Articles

What is States’ Rights?

by Mike Crane

Our Rights are like a cookie. No matter how big the cookie and how small the bites, eventually you run out of cookie.
—Mike Crane 

A very wise man, one for whom I have great respect, recently issued what seemed to be a challenge, “Was all y'all's talk about states' rights just whiskey talk, or do y'all really believe it?” Then he followed with, “If you do really believe it, then get liquored up and write an article!” 

So this POOR (Plain Ole Ordinary Redneck) mountain moron got to thinking about that. In my younger years it has been rumored by some that I got liquored up once or twice, but I can’t remember a thing about it. Some said that was the effect of the liquor. Now that I am kind of the opposite of a youngun, I can’t remember getting liquored up at all. Some say that isn’t the effect of liquor. Life is like that at times -- what was isn’t, and what is wasn’t. 

Of course, English majors will just go berserk over that last sentence; but it does apply to a discussion of States’ Rights in the year A.D. 2010, even if it is some of the poorest English grammar of the year. What was State’s Rights isn’t what it is today. What is States’ Rights today isn’t what it was.
To begin, I will put on my virtually unused and in brand new condition English grammar hat and point out that the apostrophe is in the wrong place. It should be State’s, not States.’ And the word Rights should be Powers. 

Why States’ vs. State’s? In the founding concept of American liberty, the primary purpose of government is to guarantee the rights of the people, which are derived from God. To accomplish this primary function of government, the power to govern was divided between a person’s State and The (several) States as a group (or the central government). States’ is the plural possessive. It references The States as a group and is thus the same as saying Federal Rights. So you could argue that people today who speak of States’ Rights have lost part of the basic concept before they even get started. 

Why Rights vs. Powers? The second word of the phrase is also misused. Rights are given to the people by God, not to their State, a group of States, or to a central government. States do not have rights; they have powers to govern that have been granted by the sovereign people. That, Ladies and Gentlemen, is the concept of American liberty. Government at every level is supposed to execute only those powers for which the people have granted the authority. Any debate that begins with the “Rights” of any government at any level has most likely been lost from the outset. Even if the effort seems to have initial success, in the end it only winds up chipping away at our God-given Rights. 

But for the sake of this article let’s just leave the above for consideration, thought, and prayer by the reader. Of those three, prayer should be the most important, giving thanks for the Rights that have been bestowed upon us by our Maker and asking forgiveness for being so complacent in giving His gifts away. 

From my perspective it is easy to identify what States’ Rights (or more accurately, State’s Powers) are not. States’ Rights are (is) not a slogan to be used to stop ObamaCare or Obama Cap and Tax or any other of the Obama socialist programs coming out of Washington City like a swarm of katydids. States’ Rights are (is) not a slogan to stop the Bush Patriot Acts or Bush CAFTA and other expensive trade agreements. By the same token, States’ Rights are (is) not a slogan to stop DFACS (Department of Children and Family Services) from illegal search and seizures, or some idiot in Atlanta telling me I do not have the proper permit to raise a duck unless the duck’s great grandmother’s owner had a proper permit! 

Now think about that last example. When someone says that States’ Rights will solve all of our problems, are they suggesting that it is proper to require a documented duck’s ancestry of suitable quality for a citizen to feed the duck and give it a home? Is such nonsense acceptable simply because it's being perpetrated by an idiot in Atlanta, Montgomery, Nashville or Columbia instead of an idiot in Washington City? A silly example, maybe. But once you concede Rights to any government entity you have lost that Right – most likely forever. Even worse is that your children and grandchildren will not even know that it is something that you lost and that they were denied! 

Today the debate should be about how State Powers will be used as a check on Federal Powers to guarantee our God-given Rights. It should be about how delegated Powers given to the Federal government will be used to guarantee our God-given Rights in areas that extend beyond the State in which we live. Otherwise, all of the rhetoric, all of the campaigning, and all the elected officials' use of today’s (improper) definition of States’ Rights will only determine how fast we go over the cliff. 

American liberty is rapidly approaching the cliff. It's up to you the citizen to change that direction if it's going to be changed. You have only this recourse at your disposal. Demand that all levels of government keep their hands off your God-given Rights unless the people grant them a Power to do so. Elect only those officials who are willing to abide by this restriction. Retire any elected official who abuses or usurps that which God has given you. 

Arguing about which level of government will do a better job abusing your God-given Rights makes for interesting partisan battles, but it's a formula for failure year after year, election after election, and decade after decade -- as we have seen. After all, those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it. In summary: what was State’s Rights isn’t what it is today. What is States’ Rights isn’t what it was. What your Rights will be is up to you.


What is States' Rights - Part 1
What is States' Rights - Part 2
What is States' Rights - Part 3
What is States' Rights - Part 4
What is States' Rights - Part 5
What is States' Rights - Part 6
What is States' Rights - Part 7

Mike Crane is a member of the League of the South Board of Directors and LS Communications Coordinator. Mike has a long track record as a hard worker within the Southern Heritage and Independence movements including being first chairman of the Florida League of the South, serving on the board of the Georgia League of the South, and an enthusiastic member of the Georgia Division of the Sons of Confederate Veterans. Additionally, Crane is a Georgia Delegate to the Southern National Congress and serves as Chairman of the Internet Technology Committee for that organisation. Mike has been politically active since 1965. Within that time, he has run for the Georgia Senate twice and the Fannin County, Georgia Commission Chairmanship. Mike is also one of the principle founders of the Southern Party of Georgia. 
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Hog Heaven


by Joyce Bennett 
 
Not too many years ago in the county where I was born, summer morning mists would hang over acres and acres of tobacco, a crop we have been raising for almost four centuries. Today, however, because most of our farmers have taken a government buy-out, it is, sadly, a surprise to come across a field topping out along a back road in August. If there is anything I associate more with my country upbringing and Southern heritage than the gummy weed so despised by anti-smoking crusaders, it would have to be that other staple of Southern agriculture, the hog.
In years gone by even county people who were not farmers kept three or four of them, and every fall our hogs met their inevitable demise. By the time I was in junior high school, I was far too sophisticated --and deracinated-- to appreciate the rustic rituals of autumn, wishing with all my heart I had been born a city girl and not some hick who had to live on a tobacco farm and eat "hug" meat. 
But as a child, I had happily run barefoot up the path behind our house to the pen to watch my father feed the animals we raised each year. I enjoyed watching them eat and liked the mealy aroma of mash and water feed and how it coated their pretty pink snouts as they dipped them in the trough. I liked to scratch their backs and hear them grunt. I even liked the "smell" of the hogs themselves. Somehow it was not unpleasant to me. 
Daddy loved his hogs and hated killing them. To spare them suffering, he hired a highly-regarded black neighbor to shoot them before slitting their throats. In pork-pie hat and galluses, a cigar in his mouth, Spencer Barnes aimed his rifle at each beloved head dropping one after the other to the hard ground. The Pennsylvania Dutch, who had come to the county in the thirties, did not kill their hogs before bleeding them, and my brother saw an Amish farmer beat with a board one poor thing that had broken its leg and wasn't moving fast enough to the slaughter to suit him. But my people were gentle. 
To them hog killing was a big event. Family came to help; and also Agnes, the woman who had taken care of us children over the years and who was given to the telling of ancient and quite often gruesome tall tales. Until late into the night everyone sat around a large table in the kitchen cutting up the meat. It fell to my mother to prepare the country sausage, and she took great care in seasoning this delicacy, adding just the right amount of red pepper and sage and expertly twisting the plumped up casings into the links that would hang from tobacco sticks in the unctuous chill of a December meathouse. In the spring, we would take down from the rafters a moldy Easter ham and scrub it off, stuffing it with greens and onions and boiling it in a pillowcase for the holiday dinner. 
I am proud of such experiences and proud of my Southern agrarian roots-- now. Though I returned to the county from the North almost thirty years ago, as a young woman I was anxious to shake off the sandy soil of a Maryland tobacco farm and eventually married a Midwesterner, moving to exotic places such as Minnesota and Iowa. It was in Iowa one gray winter day when the snow lay in dishwater dingy piles, that I saw a semi rig hauling some hogs to market. My heart broke for them. Hogs should not be treated this way. They should live in a small pen and be loved by tender-hearted people who speak softly to them and scratch their backs and who kill them with mercy and respect for the sustenance they provide. 
But I have not turned into a militant vegetarian. No one loves country ham more than I do. I baste it in Jack Daniels. And I pride myself on my greens and fatback. As I grow older, however, I feel increasingly guilty about buying corporate meat, about buying that plastic tube of Old South-style sausage at the supermarket. Animal rights types are not necessarily wrong in calling attention to the miseries that most livestock endure before their final terrifying moments in a gigantic slaughter house. And right-wing radio talk show personalities might ridicule anyone who protests the plight of corporate farm animals, but, in truth, a little kindness towards the creatures over which God has given us dominion isn't left-wing or radical. It is simply Christian. 
Because most people today might not find it practical to keep hogs out back, buying meat on the hoof or meat products from a farmer we know and trust would seem a good alternative to supporting the big agricultural conglomerates. The totalitarians in DC, however, through increasingly complex regulation, threaten small farming operations, and the Southern National Congress has now called on the federal government to end its sponsorship of big agribusiness and to "restore the common law rights of farmers to sell at farm gate."
In first and foremost defending the Christian agrarian substrate of Southern society, we begin to frustrate the American Empire's plans to control even the most seemingly mundane aspects of our lives.
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Joyce Bennett is the Chairman of the Maryland League of the South and a Maryland Delegate to the Southern National Congress.
 

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