Correcting The Liahona on the U.S. Constitution

The Liahona, the official magazine of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints published an article on the United States Constitution in its September 2022 issue.

And boy is it terrible.

The article, Understanding and Defending Constitutional Principles was written by Dr. Steven P. Brown of Auburn University’s College of Liberal Arts. Typical of the kind of venal academic malfeasance that flows from most educational centers these days, this article is full of the kind of erroneous platitudes and fallacious claims that don’t just actively contradict what the Constitution actually says, they’re also exceedingly dangerous if not absolutely deadly to human liberty. Below is a step by step dismantling of the Liahona article and its problems, not only in order to provide Latter-day Saints with a necessary correction for something published in a church magazine, but because such a work will serve as a solid foundation for discarding much of the same kind of dreck (from both academic and amateur sources) that the reader will encounter endlessly elsewhere whenever discussing the Constitution.

Introduction

The Liahona article starts off referencing President Dallin H. Oaks’s April 2021 General Conference talk titled  Defending Our Divinely Inspired Constitution and explains that the five principles of constitutional government listed by President Oaks will serve as the road map for the article. The article dedicates itself to explaining each principle and why it is important. I have already examined this talk in detail in my article President Oaks Taught The Principles of Anarchy at General Conference. The condensed version of that article is that in it I explained how each principle listed by President Oaks is actually violated and more fully expressed and lived in voluntaryist, libertarian, and anarchist societies where the government does not have the power to rule by force than they are in statist societies like that created by the U.S. Constitution.

This is no condemnation upon the Constitution itself. It was a giant leap forward for liberty and human rights in its day, but today we understand both issue far better than our forefathers did. In our day we have developed forms of government – voluntaryism, libertarianism, anarchism – that better implement those God-given principles of government than the Constitution ever did. To continue to allow ourselves to be bound by it and the violent monopoly it formed is to shackle ourselves to the dust when we could be soaring to the heavens. For a principle by principle explanation of this I highly suggest my article in its fulness.

Popular Sovereignty

The next section in the Liahona article is about popular sovereignty which it says, “means that government gets its authority from the people it serves, and both the government and the people must recognize this principle in order to safeguard it.” That is a pretty good definition, but then it immediately makes a massive blunder. Right after the previous quotation the article says:

Governments acknowledge popular sovereignty by conducting regular elections where individuals are free to vote for any candidate of their choice. Elected leaders likewise remember that popular sovereignty is vested in all of the people and not in just those who may have voted for them. They actively seek compromises that will benefit the greatest number.

^{Understanding and Defending Constitutional Principles, Brown}

These are typical claims, but they fall apart immediately when you think about them to any degree.

Do elections ensure that you have control over your government? With the way that governments use propaganda to manipulate their own people without their knowledge and the rising power of the unelected and largely unknown bureaucrats that run the national-security state, how can anyone claim that people have any control over their actual government? Elections merely manufacture consent, giving those in power an aura of legitimacy while they continue to pursue their own agendas. The expanding power of the government renders elections meaningless. The way that politicians use the powers they have also makes supporting them and the systems that empower them – such as voting – fundamentally wrong. In a statist (“state-ist”) society, voting is immoral because voting doesn’t protect human liberty, it only empowers political oppressors. As the classical legal theorist Lysander Spooner succinctly put it:

 A man is none the less a slave because he is allowed to choose a new master once in a term of years. Neither are a people any the less slaves because permitted periodically to choose new masters. What makes them slaves is the fact that they now are, and are always hereafter to be, in the hands of men whose power over them is, and always is to be, absolute and Irresponsible.

^{No Treason: The Constitution of No Authority, Pg. 24}

Even if elections were made with fully educated people in a government free of internal authoritarian corruption, the idea that just because someone you hate won a popular contest so now they get to force you to obey them or they have the right to beat you, cage you, or even kill you isn’t just nonsensical. It is outright insane. Elections in and of themselves are a violation of sovereignty of the people as long as anyone is forced to accept the rulership of someone he or she does not support. And the leaders elected in such a system by their very actions deny the “consent of the governed” and the rights of the people to be led by those they choose.

As for compromise, what a filthy word. Lehonti was destroyed because he was willing to compromise with his enemy and come down from his fortifications to a place where his enemy could kill him. How could a people who understand so clearly the lesson this teaches about our spiritual lives not recognize the same reasoning applies to our political lives as well? The story is even a political story about a general being deceived and killed by a political rival because he, Lehonti, compromised with that rival. The moral of the story is clear. Political compromise with corrupt politicians only leads to the victor of corruption and authoritarianism. This is a political lesson that Lehonti teaches us that we apply to spiritual concerns, not the other way around. When you compromise with corruption, error, and evil the only forces that win are corruption, error, and evil. By giving up your principles you have only degraded yourself and empowered your enemies who wish to rule over you. Compromise only benefits politicians who trade favors like money to gain power and actively harms the people who end up suffering from such compromises.

Compromise is for when you’re deciding what to have for dinner, not for deciding the fates of millions, not for deciding how you will treat the rights of others. Compromise is the word the coward uses when trying to turn his mental, emotional, and spiritual gutlessness into a virtue.

A free society does not need to worry about compromise because no one has the authority to force their will upon you. It is only in a society that believes you need to compromise in order to ensure that others have the power to violate your rights and to force you to obey their will need worry about ensuring your submission to their violation of you by telling you to compromise. The central issue here isn’t whether someone is partisan, stubborn, or unwilling to compromise. The issue is that you arrogantly believe you have the authority to demand others transform their lives to conform to your will, to change what they do to submit to your orders. In other words, the problem is not the unwillingness to compromise, it is your desire to dominate others and force them to do what you order them to do through government power., The problem is the State.

Free societies – voluntaryist, libertarian, and anarchist societies – have no problem with people of disparate beliefs and ideas working together for the common good. There is no need to compromise. Since there is no threat of compulsion people work together when it benefits them and don’t when they do not benefit. Because no one can order others around and use legalized violence to compel obedience form the recalcitrant there is no need to sacrifice your desires or rights to appease others. Not only does society function this way, but it functions better than what we have now. Thus, in these free societies true popular sovereignty is preserved while in statist ones popular sovereignty is endlessly violated by necessity for the government to merely function.

Federalism and the Separation of Powers

This section is a good explanation of the theory of federalism. Federalism is the belief that by dividing authority over different aspects of government between the individual states and the federal government and then dividing the powers given to the federal government among its three branches that you will fundamentally handicap the ability of the government to act in any seriously authoritarian way. All of that sounds good when you just hear it. But when you think about it at any depth you realize it is one of those things that only sounds smart, but is actually really stupid.

For example, the division of powers among three branches of government only works if those branches are actively fighting each other and have no unifying force to bridge their in-built competitiveness. But the three branches have never functioned that way. From the very start political parties developed that provided that unifying function. Federalist Party judges like John Jay ruled not according to the U.S. Constitution, but according to the political desires and ideology of the Federalist Party. The Congress and the Presidency only compete against one another when rival political parties control each. When the President belongs to the political party that controls Congress they do whatever they want. And it is impossible to argue that this was accidental since the Electoral College makes the development of mass political parties absolutely necessary in order to win election. Mass political parties then organize the concentrated use of government powers across the branches of government, effectively annihilating the entire separation of powers. It is almost as if the people were fed one promise – the division of power and limiting of government – while that promise was being subverted by the same document.

On top of that, you have the way that government bureaucracies simply function. As Brutus explained it as far back in 1787:

Besides, it is a truth confirmed by the unerring experience of ages, that every man, and every body of men, invested with power, are ever disposed to increase it, and to acquire a superiority over everything that stands in their way. This disposition, which is implanted in human nature, will operate in the Federal legislature to lessen and ultimately to subvert the State authority, and having such advantages, will most certainly succeed, if the Federal government succeeds at all. It must be very evident, then, that what this Constitution wants of being a complete consolidation of the several parts of the union into one complete government, possessed of perfect legislative, judicial, and executive powers, to all intents and purposes, it will necessarily acquire in its exercise in operation.

^{Federalist Power Will Ultimately Subvert State Authority, pdf pg. 51}

Those in power ever seek after more power and no artificial divisions on paper will prevent that reality. If anything, as Brutus recognizes, concentration of power into the hands of political elites in a centralized state only enables the centralizing of more power. The Constitution may promise a divided and weakened government – it may promise Federalism – but in reality it is the avenue that makes the future centralization of power inevitable. And everything Brutus warned about has come to pass and is probably worse than he (or she) could’ve ever imagined.

Protection for Individual Rights and Liberties

This section actually gives us a perfect example of exactly how the federal government has used the Constitution to increase its powers drastically:

Eventually, as a condition for ratifying the document, the first Congress under the new government agreed to consider several amendments. The first 10 of these were ratified in 1791 and became known as the Bill of Rights. While initially written to protect people only against the national government, nearly all of these amendments have since been interpreted by the United States Supreme Court to apply against constitutional infringements by state and local governments as well.

^{Understanding and Defending Constitutional Principles, Brown}

Did you catch that? The Constitution was originally written to limit the powers of the federal government but the Supreme Court has “interpreted” the text to expand the powers of the federal government. In other words, the federal government gave itself more power to dominate and control the states and the people in those states in ways that it was never meant to have simply by deciding it could do so. Exactly as Brutus warned. And if that omission wasn’t enough for you in a section supposedly talking about how the Constitution protects individual rights, buckle up. This mudshow is about to get a whole lot worse.

The article goes one to reference the First Amendment of the Bill of Rights and its protections on, among other things, religious liberty. Then Dr. Brown writes this utter insanity:

Governments safeguard individual rights and liberties, including religious liberty, by recognizing that they exist and by conscientiously reviewing policies and actions to ensure that they benefit the public without violating the rights of the people. Some rights infringements are necessary, however (for example, wartime restrictions on speech or press), but in those rare circumstances, governments tread just as lightly as possible on rights and liberties and do so for the shortest amount of time possible.

^{Understanding and Defending Constitutional Principles, Brown}

First of all, the idea that lawmakers read the laws and ensure they don’t violate the rights of the people is so utterly naïve that only a fool would believe it. Example after example after example has shown that lawmakers almost always vote of legislation not only having never read it, but they also have no idea what the text of the bill even means. And while this article makes the rather preposterous claim that this is a good thing it also explains that the system is designed to function this way does so in countries across North America and Europe. The evidence is obvious. Lawmakers have never read the laws they pass. In many cases, they couldn’t even if they wanted to do so. If they did they did read them most would never understand them. And no one gives a single fig about whether the proposed law would violate your rights or not. Politicians vote how they’re told to vote by their political party and their lobbyists.

Secondly, the idea that some rights need to violated at certain times is utterly vile and in direct violation of the very concept of human rights. Thomas Jefferson summed up the nature of human rights perfectly when he wrote:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.

^{The Declaration of Independence}

One of the fundamental truths about human rights is that they are unalienable. That is they are, “not transferable to another or not capable of being taken away or denied; not alienable.” People cannot surrender their human rights and those in power cannot take them. The violation of them is always unjust, immoral, and tyrannical. Their violation is never necessary and only a corrupt state and a wicked or deceived people would think so. Even Dr. Brown’s example is complete nonsense. The United States just ended its longest war in history when it pulled out of the Afghanistan War in 2021. You know how it was necessary to “infringe” upon the rights to free speech during the 20 years of that war? Never. Not once. The war effort was never harmed by it as evidence by it lasting as long as it did and the trillions spent on it and millions slaughtered by it. Only authoritarians fearful of having their machinations revealed fear the free flow of information to the people and that is why they violate the freedom of speech. It is to protect the wicked that human rights are violated, not for the protection of the people.

The Liahona article continues saying that individuals:

…recognize that no right is absolute and without limits. That is why there is no free-speech right to yell “Bomb!” at an airport or a freedom-to-travel right to exceed the speed limit by 40 miles an hour or a religious-freedom right to practice human sacrifice as part of one’s religion. Those who claim that government can never infringe upon a given right risk undermining the same governmental authority that was established to help protect those rights.

^{Understanding and Defending Constitutional Principles, Brown}

First off, of course there are no limits to your human rights. That doesn’t mean you can do whatever you want because you have no right to violate the rights of others. But those things you have a right to do? You have an unlimited right to do them. That is what it means to have a right to do something or not. And as for undermining the power of the government, that was the entire point of the bill of Rights – to undermine, limit, and diminish the power of the federal government over the lives of people and trap it within a narrow set of specific actions that it was allowed to do. That Dr. Brown thinks that this is bad just demonstrates that he doesn’t understand the Constitution or its history despite his professional degrees.

Next, Dr. Brown’s examples are all terrible and drawn from terrible cases. The yelling “BOMB!” example is just the modern version of Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes’s argument that you don’t have a right to yell “FIRE!” in a crowded theater in the U.S. v. Schenck case. The Schenck case was “one of the most odious free speech decisions in the Court’s history” and was overturned over 50 years ago. Further, the quote was from a comment that Holmes made when presenting the ruling and was not even part of the actual ruling itself, meaning it was never law nor ever had any legal power or authority. And it ignores the actual text of the U.S. Constitution which reads:

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

^{U.S. Constitution, emphasis mine}

Notice the U.S. Constitution says Congress shall make “no law,” as in Congress cannot make any law that would, among other things, abridge the freedom of speech. That this isn’t the core argument of the case proves just how much the Constitution is ignored. It is also another great example of exactly what Brutus argued as it shows another case where the federal government drastically increased its power at will. Holmes and his ilk weren’t interested in defending the rights of people or upholding the U.S. Constitution. They only cared about expanding the powers of the state to control speech and thereby human expression and thought.

Finally, the entire argument is weak. It is true that a person may cause harm by yelling out “FIRE!” or “BOMB!” when there is none. That doesn’t mean it should be illegal to do so because the law (both man-made and natural) provides that the person doing so would be liable for the harm caused by their actions to the people and places they yelled those things in. Said person would then be liable for actual damages done and not for what he or she said. The issue here is the outcome of your actions, not the action itself.

It is manifestly obvious that you have a freedom of travel right to travel at whatever speeds you deem safe. It is also obvious that you will be held liable for any harms caused by your driving. Speeding laws don’t keep you safe anyway and studies have shown that the safest way to drive is at whatever speed the rest of traffic travels at, even if it is far above the speed limit. In fact, speeding laws might actually put you in greater danger as they create pockets of people who drive at below the natural speed that others around them are driving in order to “drive safely” by obeying the law. This creates sections of the road where people are driving at significantly different speeds, making the road less predictable, and less safe. The result is that speeding laws actually put you in more danger by making the natural driving speed illegal.

Then comes the canard about human sacrifice. There is actually quite a deeply racist and specifically anti-Mormon history to this example coming as it does from the Reynolds v. United States Supreme Court case that ruled that the imprisonment of Latter-day Saint hero George Reynolds was legal because Congress could legally restrict polygamy by law. The ruling for the case says:

Laws are made for the government of actions, and while they cannot interfere with mere religious belief and opinions, they may with practices. Suppose one believed that human sacrifices were a necessary part of religious worship, would it be seriously contended that the civil government under which he lived could not interfere to prevent a sacrifice? 

^{Reynolds v. United States}

The obvious counter to this is simply that the U.S. Constitution forbids Congress from making laws that respect religions and which establish one religious belief over another, such as ruling that monogamy is legal but polygamy is not. Under the constitutional system the people of the various states and territories might make a law for or against polygamy within their own boundaries, but the Federal government had no authority to do so.

The other equally terrible aspect of this argument is that it is a prime example of the Slippery Slope Fallacy. The legalization of polygamy must mean that human sacrifice also has to be legal? That is as stupid an argument in 2022 as it was in 1878. The unlimited free exercise of all your human rights does not mean people would engage in human sacrifice. The implication of such is merely irrational fearmongering on Dr. Brown’s part to try and justify what he knows is fundamentally and unjustifiable position.

“I Established the Constitution of This Land”

In this section, much is made of the Lord’s statement, “by the hands of wise men whom I raised up unto this very purpose,” that is for writing the Constitution. (see D&C 101:80) It is without a doubt that they were intelligent men. The writings of Thomas Jefferson are still worth studying even today. But that doesn’t justify us in not creating something better now than they could envision then, that doesn’t justify us calcifying out social, spiritual, political, and economic development because they could not imagine the next step in liberty and individual freedom. It does not justify us in idolizing the Constitution (or your respective national charter), ignoring the many ways it has been wrong, corrupt, and evil from the very start, and choosing it over that which is better now.

Indeed, D&C 101 as a whole is incredibly ambivalent on the entire issue of the U.S. Constitution. In D&C 101:77 the Lord says that the Constitution is something, “which I have suffered to be established.” Suffering something to take place means it is something you allow even though it harms you and hurts you to do so. For example, Moses “suffered” divorce to exist among the Israelites because of the hardness of their hearts and not because divorce was God’s will. (see Matt. 19:8) That the U.S. Constitution is something the Lord had to suffer to happen, something that it hurt Him to do and which He only allowed because of the hardness of our hearts, is hardly a ringing endorsement for said Constitution. These verses reveal that in contrast to the statements of some LDS leaders (as shown in quotations in the Liahona article) the Lord’s actual statements on the Constitution are far less exalting and far more measured than most admit.

The language in D&C 101:77 also reminds me a great deal of 1 Samuel 8, wherein the Lord suffers Israel to have a king as they demand even though it goes against what He would have had for them. The Israelites chose to be ruled over by men than to have God as their king and all it brought them was misery. There too did the Lord raise up “wise men unto the very purpose” of being kings of Israel. Saul went mad with power and David became an adulterer and murderer. Civil wars and endless conflict wracked the kingdom during the rule of both kings. David’s son Solomon, called the wisest man in history, abandoned God, sacrificed babies to an idol, and led Israel away form the worship of the true God. The rule of kings in Israel, of God’s handpicked and chosen rulers, was a complete and utter disaster. Turns out that just because you may be the wisest available to the Lord, even the best of your generation, does not mean that you are good, righteous, worthy of emulation, or truly wise at all as true wisdom is to follow and submit to the commandments of God. Why would we be so deluded as to imagine it would be different today?

The Liahona article concludes:

History and revelation, as well as political theorists and modern prophets, have affirmed that these principles offer the best opportunity for individual liberty and happiness. No matter where they live, Latter-day Saints can bless the lives of others when they understand, share, and seek to maintain these constitutional principles.

^{Understanding and Defending Constitutional Principles, Brown}

Dr. Brown may have misplaced faith in the myth of the rule of law, but he is right about one thing. These principles, not “constitutional principles” but simply inspired principles of government, do offer powerful protections for individual liberty while promoting human prosperity and happiness. But only when present in a non-statist society. In a statist society, in a society where governments rule through force and ensure their control through legalized violence, in a society like that established by the United States Constitution (and the charters of most all other nations in the world) these principles are undercut, undermined, and destabilized by the government itself. Such societies will always trend towards autocracy in the long term because, “it is the nature and disposition of almost all men, as soon as they get a little authority, as they suppose, they will immediately begin to exercise unrighteous dominion.” (D&C 121:39) In a statist society these divinely inspired principles will ever be violated. As long as the means of gathering power are there, i.e. the government itself, those in power will use it to gain even more power.

Contrast that with how these divinely inspired principles of government are naturally respected in a non-statist, free society. In a free society – such as a voluntaryist, libertarian, or anarchist society – these principles become the foundation of consensual government. Individual rights are natural protected while social harmony is promoted. In free societies these principles actually find their truest expression as people voluntarily work together for their mutual good, achieving the common good without domination, compulsion, or violence of any kind.