Blessed Are the Peacemakers

President Dallin H. Oaks, screenshot from here

Earlier this week, on the eve of Constitution Day (which is September 17), there was a program at the Washington National Cathedral. The keynote address was given by Dallin H. Oaks, President of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, a former constitutional law professor, Utah State Supreme Court Justice, law clerk to the US Supreme Court. And what I knew him for, as President of Brigham Young University, finishing his time there upon my graduation. In his 90s now, he is still energetic and wise.

I’ve got the whole transcript. (Video is here.) I’ll be sharing large parts, interspersed with a few comments as I think about what he said. I think it will be a fitting way to celebrate Constitution Day in this 250^th Year celebration of our nation.

I am grateful to be here in this sacred setting with many scholars, civic leaders, and others I respect.

I'm here to speak as part of the National Cathedral's ongoing effort to find a better way to embody the love of God in public life, offering hope for unity and a moral framework to move forward in a divided world.

In my professional work, I have always regarded the United States Constitution as a model for a diverse people to achieve self-government.

Along with Professor Yuval Levin and others, I read our history to teach that "creating purpose of the Constitution."

It was at this point I looked up the spelling and tried to find the quote. I couldn’t find that exact phrase, but I suspect it comes from Yuval Levin’s book American Covenant: How the Constitution Unified Our Nation—and Could Again. 

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Remember! Remember! 25, 14, 1

 

In some of my gospel learning, I’ve studied just a smattering of ancient Biblical Hebrew language and history. Among these things, I learned that there is a particular day of infamy to ancient Israel, called Tisha B'Av (תִּשְׁעָה בְּאָב).  On this day, the 9^th of the month of Av (which varies on our calendar, but was July 22-23 this year, counting sundown to sundown), they mark a number of disasters in their history, most notably temple destructions in Jerusalem: first, Solomon’s Temple in 587 BC, which was destroyed by the Babylonians; second, Herod’s Temple, destroyed by the Romans in 70 AD. There are another dozen or so bad things that have happened on Tisha B’Av over the centuries. It’s considered a time of mourning, and of bad luck. You wouldn’t want to set you wedding date to coincide.

The month of September has become America’s Tisha B’Av, or time of mourning. 

To read the full article, FOLLOW LINK TO SUBSTACK.

Compromises on the Way to a More Perfect Union: Celebrating the Semiquincentennial, Part 9

 

We’re two months past the official Semiquincentennial July 4^th celebration day. But it’s still the year of celebration.

In this series, we’ve spent several months on various parts of our beloved Constitution.

Here’s the series up to this point, if you missed any or want to review:

·        January: The Declaration

·        February: Preamble to the Constitution

·        March: Article I: Lawmaking

·        April: Article II: Executive Branch

·        May: Article III: Judicial Branch

·        June: Bill of Rights

·        July: Happy Birthday, America!

·        August: Bill of Rights Continued

This month in particular ought to be about celebrating that amazing document, since it was signed in September (1787). There’s enough good in our Constitution that we could finish the year-long series doing more and more Constitution. I do, however, plan to celebrate some other American things in the few remaining months. But not today.

Today I thought it might be useful to go through the two major compromises in the Constitution.

The Great Compromise

The first one on our list, sometimes called the Great Compromise, had to do with the question of whether representation should be based on population or equally by state.

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Principles of the Economic Sphere

There are principles we use in the Spherical Model to identify whether something qualifies as leading toward freedom, prosperity, and civilization, or in the other direction toward tyranny, poverty, and savagery.

Because of the prevalence of socialism in our time, I thought it might be a good exercise about now, two months ahead of the mid-term elections, to look at the principles. Since socialism claims to be just an alternative economic system to capitalism (the word they prefer to free-market), we’ll focus on the economic principles.

I’m taking from the list of principles here, where you can find the list for the political and social spheres as well.  And I’m taking from the list of question to ask candidates from here and here, where you can find those lists for all three spheres.  

We’ll go through the principles, and individually ask whether socialism agrees.

To read the full article, FOLLOW LINK TO SUBSTACK.

Conspiracy to Overthrow the Government Is Illegal

Communism is against the law in the United States.

In theory, that has been true since its inception, and well before its first introduction to people in this country—because our law is the Constitution, to which communism is antithetical. The implementation of communism requires replacement of any existing political system. To translate, that means the overthrow of the United States government and our Constitution.

But, as we know, making something illegal doesn’t mean it no longer exists.

What I’m going to go through here today is a thought exercise only. But these are thoughts I believe we should be going through prior to any next election. There is a threat to our constitutional republic. And it is a real threat, a “clear and present danger” to our God-given rights by authoritarian tyrants.

Back in the 1950s, there was what was referred to as the Red Scare, when the Cold War was underway, and the enemy was a communist regime looking to expand its power and control around the world.

The threat was real. This enemy, the Soviet Union mainly, had nuclear weapons. The Chinese Communist Party was also a threat, although they didn’t succeed in getting nuclear weapons until 1964. But also during this time communist North Korea invaded South Korea, involving the US in the Korean War.

The ideologies of communism had been spreading in America, and indeed had infiltrated higher echelons of government. McCarthy was right about that.

So it was in response to this real threat (whether exaggerated in numbers at the time or not) that the Communist Control Act of 1954 was written—and passed unanimously in the Senate, then amended in the House to clarify definitions.

We’ll look at the law itself, and then talk about why it was (almost) never invoked, and why we maybe ought to be thinking about it today.

To read the full article, FOLLOW LINK TO SUBSTACK.

BIll of Rights Continued: Celebrating the Semiquincentennial, Part 8

This is a monthly series throughout 2026, the Semiquincentennial year. You can see the other parts here:

·       January: The Declaration 

·       February: Preamble to the Constitution 

·       March: Article I: Lawmaking 

·       April: Article II: Executive Branch 

·       May: Article III: Judicial Branch 

·       June: Bill of Rights 

·       July: Happy Birthday, America! 

In our discussion of rights, back in June, we talked about what is a right, so we can recognize what we’re dealing with. Because a lot of Americans have been confused about that for a century or so.

And we covered a bit of history related to the Bill of Rights, and how we got those first 10 Amendments to the Constitution.

Then we talked about the first of the five rights in the First Amendment: the right to freedom of religion.

So that leaves the other four in that amendment, and a number of others in the remaining Bill of Rights. We’ll see what we get through today.

The other four rights in the First Amendment are:

·       Freedom of speech.

·       Freedom of the press.

·       Freedom to peaceably assemble.

·       Freedom to petition the government for redress of grievances.

Last week we talked about the pandemic a bit—and a little bit of the 5^th Amendment (which was invoked 111 times by Fauci in that Senate hearing). And it’s interesting to note that all of these First Amendment rights were abridged during the pandemic.

The Constitution guarantees us that government will not abridge these rights—and yet government did anyway.

Our discussions here are intended to inform us, so that we don’t blissfully go along with whatever government officials say. Because government is fire, and it needs to be carefully contained, or it gets out of control and burns. In real terms, rather than metaphorical, government is full of humans, many of whom are motivated by power and greed, and they work for those motivators, rather than for the good of society. Some—maybe even the worst—work for the power and money with the full conviction that they are doing it for our own good, even when they’re doing it against our will.

So, about those guaranteed rights.

To read the full article, FOLLOW LINK TO SUBSTACK.

Faucian Deal with the Devil

If you’ve tuned in to independent conservative news, you know that Wednesday, July 29, was Fauci’s day to come before the Senate hearing—not to testify, but to invoke the 5^th Amendment, 111 times (probably a record), when he’d already been given a blanket pardon by the Biden autopen for anything he might be accused of going back to 2014.

He pleaded the 5^th when asked the color of his tie and whether there was a notebook on the table in front of him. Other than his opening statement, which amounted to, “Rand Paul has it in for me, a sincere and devoted public servant who never did anything wrong,” he said nothing but the same script about invoking the 5^th.

The hearing nevertheless went on. I watched the livestream Robert Gouveia had done, which included the full hearing, plus his commentary afterward (and occasionally brief commentary during). He was using the C-SPAN livestream.

There was a lot we already knew. There was a little bit new.

The diaries were new. These were not leaked. Fauci wrote these personal files on his government computer, which means they are government property, not his personal diaries, regardless of how he thought of them. He’d worked in government for something like five decades; he knew about FOIA requests for anything written on government computers.

They reveal that he absolutely knew the virus had leaked from the Wuhan lab—as early as December 2019, before it ever reached the US. Then he lied about that to the American public.

The reason for the lie seems clear: he had funded the gain-of-function research in Wuhan (and elsewhere), despite President Obama’s order curtailing any such research—because, being “the science,” he knew better than the president and acted on his own, going through some back channels to hide what he was doing.

To read the full article, FOLLOW LINK TO SUBSTACK.