When Haman saw Mordecai in the king’s gate, and that he did not stand or tremble before him, he was filled with indignation against Mordecai.
— Esther 5:9
For the past year, Chattanooga has been under administrative notice regarding the state transportation law and its limits. The evil being done by city police upon thousands of people is enforcement activity against private users of the road who are not the subject of the state law that Mayor Andy Berke and Chief David Roddy claim the authority to enforce.
Since I have been made rich in curiosity and wonder about the law, and have read it carefully and studied it, I intend to pour upon the poor in Chattanooga these riches and promises. The main form these riches take is courage in the face of people like Haman in the book of Esther, an Amalekite who hated God’s people and who wished to be adored and respected.
By David Tulis / 92/7 NoogaRadio
The Hamans of our day are policeman and sheriff’s deputies and their claque of unions and supporters at city hall, courtroom and statehouse. The submission everyone on the road has to make is these high officers is to yield their rights guaranteed under the search and seizure provisions of the state and federal constitutions.
The police want to be treated as authoritative satraps and lords over their cities and counties. They want people to bow down to them; they want to be revered. They want to be feared and dreaded — but also loved because they keep us safe, as they say.
My goal with administrative notice is to change the hearts of the common person, starting in Chattanooga and Hamilton County, so that there is courage in their heart and so that the common person does not bow down and tremble at the cop. So that he may stand his ground and invoke and assert his rights, given him by God as His image-bearer and likeness. A second purpose is to change the heart of the officer, so that he respects the citizens and dares not tread where he has no warrant.
For the citizen of Tennessee to be like Mordecai, there has to be an internal change, a change in attitude, a change in heart about that person’s rights. That person has to understand that he is not a slave before man. That person, especially if he is black, needs to understand that he has been freed as recognize by the law, not just by Lincoln’s war against the South, but also by the civil rights act and the continuing operation of the constitutions in Tennessee and Chattanooga.
That internal change brings that person, of the descendants of slaves, to risk being approached and challenged about his liberty to move about without having to give account to anyone, without permission from anyone.
It is my hope that with administrative notice the city will be less bold and less demanding and less proud, and its officers comply with the limits of the law. It is also my desire, in preparing and promoting administrative notice, to make people more courageous and willing to take risks.
The risk comes when that poor traveler in his car says, “Sir, I am traveling under the notice, and I make absolutely no statement apart from our lawyer being present.”
When a poor person, an immigrant, a black person, or anybody else makes a statement like that on the side of the street with blue lights flashing behind him in the arrest, he is following in the way of Mordecai, the Israelite who would not bow down to Haman, the son of Hammedatha the Agagite of the Amalekites who hated the Israelites, the people of God.
The people of Chattanooga, as well as 6.8 million inhabitants in Tennessee, are under an edict something like that Haman convinced King Ahasuerus to write — one allowing the massacre of all the Israelites in the kingdom.
In Tennessee, the edict is written in court rulings that deny any property right in free movement, in denial of the rights of these 6.8 million people in Tennessee. These opinions in the judiciary give a statist gloss, a progressive interpretation, quite apart from the actual law at Tenn. Code Ann. § Title 55. The actual statute is not as wide as Haman today declares. It is a foot-wide law — but enforced by him as if it were a 2 yard wide law.
The Berke and Roddy enforcement custom in Tennessee is one that makes people bow down to the police and the sheriff’s deputies, even when these creative people, as the mayor calls them, have every right to stand straight and go about their business.
In the book of Esther the edict allowing the destruction of these were lives is set for a future date. In Tennessee the edict allowing the the destruction of the rights of the people has been long in making and is progressively reinforced by the high court. From 2015 to 2017, a free and innocent user of the public freeway was convicted for exercising his constitutionally guaranteed rights. That is the Hirsch case.
The only member of the press statewide to cover the story has been me. The Hirsch case was the most important in 80 years, and it tells a doleful story of coercion and judicial conceit.
My goal with the administrative notice project is to stab back at the claims by Haman and his emissaries in their cruisers, in their blue uniforms, behind their personal armor plate, wrapped as they are with pistol belts and taser and gas and other weapons of intimidation.
My goal is for every person in my city to stand straight and to not tremble.
In the book of Esther, Haman builds a gallows for the execution of Mordecai. In our day, the place of punishment for the noncompliant is city and sessions courts. It is in these lesser courts, running in summary fashion without juries, that the damage is done day by day by day. These are not courts of law, but of custom. Punishment is light, and many accused get off with merely F$95 in court costs. These corporation courts encourage submission, making fighting back seem silly.
City of Chattanooga has been under notice for a year, and has not taken seriously the claims of the statute as against its dragnet. Its city attorney has sat motionless in face of the law’s claims that I have delivered to him in person. Phil Noblett says the courts define the law and control the law, and whatever the courts say the law is, that’s what the law is. This position requires him to ignore the fundamental rules of statutory construction in which a law defines its own scope and operation. Nothing in the transportation code, as far as I can see, offends anyone’s constitutionally guaranteed rights. It limits its claims to vehicles for hire, and not to cars privately used.
Mr. Noblett ignores the notice and defends the abuse and a terror against the African-American, the poor person in his rundown car com, the immigrant and also everyone else using the roads as a matter of right.
My hope is to pour my riches of reading and review upon the common person in my part of Tennessee, using blog and radio to get out the good word.
I believe that transportation administrative notice is a national model, that the project suitable to any city and any county in Tennessee and that it can be replicated in other states. I’m giving myself 3 1/2 years to accomplish this work of public service, this effort in racial restitution inspired by a reading of history. That was the length of time of our Lord Jesus is ministry. Three and a half years. If I can push the notice and its claims in one city and bring about a merciful result, it can be done and it will be done in other places, since these statutory schemes for transportation are almost all alike, and they all have the same origin in the early regulations in the 1915s in the various states.
The want of courage is a great sin. Fear is an idol. The desire for security is an idol. For a man to be free he must run. For a slave to be free he must escape. For a bound servant with no liberty, to have his children free, he must leave the plantation and run. My goal is to make that process easier for those who in God’s providence come upon this information and understand that they are made in God’s image and that they must make every effort to be free, as St. Paul advises.
Paul in Galatians 5:1 opposes the yoke of Israelite worship that Christ fulfilled in his coming. “It is for freedom that Christ has set us free. Stand firm, then, and do not let yourselves be burdened again by a yoke of slavery.” But he is also hinting that God’s people are to defeat other forms of false submission and slavery.
