We have seen our nation turned from one based in liberty to one based in expediency. We have seen Constitutional protections for fundamental individual rights eroded by government that is actively hostile to the legacy of individual sovereignty we inherited from the American Revolution, and abandoned by countrymen who have surrendered to fear, laziness, and complacency. We are entangled in laws that portray natural rights as vices and attack them in the name of false security, and by government that grows like a cancer until it occupies every area of human life. We find our speech threatened, our communications spied upon, our privacy violated, our finances probed, our bedrooms monitored, our bodies controlled, our businesses regulated, our property stolen, our income taxed into nonexistence, and ourselves disarmed by officials who find comfort in the thought of prostrate subjects. We have seen people fined, imprisoned, and even murdered by officials for doing no more than acting on their liberty in ways that draw the displeasure of those who treat independence as a threat and the coercive power of the state as a plaything.
To our neighbors who have lost their faith in freedom, we quote Benjamin Franklin: "They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety." The trade of liberty for promises of security is always a bad one, for it exchanges a priceless necessity for a hollow comfort that can not be guaranteed.
To the politicians and officials who treat our rights as if they were privileges that they might limit or remove at will, we say that we have had enough. You have overstepped your bounds and cut away at that which no government, no legislature, no agency, no referendum, no quorum, no majority, and no power of any sort may trespass against except at its own peril. By your actions, you have deprived the institutions in which you do your worst of their legitimacy.
From this day forward, we vow that we will no longer be bound by statutes, edicts, judicial decisions, or administrative regulations that violate our inalienable rights. We pledge to practice principled noncompliance with such impermissible restrictions on our liberty, and to encourage others to do the same.
We pledge to monitor the activities of politicians and government bureaucrats who threaten liberty, and to share such information as we gather with others who also value freedom so that those who engage in abuses can not hide behind official anonymity.
We pledge to treat our presence in the jury room as an opportunity to engage in the ancient right of jury nullification, by avowing the innocence of those who have run afoul of one of the multitude of statutes and regulations that infringe liberty, for such people are truly innocent of any real crime.
We pledge to otherwise assist those who have incurred official wrath for doing no more than exercising their rights in ways that are forbidden by the whim of the state.
We further pledge, to the best of our abilities, to obstruct continued intrusions by the state upon our liberty, and to impede the enforcement of such violations of our rights as are already in place.
We make this declaration only after due consideration, and after long and continued provocation. We do this not to turn our backs on our friends, relatives, and neighbors who have been duped into abandoning liberty, but to defend the rights whose value they have forgotten for them as well as ourselves. We hope that our example will serve as an inspiration.
| Home | Arms |