If only these two Tocqueville's two profound points were time-honored and faithfully employed by our Federal government as the ultimate litmus test applied to every bit of legislation, we might actually be experiencing that lofty Jefferson dream of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness equally insured for every citizen. Because we are so cursed with a specious moral authority wrongfully imposed by a supposedly civilly empowered government that is too often unduly influenced by a willfully deceptive church, we the people are often not privileged to all of the inalienable rights hoped for and constitutionally protected and promised by many of our cherished founders. Within days of my first entries into this very chapter, the government of the State of Kansas had decided that the teaching of scientific evolution could possibly be eliminated as part of the curriculum in their public schools if local school boards so decided. This illiberal governmental enactment is an intellectual affront to the rights of our fellow citizens to have free choice and access to the truth. How can a truly free population hope to govern itself wisely when they are denied access to the realistic knowledge of their very existence? Institutionalized ignorance was the very tool employed by European despots to maintain their oppressive power over their political subjects. The very fact that a Christian coalition can assert any degree of political power in a supposedly free society strongly suggests that they have most successfully indoctrinated many of their followers with an unorthodox dogma of non-democratic theism. I most strongly suggest that any head-of-the-church needs to be decapitated immediately. More to the point, churches need to begin dealing with the beams in their own eyes before they ever attempt to deal with the motes in the eyes of their free brothers and sisters. I would like to hope that my elected representatives would spend more time on protecting my individual rights than trying to legislate in a manner that they only perceive as being politically/morally correct.
     It sometimes feels to me that we are attempting to enter another dismal Dark Age too likely dominated by falsely conceived religions, except that this modern Dark Age comes after a scientific enlightenment that can scarcely be denied by an ever-increasingly aware and educated populace. We are on an ideological collision course that is going to be intensely fueled by an undeniable incoherence between what some hold on to as belief and others as reality. I could imagine some degree of tolerance of this religiously sired ignorance except that too many of the tenets of these vain belief systems are actually accountable for the emotional and physical devastation of far too many vulnerable citizens. If the government were to actually function only in its legitimate jurisdictional area of civil rights and actually protected all of its citizens equally, I wouldn't object to the larger part of our society ignorantly indulging themselves in such unenlightened pathos. Jefferson founded the University of Virginia and in doing so he most vehemently insisted that the university had no religious ties or affiliation. As a truly well read liberal, he fully understood from his study of history that religious beliefs often flew in the face of stark reality and the truth. If only Jefferson had had enough influence to have made this sharp separation of church and liberal education an acceptable standard for all educational institutions in American; then perhaps these most illiberal Kansas political ignoramuses wouldn't be once again attempting to turn back the clock to a time when such efforts only insured the continuance of an oppressed peasant-class denied the access to the truth through education. It endlessly confounds me just how an educated and so well informed people can so dispassionately allow this to happen as we are entering the third millennium AD.
     Government and its judicial branch have persistently been at direct odds with the actual protection of too many of its disenfranchised citizenry. It was only in the very last year of this century that an Appellate Court in the US Eastern District upheld a lower court's judgment for a gay policeman's claim of malicious discrimination under that time-honored concept of equal protection under the law. That infamous Civil Rights Act of the early sixties was exactly what it said it was; civil rights. The Act was a grand political compromise specifically designed to avoid having to fully embrace something more akin to equal rights. This government of ours still falls short on substance and too damn long on incoherent rhetoric employed to justify its irreverence of the individual's basic civil rights. This pathetic situation persists because this American government is still under the dastardly intoxication of white Christianity, which is still actively labeling heretics and would likely be burning them if they could only get away with it. The blazon image of this often denied reality is the burning crosses of the Ku Klux Klan. Trademarks can be rightfully protected under the law; I wonder why our American Christians haven't denied the KKK the blasphemous use of their sacred burning trademark. Unless of course, the Christian churches still covertly practices its inherent bigotry masked in the falsely propagandized purity of white supremacy. You need not seek to forgive my auspicious pessimism, the ghastly realities are seem daily on television.
     CNN has brought the whole world into our living rooms, and it has become almost impossible to ignore the gross political actions of so many other oppressive governments. I'm very confident that anyone capable of reading this modest volume is intimately aware of the mass social destruction that takes place almost daily somewhere on this continually calamitous planet. Ethnic cleansing, apartheid, human rights violations, racial and religious discrimination, hate crimes that frequently go unreported, habitually un-prosecuted domestic violence and the lists goes on and on. The Human Rights Campaign Fund is a Washington D.C. based political action group that most appropriately adopted the equal sign as it singular hallmark symbol only a few years ago. Its relentless efforts are simply focused on every single citizen enjoying the same rights and political privileges despite any of their countless and inalienable differences. I am deeply offended that too many others and I have to continually fight and vehemently demand equal rights just to live our own lives in a manner consistent with our own privately held notions of what is right for us. The government should have no power to impose a moral code of private behavior as long as that behavior or belief in no way sets out to affect the personal rights of anybody else. It isn't even the rightful domain of any church to impose any moral code on those outside its own designated congregations.  Just keep your on shit to yourself!
     I vehemently object to our government protecting the right of some churches to publicly air doctrine on life styles that can seriously endangers the life of some youthful minorities every bit as much as the smoking of cigarettes. We have recently gone to great lengths to discourage our youth from smoking and have even prohibited the advertisement of cigarettes all because this nasty habit is a danger to their health. What about the fact that one-third of all teenage suicides is gay related. Why would a healthy youth want to take his life unless it was somehow believed to have no worth or promise? The very idea that homosexuality is somehow interpreted as a serious personal pathology is directly and specifically rooted in Judeo-Christian doctrine. I have no objection to anyone believing in Santa Clause or the Easter Bunny as long as that belief doesn't endanger the life and liberty of a fellow human being, most particularly a vulnerable child. The protection of the life and liberty of any citizen of this planet is the direct responsibility of our civil governments. When a government blatantly fails to offer equal protection to all of its citizens regardless of their individual differences it becomes a matter of fragrant human rights violations. Of any country in the world, it should be the United States of America that insures universal protection and equal rights for all of its law-abiding citizens. I am offended when this elected government takes on the political role of protector of human rights anywhere on this planet and still fails to enforce full equal rights to its own citizens.
     Our constitutional right to the freedom of speech was granted to us so that we would not be unduly subjected to unjustified prosecution by our government for simply objecting to perceived governmental injustices. It was not a right granted to an individual or group to encroach upon the privacy or freedom of thought of another citizen. Some of our irrationally conceived laws and the agencies of enforcement have dangerously crossed the line. They have thus unintentionally provided the ideological fuel needed by many of those that necessarily operate outside the government's defined parameters of civil obedience to impose unwarranted sanctions. A strong case in point is the tragic events surrounding the incendiary Waco, Texas incident of 1993.
     April 19 is permanently engraved on my mind and heart after viewing an in-depth documentary entitled WACO, The Rules of Engagement. Most disturbing was the Satanist attitudes of some of our elected US congressmen who so much in the arrogant styles of a Hitler or Stalin defended the incomprehensible and horrific actions of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms (ATF) and most notably the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI). I can't even begin to express the scope this most tragic event in any better words than were rightfully printed on the back of the video jacket: "Waco: The Rules of Engagement is the story of federal law enforcement gone tragically wrong. It shows how the FBI, disdainful of the Branch Davidian's religion and bent on revenge, repeatedly lied to the public and American political leaders in order to focus overwhelming deadly force on a group whose diversity of race, national origin and apocalyptic religious beliefs made them easy targets for a lethal abuse of its members' civil and human rights." There were 86 innocent men, women and children occupying the Branch Davidian's compound headquarters in Waco, Texas that anguishly perished in this deliberately contrived governmental heretical burning. We no longer have any diabolical need of a tyrannical Catholic Church of the Dark Ages when we have this democratic government supposedly empowered by the people to fulfill such horrific atrocities. This was most simply a governmental hate crime of unfathomable magnitude. The worst part of this scenario; this horrific calamity was spearheaded by officials of our own elected government.
     There is a strong part of me that would like to indict the people for ignorantly electing so many officials that fail to perform in the best interest of all. But I also realize that our citizenry is so miseducated in the truth that they have no means of making an informed choice. Our own government by definition is a hideous form of a classic oligarchy principally because it fails to change its elections procedures that are currently in place to only insure that those in power remain there. Campaign reform has been and will no doubt continue to be a front-burner issue during election times, but as soon as most officials are comfortably reelected, the issue gets put on a back burner. Too sadly governments just don't exist for the general populace and we have for so long been so apathetic or so single-issue oriented that we have inadvertently allowed this gross entrenchment of illiberal career politicians.
     The fact that some governments still fail to maintain absolute power in this modern era gives some rise to hope that not all is lost. It is so encouraging that South Africa was finally able to politically put aside its horrific apartheid and give all of its citizens some say in their government. It might also be noted that this grand United States government did as little as possible to help bring about that most significant modern change. There were outrageous atrocities against people of color that our insensitive government was able to ignore probably because of our own extensive history of racial discrimination and the fact that racial hatred still prevails in many parts of this country. It may be time to convene a national human/equal rights convention here in America and expand our stated ideologies to being totally inclusive of all. Most importantly, we need to eliminate all of those unwritten policies that so unjustly divide us from one another.