No More Excuses

restoring our biblical and constitutional foundations

No More Excuses!

Why a Vote for Michael Peroutka over George Bush Is Not a Wasted Vote

It never ceases to amaze me how so many good people can be naive or deceived. Numerous times during our involvement with the Constitution Party over the past 2½ years, people—well-meaning, conservative, Christian people—have told us for one reason or another that they don’t care to vote for Principle over Politics, they don’t want constitutional government, they don’t want to end abortion in America, they don’t want their liberties reclaimed.

How can that be? How can someone who is a Christian possibly be alright with continuing the child-killing in America? Does it seem incredible to you that Christian people would make such statements?

Well, we’ve not actually heard any Christian make such statements. But by the statements that they have made, they might as well have made those statements.

Following are the statements I hear often concerning the CP and its presidential candidate, Mr. Peroutka. In reality, they are no better than excuses. My pastor in Cincinnati always said that an excuse is “the skin of a reason stuffed with a lie.” Along with these excuses are the responses I often make to this mistaken thinking.

Following the answering of these statements, there is a list of positions, policies, and practices of the Bush Administration that give us a glimpse of what we’ve had over the past 3½ years and what we are in for if we have another 4 years of him.

Statements (Excuses)

Mr. Peroutka doesn’t stand a chance.

This is a defeatist attitude. Mr. Peroutka doesn’t believe in chance. And, from what I understand of biblical principles, chance has no part in determining the leader of a nation, nor in a Christian’s outlook. In our case, God has granted that we have the liberty to choose our own leaders. As a nation, we get the kind of government we deserve. We are the ones who vote (or abstain from voting). We are the ones who stand up (or not) for what’s right. And if we want a good man to win, it’s up to us, not up to chance.

A vote for Mr. Peroutka is a wasted vote.

As Mr. Peroutka says, a truly wasted vote is a vote for a candidate who tells you up front, before even taking his oath of office, that he intends to violate the Constitution – which is exactly what both Mr. Kerry and Mr. Bush have done. Both propose grand programs that are unconstitutional, both propose to continue US involvement in the UN and other international alliances that are robbing us of our sovereignty and liberty.

A vote for Mr. Peroutka is a vote for John Kerry.

Wrong. A vote for John Kerry is a vote for John Kerry. A vote for Michael Peroutka is a vote for Michael Peroutka.

The strategists have reasoned that someone who would vote for Mr. Peroutka (a very conservative candidate) would have voted for Mr. Bush if he had not voted for Peroutka, and it is thus a vote taken away from Mr. Bush, and in effect a vote for Mr. Kerry. This is an unjustified stretch of logic.

This is also a scare tactic to whip into line those who have wandered away from the GOP fold. It is a statement that is designed to generate fear in your heart that you may actually be helping a really bad candidate to win. It is designed to send you on a guilt trip so that you will vote for the lesser of two evils rather than the greatest of multiple choices. Your vote, if made out of fear, is a flawed vote.

All of these first three statements are really saying the same thing: vote for what’s convenient, not for what’s right. It’s a twist on situation ethics. It’s an admission that whereas you believe in the principles of the Constitution Party and Mr. Peroutka, you’re going to vote for Mr. Bush because of the situation. My friend, if that’s your philosophy, then you don’t genuinely believe in what the CP stands for. Principles are not valid just when the circumstances are right or when it is convenient. Principles are always valid and right. And if you will abandon them out of fear or convenience, then you are no better than the politicians you despise.

A third party can’t possibly win in America.

No it can’t, as long as Americans keep believing lies such as this one. What would happen if everyone who objects to the GOP on principle would vote their conscience? People would be sending a clear message to the GOP that they want Principle Over Politics, not politics as usual. The CP would be a force to be reckoned with. But, sad to say, people continue to listen to the lies, and thus ensure that a third party never makes an impact on the political scene. In effect, if you believe this you are part of the problem, not part of the solution.

It is interesting that this argument is made by Republicans, whose party at one time was a third party. Have Republicans forgotten their meager beginnings? Ultimately this statement admits two fallacies: first, that the two parties are the only valid avenues to public office; and second, that winning is the only thing that really matters. Remember, Adolph Hitler won, but that didn’t mean he was right.

It is a standard GOP goal to win at all cost. The GOP does not operate by principle. This is why a perceived conservative Christian President Bush can promote a GOP senator like Arlen Specter who is as liberal as they come in the GOP. Specter is pro-choice, pro-UN, anti-Second Amendment, etc. The president was not acting on principle when he threw his support behind Specter; he was trying to keep GOP control of the Senate by insuring that Specter was the GOP candidate for senator over his lesser-known, but more conservative GOP challenger.

There’s too much money in the two major parties for the CP to make any headway.

Sure enough, there’s a lot of money in the workings of these two parties. But, money is not arbiter of elections.

Those who fought and died for our liberties during the formative days of our Republic were not well financed, yet they took on the world’s most formidable navy—and won! It was by the grace of God, though. And they poured out the hearts and begged God for his help.

Likewise, if we would recapture our liberties and restore the Republic, we will have to call upon God, even beg him to help. And, we’ll have to elect men of the character of our Founders—someone unlike either of the two major candidates.

I’m afraid of what will happen if John Kerry gets elected.

Fear is controlling your voting. And if you vote based upon fear, you will later on regret your choice. Instead of making a positive, confident choice for the best candidate, you are minded instead to cast a vote based upon your fear of another candidate, voting for a candidate who is not as bad as so-and-so.

People fear that Mr. Kerry in the White House would translate into a total trashing of morals and the American life as we know it. But keep one thing in mind: there is a game, a deception, that Washington has to maintain, no matter what. And it is this game that would keep Mr. Kerry in check if he is elected.

If Mr. Kerry does win, and the GOP keeps control of the House and Senate, we are no worse off than we were during the Clinton years. The two major parties will control the different branches of government. While Clinton was president, for example, his administration (and Janet Reno) tried to push the USA Patriot Act (known by another name and in slightly different form) through the GOP-controlled Congress. It failed to pass on three different occasions, owing to the staged opposition that Republicans and Democrats maintain in Washington. But with Bush as president and a Republican Congress, it sailed through, and our liberties were further eroded. We have been worse off when both the executive and legislative branches are controlled by the same party than when they are controlled by different parties.

The Bible says one-world government is coming anyway. You can’t stop it. So why bother?

Well, let’s just throw up our hands and give up, then. Don’t go to the polls. Don’t get involved. Don’t bother living for God, either. That way, we can hasten the inevitable and be all the sooner on our way out of here.

Really, that’s a very poor attitude. Is that what our Founders fought to give us? The Founders had the same Bible with the same prophecies in it, yet, they found cause enough to stand for their liberties and fight for them, some of them even dying for them. Where has the spirit of the American revolution gone?

If the excuse not to help the CP and not to vote for Peroutka is that one-world government is unstoppable, then don’t vote for Bush, either. Vote for Kerry so it will come all the faster.

Mr. Bush has a lot better morals than Mr. Kerry.

This is debatable. Mr. Bush has been held up as a conservative Christian man, a moral man, who champions our values. Once you read the record on it (below), you’ll conclude otherwise. We are being deceived. And the sooner you and I recognize that, the sooner we will be free to exercise an unfettered vote in confidence for a truly moral candidate who does champion the values for which we thought the GOP stood.

Mr. Bush is God’s man. He’s a Christian man. We shouldn’t question what he’s doing.

It would be foolish of me to deny his profession of faith. I do not know his heart; only God knows his heart. However, I can examine his statements and the fruit of his political career and make a judgment as to whether they translate into a Christian testimony and whether he is worthy of my Christian vote.

Examine his words and deeds relative to several moral and constitutional issues given below. After reading through the list, a Christian would be going contrary to his own faith to cast a vote for Mr. Bush. The real question is whether or not Christians, after learning the facts, would rather go on ignoring them and vote for Bush in spite of them.

We have a responsibility as citizens to know who we are electing and to hold their feet to the fire so they will do right. If they won’t stand right morally, we need to act. If they trample our liberties, we need to act. He who has rights must assert them. If not, they will be trampled—repeatedly. God gave us our liberties, but the keeping of them is our responsibility. And if we allow our leaders to repeatedly trample them, we get the government we deserve.

Mr. Kerry is so anti-gun, I have to vote for Bush.

Under the “Liberties” section below, see how Mr. Bush has worked against our Second Amendment rights. The fact is, both Mr. Kerry and Mr. Bush will work against our Second Amendment rights. The difference is merely in how much. On the other hand, Mr. Peroutka is 100% in favor of your right to own and operate a firearm, and will enact policies and promote legislation that will secure those rights, and will push for the repeal of damaging legislation that has already been passed.

Bush Positions, Policies, and Practices

Gay Rights

While governor of Texas, Bush appointed a supporter of the Houston Gay and Lesbian Political Caucus and also of Planned Parenthood, Martha Hill Jamison, to the 164th District Court in Houston.
Early in 2000, President Bush attempted to purge the Republican platform of planks against homosexual marriage and homosexuals in the military.
President Bush insisted that openly homosexual Congressman Jim Kolbe of Arizona be given a prominent speaking role at the Republican National Convention.
The Bush Administration has conducted White House meetings with gay groups.
Bush signed a District of Columbia appropriations bill that funded benefits for unmarried domestic partners.
He refused to nullify a 1998 Clinton executive order prohibiting discrimination against sodomites in the federal workforce.
He signed a bill allowing death benefits to be paid to the “domestic partners” of firefighters and police officers who die in the line of duty.
He has increased funding for homosexual propaganda campaigns under the guise of health education programs.
He allowed the Office of Personnel Management, the Department of Agriculture, the Department of Transportation, and the Department of Justice, to openly celebrate “gay pride.”
Mr. Bush has appointed over 40 openly gay individuals to posts in his administration, including the Romanian ambassador, a homosexual activist, who lives at taxpayer expense with his live-in lover in the US Embassy in Romania.
On April 18, 2002, at the annual meeting of the Log Cabin Republicans, the White House hosted a first-ever policy briefing for gay Republicans, featuring senior administration advisors.
President Bush authorized a Clinton policy that allows an “unmarried partner” of a foreign aid worker to be given the same status as a married spouse.
The Bush administration posted a job for a “gay and lesbian program specialist” at the Department of Agriculture.
President Bush publicly praised the Metropolitan Community Church of Los Angeles on occasion of its 35th anniversary, a church that performs 6,000 “gay marriages” annually.
George Bush’s home church in Texas is Highland Park United Methodist Church in Dallas. This church welcomes impenitent homosexuals as members.
In an interview with Diane Sawyer on gay unions, President Bush said, “The position of this administration is that whatever legal arrangements people want to make, they’re allowed to make, so long as it’s embraced by the state or at the state level.”

Abortion

Mr. Bush professes to be pro-life with the exceptions of rape and incest, claiming that good people can disagree on this issue.
He does not believe that Roe v. Wade should be overturned.
During the presidential debates of 2000, Mr. Bush admitted abortion played no part in choosing judicial nominees were he to become president.
As governor of Texas, Mr. Bush did appoint pro-choice judges to the bench.
President Bush decided to allow social service agencies in Africa and the Caribbean to receive funds from the U.S. treasury under his $15 billion emergency AIDS relief plan even if they promote family planning and provide abortions.
Mr. Bush lobbied for and signed the Partial-Birth Abortion Ban, hailed by many as a great stride forward for the pro-life movement. However, the bill redefines the procedure, thus leaving untouched the procedure that is actually being practiced in America. The very language of the ban encourages the killing of the baby before extraction. The end result is that abortion continues unaffected in America while the president points to signing of it as one of the conservative Christian trophies of his administration.
Thanks to Medicaid disbursements and President Bush’s Title X of the Public Health Service Act in 2001, companies such as Planned Parenthood, the largest baby-killing conglomerate in the world, continue to get taxpayer funding. Under Bush, this baby-killing organization has received more tax-funds than under Clinton! Planned Parenthood was responsible for the deaths of 227,375 Americans in 2002.

Liberties

Mr. Bush and Attorney General John Ashcroft crafted and pushed through Congress the USA Patriot Act after 9-11, telling legislators they were unpatriotic if they don’t vote for it. The act grants broad new police powers, negatively affecting Americans’ freedom of association, freedom of information, free speech, the right to legal representation, freedom from unreasonable searches, and the right to a speedy and public trial. It grants to the president the privilege of determining who is an “enemy combatant,” a term so ill-defined that many Americans can now be classified by it.
USA Patriot Act II was snuck through the Congress as part of another bill on the very day Saddam Hussein was captured, when Americans’ attention was focused on him.
His support of Clinton’s 1995 “assault weapons ban” which outlawed a host of semi-automatic guns. The gun ban was due to expire in 2005, but according to Presidential spokesman Scott McClellan, “The president supports the current law (the Clinton gun ban), and he supports reauthorization of the current law.”
His support of Clinton’s National Monuments Declaration, in which millions of acres of western land was seized by the executive branch.
In spite of the fact that he campaigned on the promise to veto any campaign finance reform legislation that limited Americans’ freedom of speech, he signed into law the McCain-Feingold Campaign Finance Reform Bill that effectively eviscerated the first amendment.

Spending

Mr. Bush encouraged the increase in the size and spending of the federal government with a record deficit. With his $2.23 trillion budget, his administration completed the biggest increase in government spending since the Lyndon Johnson’s “Great Society.” The budget deficit predicted by the House Budget Office will hit a record $306 billion. Spending on government programs increased 22 % from 1999 to 2003. A Washington Post report said, “The era of big government, if it ever went away, has returned full-throttle under President Bush.” Former house majority leader Dick Armey commented that under President Bush, the federal government is “out of control.” Our president, in cooperation with international bankers, is literally bankrupting our nation.
He proposed to increase the budget and the power of the Internal Revenue Service: “Bush would give the IRS a 5.3 percent boost to $10.4 billion for the budget year that begins Oct. 1. That will include $133 million dollars for added audits of businesses and high-income taxpayers.”
He signed into law a massive expansion of Medicare that, according to Ron Paul (R-Texas), resulted in “the single largest expansion of the federal welfare state since the Great Society programs of the 1960s.”

US Sovereignty

Bush has endorsed and promoted the globalist, sovereignty-threatening aims of the United Nations. His demand of Iraq was that it conform to UN resolutions, resolutions that the US may some day be called to conform to, as long as we remain members.
He has continued the Clintonian policy of sending our soldiers to serve under U.N. commanders on U.N. missions.
He is promoting the formation and adoption of FTAA (Free Trade Area of the Americas) which will bind our nation in a union with 34 other nations in our hemisphere for economic purposes, but will also grant an international counsel the authority to override our Constitution to resolve disputes among the member nations.

Borders and Immigration

Mr. Bush has expanded government welfare programs to illegal aliens and his proposals to grant amnesty to illegal aliens.
In January 2004, Bush proposed a full amnesty program for up to 12 million illegals already in this country. Since that time, the number of attempts to cross the border has increased by over 25% in some areas as Mexicans (and others) rush to the US to be able to take advantage of the benefits being offered by the president.

Christianity

President Bush said he reads the Bible daily, but he confessed to The New York Times, “I don’t necessarily believe every single word is literally true.” About the evolution-creation debate, he said, “The verdict is still out on how God created the earth. I don’t use the Bible as necessarily a way to predict the findings of science.” In other words, Darwinism may be true according to President Bush.
One of his first acts as president, in February 2001, was to follow through with the Clinton administration’s campaign to shut down the Indianapolis Baptist Temple over a tax dispute. Despite the fact that churches are automatically tax-exempt according to IRS regulations, John Ashcroft and company took the church property with the approval of Mr. Bush.
He demoralized Korean and Japanese Christians by bowing down at a pagan Shinto shrine in Japan.
He has made public statement that Muslims and Christians worship the same God, contrary to the plain teaching of Scripture.
He has endorsed Ramadan, a Muslim fast, at a White House celebration.
He proposed to increase funding of the National Endowment for the Arts by 15 percent, the highest percentage increase in two decades. That’s a total of 139 million dollars in 2005 to finance art, much of which is blasphemous. (Recall the taxpayer-financed painting of a crucifix in a jar of urine.)
Not only did President Bush publicly condemn Judge Roy Moore’s actions, his chief political consultant Karl Rove spearheaded the attack against him. When Roy Moore was before Bill Pryor’s inquisition about to lose his job for his public stand for God, President Bush was in California campaigning for a pro-abortion, pro-sodomite Republican, Arnold Schwarzenegger.

If you can stand reading more of the Bush record, visit www.BushRevealed.com. There is also an interesting article at our state party website entitled, “Why Christians Should Not Vote for George W. Bush.”

Conclusion

After reviewing the Bush record, and knowing the possibilities of Kerry, why would anyone want to vote for either one? Why would someone who loves liberty want to vote for a man who is an internationalist? Why would a Christian want to vote for a man who has by his actions operated contrary to his profession of faith? Why would a fiscal conservative want to vote for a man who has given us the largest deficits in history?

Face it—the two major parties have nothing to offer the conservative or Christian voter in America today. Not if you want a return to liberty. Not if you want abortion to end in America. Not if you want to restore your Second Amendment rights. Not if you want fiscal responsibility. Not if you want a constitutional America.

A vote for Mr. Bush, after knowing his record, is like saying, “I don’t care if we stop abortion in America. I don’t want to return to the Constitution. It doesn’t matter if we have our liberties restored.”

God does not operation on convenience or the lesser of two evils. Why should his children operate that way? His truth is not dependent upon the situation. Why should his children operate with that mindset?

Remember this: the major media do not even consider third party candidates as viable choices. And as long as you listen to their message, you’ll believe their lies and deceptions. Is it any oversight or accident that the presidential debate commission will not allow a third party into the debate? Not at all. The commission recognizes that the message of the third parties many times resonates with the American people better than the message by the major parties. And to keep Americans voting for the two major parties, the message of the third parties has to be suppressed. Hence, they are largely ignored by the media, and the debate commission refuses to work with them.

Your best strategy this election cycle is to guard your mind from the lies and deceptions foisted on us by the major media (ABC, NBC, CBS, CNN, and even FOX). I recommend WorldNetDaily.com on the web, and other web resources linked from our state party website.

Keep biblical principles and the Constitution at the forefront of your decision-making. Don’t allow yourself to be placed on a guilt trip about helping the other side win. Do what’s right, not what’s convenient.

You can help America by first making sure of your own standing before God, and living your life to please Him. Help others to see the folly of abandoning biblical principles. By helping them, you help America.

June 4, 2004

Mr. Michael Harrison is State Chairman of the Constitution Party of North Carolina. He may be reached for comment here.

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