CIVIL RIGHTS ACT: TILTED FOUNDATION
By Rev. Ted Pike
24 Jan 08
The legacy of Martin Luther King Jr. includes landmark civil
rights acts of the 1960s. The Civil Rights Act of 1964, Voting Rights
Act of 1965, and Civil Rights Act of 1968 with its Fair Housing Act
ostensibly enforced equality, equal opportunity, and voting rights
to blacks.
In reality, these acts also granted unprecedented power to the
federal government to invade states' rights and enforce not just
equality but special rights and privileges for black Americans. These
laws were built on the premise that blacks, having suffered so long
and bitterly, were entitled not just to equal treatment but to special
perpetual compensation. They would not have to earn equally high
GPA's to enter college, medical, or law school. Business owners would
have to atone for years of discrimination by guaranteeing annual
quotas of blacks in their workforce (many of whom were less qualified
than white applicants). Predominantly white taxpayers had to fund
expensive bussing programs to place black children in white public
schools far from their home districts.
Such preference violated the 14th Amendment of the Constitution,
which forbids government to grant special benefits to any group --
regardless of how deeply it has suffered.
These civil rights acts also dealt a body blow to the sanctity of personal
property. The forgers of our nation believed that anyone who is a US citizen
has rights to equality and justice before the law. Citizens can use all publicly
owned facilities and services. They may serve on juries and in the military.
They may enjoy public education, unrestrained voting rights, and freedom from
involuntary servitude.
But our early ancestors never taught that any citizen can entitle
himself to enjoy others’ rental property, businesses, private
institutions of learning, fraternal groups or even churches, contrary
to the owners’ wishes. People might suffer hurt feelings if
they’re not included in privately owned organizations. But
the founders knew that a much worse injustice would result from destroying
private control—a right as fundamental to our heritage as free
speech. (This does not apply to vital or emergency services. No privately
owned companies in that business could or should ever safely deny
assistance to people of any race.)
Federal civil rights acts eroded this foundation. They made private
property and institutions into essentially public-controlled properties.
Restaurants, apartments, educational institutions, etc.—created
and kept running by the hard work and financial investment of individuals—could
be sued by a racial minority who was denied access to them. Americans
who insisted on their property rights became federal criminals.
Civil rights laws were predominantly meant to grant special rights
to blacks, yet feminists claimed similar victim status under centuries
of “male chauvinism.” They demanded and got federal concessions
under the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Feminists won the
right to sue employers for discrimination in hiring or firing.
In 1968 the parent of the present federal hate crimes bill (Title
18, U.S.C., Sec. 2a) led to later enactment of triple penalties against
anyone who committed a crime motivated by bias against federally
protected groups. It also stipulated that anyone whose speech might
provoke another to violence against these groups should be indicted
along with the active offender.
Inevitably, homosexuals demanded the same privileges and protections
as blacks and women. Through the nineties, roughly 45 states passed
hate crimes laws. Most granted homosexuals virtually the same protections
that blacks acquired in 1964.
Protection of homosexuals, transvestites, and transgendered people
is a critically important demand of the federal hate bill, repeatedly
submitted to Congress since 1998.
Civil Rights Firestorm
During the sixties a few dissenting Constitutionalists (including
myself as a high school student) suggested that a civil rights bill
should go no further than absolutely guaranteeing equality before
the law. Yet, Constitutionalists were out-shouted in an emotional “civil
rights” firestorm. It was not surprising that the Communist
Party USA and the American Jewish community totally supported civil
rights legislation. Communists wanted to abolish private property,
which is largely what segregation was all about. The Jewish agenda,
at least from the vantage point of its top strategists (the Anti-Defamation
League), was to lay the foundation upon which broader Christian-persecuting
bias and hate crime laws could be built.
The bias crime juggernaut that began to roll in the sixties has
now assumed tremendous momentum. Its dark ambitions loom far beyond
civil rights idealists’ dreams. More and more groups—including
families with children, the disabled, homeless, religious sects such
as Jews, Sikhs and Muslims, even (as in England) witches and warlocks,
atheists and Satanists—attempt to hitch a ride on the "special
rights” hate crimes gravy train.
How can society protect itself from an ever-expanding number of
special interest groups demanding preference and invasive rights
to our property in the years ahead?
First, we must reevaluate how the civil rights movement took us
in the wrong direction. We must understand that discrimination is
not ended by giving one group preferential rights over another. Those
not possessing such advantages automatically become victims of reverse
discrimination!
We must also understand that the civil rights laws of the sixties,
enacted with massive public blessing, were really potential hate
crime laws. All homosexuals have to do to make them so is inject “sexual
orientation” next to race and gender. Voila! Civil rights laws
become Christian-persecuting hate laws.
America must again obey the 14th Amendment that prohibits special
protection of any one group. Congress should repeal all aspects of
civil rights laws that violate it.
We must re-instate the ancient ethic that, just as a man’s
house is his castle, so all privately owned property is under sole
control of its owners—not his neighbors, government or specially
protected groups.
Return to Segregation?
"Yet," many will object, "Doesn't this lead to re-establishment
of segregation? After all, isn’t segregation the banding together
of communities agreeing not to allow their institutions, businesses,
or private colleges to be accessed by blacks?"
No. Segregation was a broad state-enforced exclusion of black participation
from many tax-supported activities and institutions. Insisting that
private individuals and groups regain the right to discriminate against
those who want to make use of their property is not the same. It’s
only a return to universal norms about the sanctity of private property.
Such norms have been unquestioned since the dawn of history. Harsh
as it may seem, we must re-instate the right of property
owners to discriminate against anyone who impinges
on our property for any reason . This will empower property owners
to resist intrusion by the militant homosexuals who have pirated
the civil rights laws. Unless their agenda is resisted, they will win
even more special federal protections in the years ahead to invade
and destroy the integrity and morality of Christian colleges and
churches, let alone controlling our businesses and real-estate.
I believe public pressure and criticism—not federal edicts—are
the best ways to repulse possible bigotry in the use of our private
property. It is unkind, repugnant, and abrasive for anyone to inform
another human being that his skin color makes him unwelcome as a
patron, employee, renter, or student in a white-owned business or
institution. But, through economic boycott and vigorous criticism,
it should be the role of society, not government, to repress bigotry.
Otherwise, in place of black victimization, we will continue to witness white
and Christian victimization. Insistence on property rights will be viewed by
the courts as “bias” and “hate crime.”
Ultimately, racial tension between blacks and whites won’t
be solved by either black or liberal attempts to dispossess whites
of their property rights or by white segregationist attempts to re-acquire
them to the extent they existed before civil rights laws. Both these
efforts created suspicion, strife, bad blood -- and bad legislation.
From Selma to S. Africa , attempts to disenfranchise blacks from
white prosperity have only resulted in race envy and class hatred.
Conversely, the more than 40-year American experiment to disenfranchise
whites of their personal property rights opens the doors for white
backlash and evil freedom-stealing bias and hate crimes laws.
Is there a political solution to these two strife-creating extremes?
I doubt it. But there is a spiritual one. Christ came and died for
all mankind, empowering all races to be united in love and worship
of their Creator and in love for one another. It is no accident that
one of the first acts of the apostle Philip was to meet a black
Ethiopian eunuch and share with him, in question and answer, the
wonders of unity and power in Christ (Acts 8:26). Perhaps all efforts
to find a perfect solution to the problem of racial tension fail
because they are destined to do so. If a strictly political solution
existed, who would need the transcendent power of a clean heart to
love one’s
fellow man as much as ourselves? That only comes from Christ.
Rev. Ted Pike is director of the National Prayer Network, a Christian/conservative
watchdog organization.
Let the Anti-Defamation League of B'nai B'rith teach you how they
have saddled 45 states with hate laws capable of persecuting Christians: http://www.adl.org/99hatecrime/intro.asp.
Learn how ADL took away free speech in Canada and wants to steal
it now in the U.S. Congress. Watch Rev. Ted Pike's Hate
Laws: Making Criminals of Christians at video.google.com. Purchase
this gripping documentary to show at church. Order online at www.truthtellers.org for
$24.90, DVD or VHS, by calling 503-853-3688, or at the address below.
TALK SHOW HOSTS: Interview Rev. Ted Pike on this
topic. Call (503) 631-3808.
National Prayer Network, P.O. Box 828, Clackamas,
OR 97015
