Declaration of Independence

The Declaration of Independence
07/04/1776

When in the course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth the separate and equal station to which the laws of nature and of nature’s God entitles them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. That to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed. That whenever any form of government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or to abolish it and to institute new government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form as to them shall seem most likely to effect their safety and happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly, all experience hath shown that mankind are more disposed to suffer while evils are sufferable than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same object, evinces a design to reduce them under absolute despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such government and to provide new guards for their future security. Such has been the patient sufferance of these Colonies; and such is now the necessity which constrains them to alter their former systems of governments. The history of the present King of Great Britain is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute tyranny over these States. To prove this, let facts be submitted to a candid world.

He has refused his assent to laws, the most wholesome and necessary for the public good.

He has forbidden his Governors to pass laws of immediate and pressing importance, unless suspended in their operation till his assent should be obtained; and when so suspended, he has utterly neglected to attend to them.

He has refused to pass other laws for the accommodation of large districts of people unless those people would relinquish the right of representation in the legislature, a right inestimable to them and formidable to tyrants only.

He has called together legislative bodies at places unusual, uncomfortable, and distant from the depository of their public records, for the sole purpose of fatiguing them into compliance with his measures.

He has dissolved representative Houses repeatedly for opposing with manly firmness his invasion on the rights of the people.

He has refused for a long time, after such dissolutions, to cause others to be elected; whereby the legislative powers, incapable of annihilation, have returned to the people at large for their exercise; the State remaining in the meantime exposed to all the dangers of invasion from without and convulsions within.

He has endeavored to prevent the population of these States; for that purpose obstructing the laws for naturalization of foreigners; refusing to pass others to encourage their migrations hither, and raising the conditions of new appropriations of lands.

He has obstructed the administration of justice by refusing his assent to laws for establishing judiciary powers.

He has made judges dependent on his will alone for the tenure of their offices and the amount and payment of their salaries.

He has erected a multitude of new offices and sent hither swarms of officers to harass our people and eat out their substance.

He has kept among us, in times of peace, standing armies without the consent of our legislature.

He has affected to render the military independent of and superior to the civil power.

He has combined with others to subject us to a jurisdiction foreign to our constitution and unacknowledged by our laws; giving his assent to their acts of pretended legislation:
For quartering large bodies of armed troops among us:

For protecting them, by a mock trial, from punishment for any murders which they should commit on the inhabitants of these States:

For cutting off our trade with all parts of the world:

For imposing taxes on us without our consent:

For depriving us in many cases of the benefits of trial by jury:

For transporting us beyond seas to be tried for pretended offenses:

For abolishing the free system of English laws in a neighboring province, establishing therein an arbitrary government, and enlarging its boundaries so as to ren-der it at once an example and fit instrument for introducing the same absolute rule into these Colonies:

For taking away our charters, abolishing our most valuable laws, and altering fundamentally the forms of our governments:

For suspending our own legislatures, and declaring themselves invested with power to legislate for us in all cases whatsoever.

He has abdicated government here, by declaring us out of his protection and waging war against us.

He has plundered our seas, ravaged our coasts, burnt our towns, and destroyed the lives of our people.

He is at this time transporting large armies of foreign mercenaries to compleat the works of death, desolation and tyranny, already begun with circumstances of cruelty and perfidy scarcely paralleled in the most barbarous ages, and totally unworthy the head of a civilized nation.

He has constrained our fellow citizens taken captive on the high Seas to bear Arms against their country, to become the executioners of their friends and brethren, or to fall themselves by their hands.

He has excited domestic insurrections amongst us, and has endeavoured to bring on the inhabitants of our frontiers, the merciless Indian savages, whose known rule of warfare, is an undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes and conditions.

In every stage of these oppressions we have petitioned for redress in the most humble terms: Our repeated petitions have been answered only by repeated injury. A Prince whose character is thus marked by every act which may define a tyrant, is unfit to be the ruler of a free people.

Nor have we been wanting in attentions to our Brittish brethren. We have warned them from time to time of attempts by their legislature to extend an unwarrantable jurisdiction over us. We have reminded them of the circumstances of our emigration and settlement here. We have appealed to their native justice and magnanimity and we have conjured them by the ties of our common kindred to disavow these usurpations which would inevitably interrupt our connections and correspondence. They, too, have been deaf to the voice of justice and of consanguinity. We must, therefore, acquiesce in the necessity which denounces our separation and hold them, as we hold the rest of mankind, enemies in war, in peace friends.

We, therefore, the Representatives of the United States of America, in general Congress assembled, appealing to the Supreme Judge of the world for the rectitude of our intentions, do, in the name and by the authority of the good people of these Colonies, solemnly publish and declare that these United Colonies are, and of right ought to be, free and independent States; that they are absolved from all allegiance to the British Crown and that all political connection between them and the State of Great Britain is and ought to be totally dissolved; and that as free and independent States, they have full power to levy war, conclude peace, contract alliance, establish commerce, and do all other acts and things which independent States may of right do. And for the support of this Declaration, with a firm reliance on the protection of Divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our lives, our fortunes, and our sacred honor.

Signers of the Declaration of IndependenceNEW HAMPSHIRE: Josiah Bartlett, William Whipple, Matthew Thornton
MASSACHUSETTS: John Hancock, John Adams, Samuel Adams, Robert Treat Paine
RHODE ISLAND: Elbridge Gerry, Stephen Hopkins, William Ellery
CONNECTICUT: Roger Sherman, Samuel Huntington, William Williams, Oliver Wolcott
NEW YORK: William Floyd, Philip Livingston, Francis Lewis, Lewis Morris
NEW JERSEY: Richard Stockton, John Witherspoon, Francis Hopkinson, John Hart, Abraham Clark
PENNSYLVANIA: Robert Morris, Benjamin Rush, Benjamin Franklin, John Morton, George Clymer, James Smith, George Taylor, James Wilson, George Ross
DELAWARE: Ceasar Rodney, George Read, Thomas McKean
MARYLAND: Samuel Chase, Thomas Stone, William Paca, Charles Carroll of Carrollton
VIRGINIA: George Wythe, Richard Henry Lee, Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Harrison, Thomas Nelson, Jr., Francis Lightfoot Lee, Carter Braxton
NORTH CAROLINA: William Hooper, Joseph Hewes, John Penn
SOUTH CAROLINA: Edward Rutledge, Thomas Heyward, Jr., Thomas Lynch, Jr., Authur Middleton
GEORGIA: Button Gwinnett, Lyman Hall, George Walton

Scientist Playing God

It seems to me that in the 1940’s there was a man who was trying to perfect a certain race. According to him there were some people who were not worthy of living and thus, he proceeded to have 11,000,000 people murdered. Some were burned alive, some were gassed, and it seems that some may have been buried alive. There are people of our race [the human race] who want to deny these events ever happened, but what planet were they born on.?

Just recently I read the story of a British woman who selected a “cancer free” embryo, and destroyed the ones remaining. Are doctors and scientist playing like they are God now? Is this not what Hitler was trying to do as well. The only difference being it is being done earlier in the stage of human life.

Let me give you an excerpt from the article I read:

“A London woman is carrying Great Britain’s first baby guaranteed not to inherit breast cancer, but she had to eliminate several of her other embryonic offspring to do so.

Doctors used preimplantation genetic diagnosis (PGD), a controversial screening method, to determine which of the 11 embryos created by means of in vitro fertilization (IVF) had the gene that would have resulted in a female child having a 50 to 85 percent chance of developing breast cancer, according to The Times of London.

Six of the embryos tested positive for the gene and were rejected. Two embryos without the gene were implanted, producing a pregnancy of 14 weeks as of June 29, and two others were frozen, The Times reported.

The 27-year-old mother, who desires to remain unnamed, and her 28-year-old husband are fertile, but they chose IVF and PGD because of the prevalence of breast cancer on one side of the family. The husband had tested positive for the gene, known as BRCA-1.

“For the past three generations, every single woman in my husband’s family has had breast cancer, as early as 27 and 29,” the mother said, according to The Times. “We felt that, if there was a possibility of eliminating this for our children, then that was a route we had to go down.’”

If you would like to read the rest of the article you may go to Cancer free Child .

I can understand people not wanting to have children with diseases, but those things are out of our hands. Life and death are in God’s hands, and until we realize that and we continue on the path of selection for our children or others, this is going to lead to a destruction of human life far beyond that of the Jewish Holocaust. It already has through the abortion of the unborn babies of America and the rest of the world. Now, in the name of science and health, there will be another. Again, let’s stop playing God, and let God give the life and take the life, when He chooses.

-Tim A. Blankenship

The Summer of 1812

At a time when some of the States of the Union were considering secession this Nation was being attacked all around. It is usually so even in 2007. When any nation is divided she will fall. Here are the words from, “FROM SEA TO SHINING SEA” by Peter Marshall and David Manuel;

“In the South, while the question of slavery no longer had a place in the front-page news, it had hardly died away. Southerners needed only to look to the Northwest and Indian Territories, where most of the immigrants were settling, see the sort of states that would be formed from them — most of them admitted with constitutions banning slavery. How long would it be before they were overwhelmed, in Senate and House? Right now, one of their own, indeed their champion, was imposing his will on the North — how long before the shoe was on the other foot? Jefferson’s embargo was hurting them, too; countless bales of cotton remained piled on the docks and levees, with no place to send them. Something had to be done…’

‘By the grace of God, literally, the republic stayed together. The nation stumbled on, with Jefferson’s protege, James Madison, now at the helm. But the situation was not improving. On the Continent, Napoleon appeared to be invincible. The Austrians fell to him, and the Spaniards, and the Italians, and now he was turning towards Russia; it appeared he was about to add the Bear to his list of conquests. The greater his success, the greater the threat he posed to the island race to his west. And the greater measures Britain took to protect herself. Now any American ship found on the high seas was likely to be taken and her crew impressed. As A. L. Burt put it:”

“The independence of the United States was being frittered away. The country was losing its self-respect, the most precious possession a nation can have, as it failed to command the respect of the belligerents. More and more the feebleness of the American government’s policy had been teaching these embattled giants of the Old World that they could trample with impugnity upon American rights, American interests, and American feelings.”

Marshall and Manuel take up the narrative again, “Finally, by the Summer of 1812, there had been too many ignominies, too many outrages; it was reported that more than 6,000 American citizens had been kidnapped and forced to serve in the Royal Navy, which had to replace some 2,500 deserters a year and simply refused to curtail impressment. If America was to retain any semblance of honor, she had no further alternative but to fight. Crying ‘Free Trade and Sailor’s Rights’, the War Hawks in Congress won the vote for war seventy-nine to forty-nine, and on June 18, President Madison proclaimed that a state of war existed between Great Britain and the United States. The American cause was summed up by the commander of Western Tennessee Militia:”

“We are going to fight for the re-establishment of our national character, misunderstood and villified at home and abroad; for the protection of our maritime citizens, impressed on board British ships of war and compelled to fight the battles of our enemies against ourselves; to vindicate our right to a free trade, and open the market for the production of our soil, now perishing on our hands because the ‘mistress of the ocean’ forbids us to carry them to any foreign nation. ANDREW JACKSON”

There are times we must fight. One of them is when we have been attacked. Definitely we have been attacked again. From the book FROM SEA TO SHINING SEA pp. 131 & 132 paperback

-Tim A. Blankenship