I have said kind things about Ron Paul in the past, and I will continue say them in the future. He continues to be one of the people I could vote for when Ringling Bros. finally brings the gaudy parade to my state. But he whiffed it last night in the debate when asked how his faith would affect his behavior in office. He said that it wouldn’t. Not only did he whiff it, but Santorum jacked it out of the park. Santorum said, quite rightly, that the Constitution is the how of America, and the Declaration is the why. He said that government doesn’t give us our rights — God does that — and he said that the government’s role is to protect God-given rights. This was a dead-on bull’s eye.
Ron Paul’s formal position is therefore secularist. Now, of course, like all secularists, he is unable to actually keep these “disparate” elements of his worldview in separate compartments. The thing is impossible. But when you think you can do it, the result is generally a lot of confusion. Now I also believe that Ron Paul is as honest as white paint, and that he has told us plainly his actual thoughts on this. But this just means that he is honestly schizophrenic on this topic. That doesn’t make him lonely, it just makes him wrong. The secularist experiment is a fraud, and is lying around on the floor in a shambolic ruin.
In a breakfast discussion this morning, a friend astutely observed that this is why we probably ought to back away from our talk of constitutional rights. The Constitution was assigned to protect them; the Constitution was not given to us so that it might assign them. The Constitution was made for the rights, not the rights for the Constitution. Let’s speak of God-given rights.
I really appreciated the clarity in Santorum’s remarks. I appreciated the lack of confusion. God honors it when He is confessed.