Floyd Reports

We aren’t supposed to have a “ruling class” in the United States. Article I, Section 9 of the Constitution states, “No Title of Nobility shall be granted by the United States.” Although members of the House and Senate may consider themselves aristocrats, and are often sneeringly referred to as such, they aren’t so in reality. This is because they could be removed en mass by the electorate whenever it conjures the good sense to do so. (Hold not thy breath.)

No guillotines, no pitchforks, just voters summoning the gumption to turn out the self-serving blackguards in favor of merely potential blackguards who themselves might be turned out before they tended to be corrupted absolutely.

So, complain though we might, we have a remedy at hand –elections– bequeathed by the founders, designed to prevent Congress from becoming a de facto nobility for whom the laws of the land do not apply, and protecting us from any whom the United States might wish to pronounce so noble as to deserve a title of nobility and its attendant privileges. The problem is not really Congress, therefore. Rather, we have met the enemy, and he is us. Failure to elect statesmen rather than pork-dispensing nest featherers is our own fault; we still possess the power to keep a new nobility from arising in our midst. Or do we?

What of the Super Citizens? As dangerous as the Congress and its bureaucracies have become vis a vis our liberties and treasure, the Super Citizens make Congress look like pikers. The Super Citizens have accrued rights, powers, and privileges Congressmen only dream of for themselves (but often confer to Super Citizens.)

Super Citizens have been granted the right to kill unborn children. I don’t have that right; do you? Super citizens have been granted the right to dominate our energy policy, whimsically preventing oil companies from drilling for oil in certain places, preventing construction projects from going forward because of a puddle formed on private property where insects might chose to lay eggs, preventing schools from inculcating the religious values of the taxpayers that support them and whose children attend them, etc.

Super Citizens dictate where one may smoke a cigar or consume sugar or salt. They dictate what may be printed on a candy bar wrapper, that unions shall have rights that other businesses do not, and who may carry a weapon and where. So many more instances could be multiplied here that, well, you get the picture.

None of these things were possible until classes of Super Citizens were granted the rights and privileges, if not the titles, of nobility. In many cases, Congress was the grantor; in some cases, it was courts and bureaucracies that waved their wands and made new classes of men ex nihilo. There are many Super Citizens afoot now who rule us, whether we realize it or not. Super Citizens are a new nobility based not on family lineage but on adherence to certain newly privileged ideologies.

Perhaps the most dangerous Super Citizens yet have now come to the fore demanding the right to redefine marriage and the family. They don’t announce that as their goal of course. They say they just want “marriage equality,” i.e. the right to marry someone of the same sex. But this is not equality; it is the right to redefine marriage and the family, a right that I don’t have, nor do you. So how can their attainment of such a right make them equal? It won’t; it would make them Super Citizens.

Congressmen, desirous of retaining their jobs, would never entertain voting for gay marriage given that thirty-two states have voted it down in referenda, the clearest warning a Congressman could hear. So the Super Citizen wannabes will continue to try and shape public opinion, not in the hope that Congress will ever be molded to its wishes, but so that the courts will eventually contain enough sympathetic judges to grant Super Citizen status to gay marriage aspirants.

Judges and future judges read the news, and like many people, they want to be liked and lauded and feted by crowds before newspaper and broadcast reporters. Many judges are elected, and so it is helpful to have nice things said about certain candidacies in those news and opinion outlets that cater to Super Citizens. Potential Super Citizens can, with such influence, create their own creators, their own grantors of Super Citizen status, who wish to join the rolls of the immortals who granted Super Citizen status to other Super Citizens in days of yore.

What would the US look like were these potential Super Citizens to hold sway? We need look no further than the Health and Human Services rules promulgated by Kathleen Sebelius last year, mandating that under the Affordable Care Act, religious employers basically hand out free contraceptives and sterilization services to employees of their ministries. This made Super Citizens of contraceptive users, who would have the right to free birth control supplied by their employers even if those employers are Christian ministries who deem contraceptives anathema.

Health and Human Services redefined the nature of a Christian ministry for the purpose of procuring exemptions from the rules, a redefinition that basically defines Christian ministries out of existence and hence would keep exemptions at a bare minimum. If, for instance, your church’s XYZ ministry predominantly serves non-members of your church, your ministry must provide employees free contraceptives through your health insurance plan (if the Supreme Court upholds the Affordable Care Act). There are other criteria, but this one alone makes employees of church soup kitchens and homes for unwed mothers eligible for free contraception at the church’s expense, because after all, does any church-sponsored soup kitchen or home for unwed mothers cater almost exclusively to members of its own parish?

Without the fig leaf of the HHS redefinition of a church ministry, the “free exercise” applicability of the First Amendment would be more easily noticed, hence the required redefinition. Having already accepted the Internal Revenue Service’s definition of a religious institution for 501(c)3 purposes, where would churches get off having a beef with further “clarification” of church ministries designed simply to ensure that Adam and Steve’s nuptials go off without a hitch?

Should gay marriage be imposed on the nation by judges, we can expect the enforcement of acceptance of gay marriage to apply with the same despotic alacrity as the redefinition of Christian ministries was undertaken pursuant to HHS’s contraception mandate. Once a judge or panel of judges decided that the Defense of Marriage Act, or a state’s (or the states’) constitutional amendment or referendum prohibiting gay marriage, was unconstitutional, then Katie can bar the door, but it would have little or no effect.

The new Super Citizens would not be pleased merely with the ability to marry one another, any more than abortionists have been happy to limit their services to rape and incest victims (the human shields used to push through Roe v Wade.) They would demand your tolerance, and that tolerance would take the form of their right to rent your church property for their weddings and receptions. Refuse, and you’ll be sued (it already happened). They would demand that Christian photographers and printers provide their services to gay weddings as well, or be sued (already happened). They would sue to require that a Christian-run bed and breakfast serve as their honeymoon venue (already happened).

Would the Obama Administration or one like it stand idly by while its Super Citizen constituents’ judicially granted rights were flouted by mere churches? No more than they would allow other Super Citizens’ right to free birth control to be thwarted by churches’ distaste for providing it. Once gay marriage became the new normal, and a whole new class of Super Citizens was birthed by “liberal” judicial fiat, how long would we be able to maintain ordinary life?

We would, to a greater extent than we now, be ruled by a new nobility, whose defining characteristic is unnatural sex, along with their lawyers and sympathetic judges who view it as bigotry of the Jim Crow variety to practice our religion as we see fit as required by our Lord and (formerly) protected by the First Amendment.

Those trying to “force their beliefs on others” by maintaining moral limits on church praxis and property will find the social and financial consequences egregious. After all, many mainline churches now ordain professed homosexuals and perform gay marriages. Bringing recalcitrant churches to heel would just be a mopping up operation, clearing out the social detritus that follows any great leap forward.

Most of us have only a little influence in our society. We can write a letter to the editor, or defend traditional marriage at the water cooler, which doesn’t seem like much of a contribution. But if we fail to exercise whatever influence we have in the defense of western civilization, if we maintain silence for fear of being labeled bigots for speaking out against gay marriage whenever it is broached in our hearing, then “All these things will come upon this generation.”

The conservative movement appears to be putting out enough steam to prevent the reelection of President Obama. We’ll see. The Supreme Court seems poised to strike down Obama Care, we hope. Financial reality seems to have gotten enough people’s attention to warrant optimism that the federal government can be sufficiently pruned, and future generations freed from the bonds of indebtedness now averaging $200,000 per newborn citizen. We pray. The “pro choice” position is now a shrinking minority. We rejoice. Maybe someday we will look back in wonder at how close we came to cultural and financial ruin, and luxuriate in long sighs of relief at how bad it was (and almost got) before the adults grabbed the wheel and averted disaster.

Maybe however, just maybe, we will essentially become political dhimmis of the new nobility, the gay marriage Super Citizens, forced to pay tribute and watch our tongues in a nation where no title of nobility can be granted, but the prerogatives of nobility fly like a bouquet at a wedding to be seized by the maid with the sharpest elbows.