders and succumbed. Today, in the interest of those immigrants already here as well as those to come, Robert Frost’s dictum that “Good Fences Make Good Neighbors” must be our watchword.

Under existing authority, planning for a fence and other obstacles to keep illegal entrants out has progressed to a point at least sufficient to supply the data on which some fencing around San Diego has already been authorized. Non government sources estimates for a “fence” effectively closing the 1951 miles of our border with Mexico run anywhere from shy of a billion dollars to north of 8 billion dollars depending on how elaborate an obstacle we decide to construct.

Passage of a border security bill that carries that fence to a reality is of the highest priority now. The issue of the 12 million that are here does not require the same level of immediate concern. Competent enforcement of existing law can permit the focus be kept in line with that portion of the House bill that creates effective border security. Surely we can accomplish this goal.

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Robert E. Freer, Jr, President of the Free Enterprise Foundation, is a Visiting Professor and the John S. Grinalds Leader in Residence at The Citadel. He is a regular contributor to the Mercury and can be reached at Robert.freer@citadel.edu. Have a favorite column from the past? Copies of his earlier columns can be found in the archive at www. FreeEnterprise.tv.

Charleston Mercury July 19, 2006. Page 16.

Last Best Hope - OpEd

Writing to Congress near the end of 1862 in the depths of a bitter national struggle with the outcome seriously in doubt, Abraham Lincoln called the country to its rendezvous with destiny:

“Fellow citizens, we cannot escape history. We of this Congress and this administration will be remembered in spite of ourselves. No personal significance, or insignificance, can spare one or another of us. The fiery trial through which we pass, will light us down, in honor or dishonor, to the last generation. We say we are for the Union. The world will not forget that we say this. We know how to save the Union. The world knows we do know how to save it. We - even we here - hold the power, and bear the responsibility. In giving freedom to the slave, we assure freedom to the free-honorable alike in what we give, and what we preserve. We shall nobly save, or meanly lose, the last best hope of earth.”

In starkly setting the stakes, in calling for the best in us all, Lincoln concisely stated what has from our founding made us different from the rest of the nations of the world. From the arrival of the first European settler, this new world accepted for itself, rising from the aspiration of its people the responsibility to always seek for the best that was in us, not just for ourselves but for the many nations from which we sprang.

Call it arrogant, call it prideful. I call it magnificent! Our best leaders have always been attuned to that spirit universal to the American saga. Our frontier pioneers did not feel they were merely felling trees. They knew to a certainty that they were felling the shackles of outdated notions regarding their relationship to the nation which they, with their sweat and their individual initiative, were creating.

They were showing the world a better way to live. In seeking freedom for the individual human spirit, they were seeking to provide the model for nation states everywhere. The citizen is possessed of the ultimate power, not the state. The citizen is primarily responsible for his or her welfare and cedes only so much power to the state as agreed in a free and fair process.

From the Virginia House of Burgesses and John Winthrop’s City on a Hill to Ronald Reagan’s now burnished city, aglow with the triumph of our example to a shining luster, our citizens have exercised their right to manage themselves, and the nation has accepted its responsibility to lead the world to a better future.

While in some quarters that fact is greeted derisively, it also cannot be denied that as a nation we have tried to be that “… Last Best Hope of Earth”, to which Lincoln, in the depths of our national agony, called us.

As a nation we have often demonstrated that when called, we will be our brother’s keeper. We have met the competing “isms” of the 19th and 20th century and triumphed. We have armed the democracies in war and rebuilt the world in peace. We have given generously of our treasury in time of famine and catastrophe abroad. While individuals may have fallen short from time to time, as a nation we have lived Lincoln’s creed and for that we should be proud.

If you read or listen to the mainstream media and believe the angst they peddle, you would believe as a people we are divided. We are not. Though we are again in a time of national challenge, deep to our core we resonate Lincoln’s summons. From Carolina’s Diamond Gate to California’s Golden Gate, we have harkened to freedom’s call for too many generations to turn aside now. Americans of the 21^st century like our ancestors of yore will prove equal to the task. While there is seldom a straight line in any human endeavor, in our current struggle against messianic terrorism, we will endure; we will succeed because we must.

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Robert E. Freer, Jr, President of the Free Enterprise Foundation, is a Visiting Professor and the John S. Grinalds Leader in Residence at The Citadel. He is a regular contributor to the Mercury and can be reached at Robert.freer@citadel.edu. Have a favorite column from the past? Copies of his earlier columns can be found in the archive at www. FreeEnterprise.tv.

Charleston Mercury July 6, 2006. Page 16.

In the Beginning - OpEd

“In The Beginning” … thus begins the book of Genesis and upon that notion’s application to us and our world is about all we can agree. The rest is speculation. Being a curious sort, man has pursued a quest to answer the ultimate questions about the origin of our world and ourselves. History reveals that that pursuit has followed many paths which we have refined into bodies of knowledge. Some are referred to as belonging to a family we have called “science”. These follow rigorous rules of inquiry, verification and then application. Others which depend upon the experience of our species, free thought and intuition ultimately, when faced with the unverifiable, depend on faith.

Science for many generations was corrupted to serve faith, and humanity was ill served by that enslavement. Since the Enlightenment a general rejection of placing the straight jacket of faith on scientific pursuit and its application to the practical and immediate has created a deep divide between scientific and faith related pursuit of the knowledge of the ultimate questions about our origin. The two communities often cannot engage in polite let alone constructive dialogue. Yet much of our nation’s extraordinary history has seen these two flourish alongside each other to enrich our soul while laying a path for unprecedented affluence and scientific progress. I have written a number of columns dealing with the meaning of separation of church and state as it was actually intended by our Founders and can assure you it was not the iron curtain envisioned by much of our current judiciary in its decisions of the past 50 years.

Two cases have come to epitomize the position of the warring parties. The first in 1925 is State of Tennessee versus John Scopes for violation of its anti evolution teaching statute and more recently in 2005, Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District which forbids the teaching of “intelligent design” in public schools as an alternative explanation for evolution. These cases act as book ends for the debate. It’s ironic that in 80 years we have gone from you can’t teach Darwinian evolutionary theory to you can’t teach anything but.

What in part is fueling the current inflammatory rhetoric on the different perspectives is the success of the scientific process itself. Our advances in understanding human DNA have themselves revealed more complex questions of biologic sequencing which boggle the mind in ever reaching a conclusion that the result could be random. While scientific inquiry continues, we have yet to come up with an explanation other than the hand of a creator. In some of what I am about to discuss, I would like to acknowledge an outstanding article by Margaret B. Edwards in the Summer 2006 issue of the University of Virginia Magazine. It is clear, concise and yet comprehensive in its attention to the speech issues as well as the scientific.

We need to understand first that Creationism is not the same as intelligent design. Intelligent design does not identify the world’s author as “God” nor deny evolution while Creationists do. What adherents of intelligent design say is that the confluence of natural phenomena that have been explained leave a number of questions that scientific principle itself suggest are beyond chance. According to Michael Behe, professor of biological sciences at Lehigh and sighted in the UVA article says that in a his research on the delineation and design and natural selection, one experiment particularly requires 40 distinctly different types of proteins to produce a working synthesis. Like life itself, which requires a greater number of syntheses than this to have evolved into homo sapiens, it “…could not have started unless an intelligent agent put the right pieces in place, together at the same time.” Adherents of intelligent design also point to weaknesses in evolutionist’s time line as further support for at least the consideration of their line of inquiry.

Darwinists say no, because what the inquiry into intelligent design pursues is the unknowable and thus not science and most certainly should not be foisted off on young impressionable minds taking high school biology……….Where have these people been? What high school students have they been exposed to? -Certainly not ones on this planet. There is not a more skeptical, questioning group on planet earth than the typical American teenager! Thus what strikes me is that the battle as being fought out in the school rooms of America isn’t over who is right but over free speech and the intellectual free pursuit of ideas. The world is being turned on its head. What was forbidden 80 years ago is now the required. And this “gag rule” is all the result of a specious argument that we are turning our classrooms into Creationist churches. What the intelligent design folks are saying is that the existence of a creator of some sort can be posited pursuant to scientific method. In the same way we can prove alternative dimensions, the presence of Quarks and other quantum physics we can posit the presence of a creator.

According to Bryce Paschal, advisor at U.Va to a campus group pushing intelligent design and himself an associate professor of biochemistry and molecular genetics at U.Va. , “Good Science identifies weak links in what is known. Science should acknowledge the shortcomings in evolutionary science, especially as regards what is known about transition species.” Much in Darwinian Theory is also inferred according to Professor Paschal. The presence of the courts in all of this seems misplaced. In Thomas Jefferson’s words, “[I]t is error alone which needs the support of government.” Left to real freedom of intellectual pursuit including the non sectarian consideration of the threads created by biology’s advances, man will sort it out and shouldn’t be prevented from including those questions and the consideration of all possible answers. As for myself, I cast myself with that other 18^th century scientist and philosopher, Benjamin Franklin. When debating the divinity of Jesus, Franklin disclaimed an opinion saying he had never studied the question and “…think it needless to busy myself with it now, when I expect soon an opportunity of knowing the Truth with less trouble.” I enjoy you, my readers so I hope it isn’t too soon.

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Robert E. Freer, Jr, President of the Free Enterprise Foundation, is a Visiting Professor and the John S. Grinalds Leader in Residence at The Citadel. He is a regular contributor to the Mercury and can be reached at Robert.freer@citadel.edu. Have a favorite column from the past? Copies of his earlier columns can be found in the archive at www. FreeEnterprise.tv.

Charleston Mercury June 22, 2006. Page 16.