(Illustration freethoughtproject.com)
Lawsuits have been filed to redress the grievance of 900 high school students in a Georgia town who were roughly searched in a mass hunt for drugs.
The striking thing about the story of the April 14 search at Worth County high school is that none of the young men on the football, basketball or wrestling teams dared to demand an end to the abusive sexual assaults of themselves and of girls lined up next to them along the walls of hallways and classrooms during the warrantless search and seizure by Sheriff Jeff Hobby and a gaggle of deputies.
By David Tulis / Noogaradio 92.7
In a four-hour lockdown, deputies ordered students to stand facing the wall with their hands and legs spread wide apart. They touched and manipulated students’ breasts and genitals, inserted fingers inside girls’ bras, and pulled up girls’ bras, touching and partially exposing their bare breasts, touched girls’ underwear by placing hands inside the waistbands of their pants or reaching up their dresses, touched girls’ vaginal areas through their underwear, and cupped or groped boys’ genitals and touched their buttocks through their pants, according to a class-action lawsuit.
The question for the homeschooler is this: Would my homeschool son have done any differently, shown himself brave and chivalrous in the face of abuse? Or would he have been compliant and obedient?
Beyond that, do homeschool sons know enough about the obligation to protect women and the weak, and do they know enough about constitutionally guaranteed liberty to have done better than these public school students?
I have my doubts.
Chattanooga police abuse victim Hanson Melvin cuddles with his third child, Richard Wayne. He was victimized in a walking-while-black case for which he is suing officer and city. The morning his wife, Tarah, gave birth to the boy, the future homeschooling dad was in Hamilton County court on perjured charges. Mr. Melvin’s defense of his rights is an example to other Christians. (Photo Tarah Melvin)
The larger issue of courage might be partly answered by delving here into the lesser technical question of the state of the law in these states united, and whether one has any rights to invoke, assert and defend. If a teen boy knows his rights, a godly upbringing more easily can spring to the defense of the innocent. The more he knows about the law, the better material his courage has with which to work an honorable refusal to cooperate, a resistance against lawless power such as that imposed in a criminal act by Mr. Hobby.
Nonresistance?
The great lack of instruction and encouragement among homeschool families of the proper role of law in defending the constitutionally guaranteed, God-given, inherent and unalienable rights of men and women in Hamilton County and beyond.
Constitutionally guaranteed rights are enshrined and partially enumerated in the public law of this state. Their origin is largely in Christianity, which creates a decentralized and free social order, largely horizontal and liberated rather than vertical, militarized and power-based. In a Christian nation, the state has no authority over non-criminal people. Government is mostly its court system.
States today, whether Tennessee or the U.S. government, act as if they have control over many areas of non-criminal activity. By commercial regulation and the imposition of police authority, they have seized control of much human activity that only theoretically affects the public health, safety and welfare, which is mostly private
This abuse of the modern states against God’s law of liberty and against the idea of Christendom has brought to the 20th century much war, decapitalization and decapitalization.
The gospel ordains civil society obedient to God’s law. One of its doctrines is that of the lesser magistrate and the requirement for resistance against ungodly rule.
The lesser magistrate is ordered to disobey the greater if his commands are evil. The individual is required to disobey the decrees of a king if God requires it. The men of Israel refused to obey Saul and punish Jonathan when he ate of the honeycomb. The midwives refused to obey pharaoh to kill the newborns among the Israelite captives. Rahab of Jericho hid the spies and lied to the king about the whereabouts of her visitors. The apostles rejected a gag on preaching. Paul knew how to use his Roman citizenship to make appeal for relief.
The idea of intervention is a distinctly biblical concept which has been echoed through history, and is seen in many respects in the secession of the southern states to defend the people’s and institutions of the South against unconstitutional grab of power by the government in Washington in 1861. It is visible more recently in the actions of Operation Rescue and abortion abolititionists defending the unborn in the face of violent police activity.
Matt Trewhella, author of The Doctrine of the Lesser Magistrates, tells how the church members of Romanian Rev. László Tőkés intervened to protect him in December 1989 and how the people’s intervention led to the downfall of dictator Nicolae Ceauşescu and the Communist government.
The Rev. Trewhella’s 2013 book explores the concept, including a marvelous story from Josephus in which the Temple of the Israelites is protected by a Roman official who defies the commands of a greater official to destroy the temple.
How does Christian respond?
Are Christian homeschool young men learning what they’re supposed to about upholding the law of God? About upholding the law of the land that is the means of acting in a godly way in terms of existing rights and protections?
In Worth County, I propose, it was the duty upon every godly young man to bar, delay and stop the sexual battery and false imprisonment among those searched by male and female deputies of Sheriff Hobby.
The grounds for resistance would not have been just moral. They would have been legal as well.
And here is where homeschool students are in great lack. They have very little sense of the law, very little recognition about the protections that the law provides for the innocent.
2 key words
This protection is exercised through a demand for probable cause.
The criminal indictment of Sheriff Hobby by the grand jury of Worth County highlights these two words. Not having probable cause, the sheriff “did *** unlawfully, willfully, and intentionally violate the terms of his oath as prescribed by law, in that he did swear to ‘support the Constitution of the United States and of this state’ and then did order deputies under his employ to search students *** without probable cause or any other legal basis and without due process.”
Probable cause.
A homeschool son needs to know that probable cause are the operating words of authority. A homeschool boy needs to know that a deputy or an officer has no authority to act against him or anybody else without probable cause or the equivalent. That would include:
➤ An arrest warrant signed by a judge
➤ Firsthand eyewitness evidence of a person having committed a crime or having heard threat by the party to breach the peace
➤ Belief on reasonable grounds that a warrant has been issued for that person’s arrest
➤ Reasonable grounds to believe that the person is committing or has committed a crime
An officer who has stopped, seized or arrested a girl in a high school or any other place has to be able to state his probable cause as to why she is being detained and searched.
These are the sources of authority of any officer. Without any of these requirements being met, the cop is acting in his personal capacity.
A worthy young man
A young man seeking to please God would have objected and resisted even if you did not know on what legal grounds he might speak and stand forth. In Worth County High, published reports indicate no young man made a resistance or faced threats by the officers for standing his ground in defense of himself and others.
Where to get this education? Where to obtain information about our rights? Whom do we consult for an encouraging word? Are there any books that explore these matters?
➤ An excellent video by legal activist Eddie Craig of Texas explores in detail how to deal with police abuse while using the highways and roads. His legal citations are Texas specific, but he provides an excellent method of self-defense against cops enforcing transportation statutes, which are similar across the 50 states. His method works whether one is a licensed driver. It also serves a non-licensed traveler of the public right of way, one who uses the roads apart from state license because of poverty, immigration status or constitutional predeliction. His video at InfoWars is two hours long, and gives a thorough examination of commercial enforcement against you and members of your family. I have listened to his two main lectures available online, and have adapted his “transportation script” for my personal use while traveling.
➤ Family Guardian database. https://famguardian.org/. These pages are an organized assembly of material, from PDFs, video links and books that let you focus in on the question of probable cause and how to use it. If you click the link on “criminal justice and terrorism,” your husband and sons can get a start. With links to talks such as that of James Duane, “Don’t Talk to Cops” (48 minutes).
➤ Chuck and Timothy Baldwin are a father-and-son team who explore the loss of American liberties and how they might be restored. Tim Baldwin, the son, has a DVD that gives a basic outline of responding to police contact.
➤ The American Civil Liberties Union has several free resources, including a one-page flier that tells you your rights.
➤ For a broader view of police abuse and how Christians should help fight against it as a work of mercy and evangelism, the ACLU has a manual (1997) that tells what to look for and how to work for reform of legal abuse in one’s hometown, though its perspective is entirely pragmatic and pagan.
Chattanooga doings
I believe my own work in Chattanooga on many of these points has had little support among Christian dads and sons because of the majority report among Christians as to the claim of God’s law upon American society. The popular theological analysis that I won’t detail here highlights thrilling and near-term end-times concepts and antinomianism (a rejection of law). These two theories create a privatized, inward-looking and personalized Christianity with no or with little public outlook and a bleak, pessimistic perspective.
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Dads in Chattanooga are not preparing their sons to defend the innocent and victims all around us. They think it’s not important. They don’t see value in it.
My work at Nooganomics.com and on 92.7 FM radio every weekday morning at 9 seeks to encourage men of character to understand how to invoke the law before the lawless, particularly when the lawless ones are in blue uniform and represent peremptory and executive government.
The great danger today is not private crime, but public crime and torts of oppression. Until Christian men in the Chattanooga area stand up for themselves and the innocent for God’s glory, they are complicit in violence and abuse, such as that heaped on a dad, Hanson Melvin of Hixson, whose Christian boldness in 2016 led to the firing of a crooked, lying cop and a lawsuit pending against a private gang of officers who harassed him after Mr. Melvin’s return from an illegal arrest and jailing.
Christian men who see no faith issue in such matters are willfully ignorant. They refuse to extend a witness for God and godly government when occasions demand it, and refuse to prepare for the coming of such blighted doings in their own lives.
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Much required of homeschoolers
Knowing the basics about God-given and constitutionally guaranteed rights is a way of witnessing about the fruits of grace. The police state is premised against grace. The church and the family are for grace. The police state practices lawlessness and violence particularly against blacks and the poor. The Bible from which we read and preach requires special protection and provision for aliens, strangers, the poor, orphans and widows.
At Worth County high school, young men stood silently by as hundreds of girls were sexually assaulted. They have a lot to learn from their civics class. So do we in our homeschools.
God has revealed to us a holy law summarized in the 10 commandments. It is able to create a society of justice and equity. So who are we to know so little about the lawful means by which to defend God’s prerogatives and godly justice?
“And that servant who knew his master’s will, and did not prepare himself or do according to his will, shall be beaten with many stripes. But he who did not know, yet committed things deserving of stripes, shall be beaten with few. For everyone to whom much is given, from him much will be required; and to whom much has been committed, of him they will ask the more.” Luke 12: 47 48.
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This video is worth the 48 minutes I urge you to give it. Professor James Duane of Regent University.
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