There will always be political agendas.  There will always be those looking for an excuse to stomp on the rights of our fellow Americans. This was quite clear from the rapid responses to the terrorist attack in Orlando. We must stand up to all of this and refuse to be bullied into surrendering our liberty for useless government promises. The solution is not the denial of Constitutional rights for law-abiding citizens, nor is it a indiscriminate bombing of the Middle East. We need to stop with our knee-jerk answers, our expected blame of political opponents, and our reflexive desire to tear down Constitutional boundaries to have some illusion of security.

All lives matter.  It makes no difference who you are, what you believe, or what political party you support. Christians believe this. That’s why we will fiercely defend the lives of our brothers and sisters in the LGBT community in Orlando, because the strength of our culture is respect and tolerance for all of our people. It is possible to disagree on issues such as gay marriage while recognizing this basic principle.

You know who doesn’t subscribe to this idea? ISIS. ISIS, as we all know, is a terrorist organization whose members indiscriminately kill those who are not Muslim. If you wanted to call out a group whose hatred for gays has reached unconscionable levels, there’s your enemy. It makes no difference whether the Orlando shooter was straight or gay. He claimed allegiance to ISIS, and that cannot be ignored.  Terrorist sympathizers and committed terrorists are coming for us here in America, and not just ISIS. They are already here.  Now we must deal with them.

Freedom and liberty are under assault in this country.  Our Constitution, which protects the rights of all of us to live free in the greatest country in the world is being trampled on by this current administration and some of its enablers in Congress.  Those who have been tasked to protect it are more concerned about scoring political points than actually solving problems. In this case, I’m referring to those in both political parties who are trying to use tragedies such as San Bernadino, Sandy Hook, and now in Orlando, to pass even more useless gun control legislation.  All these measures do is to keep law-abiding citizens from protecting themselves and their families. Criminals don’t obey gun control laws, and terrorists don’t restrict themselves to weapons containing bullets.

After 9/11, it was understandable to err on the side of protecting Americans.  As a result, we got new government departments and agencies (Department of Homeland Security, TSA) and the Patriot Act, with an extra dose of warrantless wire taps, and a terrorist watch list.  There are non-terrorists on the terrorist watch list, with no quick recourse for those unjustly accused of being terrorists.

Let me ask you this:  Do you feel any safer than you were before the government tried to fix the situation with more bureaucracy and more laws?  The answer for most of us would be that these measures have not solved the problem. The government has trampled on our privacy rights and expanded their own power base for a goal they could never achieve.  Liberty will always be essential to who Americans are. It is the secret sauce for what makes our way of life and our culture exceptional and envied by the rest of the countries in the world, and we must fight to keep our country and ourselves free.

Our rights ARE being infringed.  Right now.  Very few of our elected “leaders” are willing to stand up for these rights.  Very few of our “leaders” even value the importance of what our founders set up for us – “a republic, if we can keep it”. We need to reverse this trend by defending free speech – critical for a free society to have the ability to speak truth to power and address grievances against our government, even when it’s not politically correct.  We need to defend the 2nd amendment – the right to defend ourselves and our families.  We need to return to the basic principles laid out for us in our Constitution and in the Bill of Rights. If we forget who we were and what we believed at the beginning, then our country is truly lost.  Don’t let this happen. FIGHT.