Tea at Trianon: Due Process

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

Thursday, February 2, 2012

Due Process

How certain American citizens have long been denied their most basic civil rights.

It is Roe v Wade not NDAA that stripped away the protections of the Constitution from some Americans by allowing someone to deprive them of life without due process. Once you have created categories of people who are subject to arbitrary killing, how difficult is it to create categories of people who are subject to arbitrary arrest? Apparently it is very easy. Like Douglas Macgregor said, “Whenever you suspend due process, which in effect suspends the rule of law, you walk down a very dangerous path.” Well, we have not had the rule of law in this country since January 22, 1973, because that is when it was decided that due process could be suspended and some persons arbitrarily killed. (Read entire post.)