Perhaps the Brookings-Harbor School Board should open a history book and learn the difference between a republic and a democracy. The difference is essential when understanding the proper role of government and that God-given rights cannot be taken away.
Have those that complained about our video (Overview of America) not learned what America's founding fathers taught? They painstakingly avoided a democracy and built a constitutional republic. Consider their words for yourself:
• Virginia's Edmund Randolph participated in the 1787 convention. Demonstrating a clear grasp of democracy's inherent dangers, he reminded his colleagues during the early weeks of the Constitutional Convention that the purpose for which they had gathered was "to provide a cure for the evils under which the United States labored; that in tracing these evils to their origin every man had found it in the turbulence and trials of democracy...."
• Samuel Adams, a signer of the Declaration of Independence, championed the new Constitution in his state precisely because it would not create a democracy. "Democracy never lasts long," he noted. "It soon wastes, exhausts and murders itself." He insisted, "There was never a democracy that 'did not commit suicide.'"
• New York's Alexander Hamilton, in a June 21, 1788 speech urging ratification of the Constitution in his state, thundered: "It has been observed that a pure democracy if it were practicable would be the most perfect government. Experience has proved that no position is more false than this. The ancient democracies in which the people themselves deliberated never possessed one good feature of government. Their very character was tyranny; their figure deformity." Earlier, at the Constitutional Convention, Hamilton stated: "We are a Republican Government. Real liberty is never found in despotism or in the extremes of Democracy."
• James Madison, who is rightly known as the "Father of the Constitution," wrote in The Federalist, No. 10: "... democracies have ever been spectacles of turbulence and contention; have ever been found incompatible with personal security, or the rights of property; and have in general been as short in their lives as they are violent in their deaths." The Federalist Papers, recall, were written during the time of the ratification debate to encourage the citizens of New York to support the new Constitution.
• George Washington, who had presided over the Constitutional Convention and later accepted the honor of being chosen as the first President of the United States under its new Constitution, indicated during his inaugural address on April 30, 1789, that he would dedicate himself to "the preservation ... of the republican model of government."
• Fisher Ames served in the U.S. Congress during the eight years of George Washington's presidency. A prominent member of the Massachusetts convention that ratified the Constitution for that state, he termed democracy "a government by the passions of the multitude, or, no less correctly, according to the vices and ambitions of their leaders." On another occasion, he labeled democracy's majority rule one of "the intermediate stages towards ... tyranny." He later opined: "Democracy, in its best state, is but the politics of Bedlam; while kept chained, its thoughts are frantic, but when it breaks loose, it kills the keeper, fires the building, and perishes." And in an essay entitled The Mire of Democracy, he wrote that the framers of the Constitution "intended our government should be a republic, which differs more widely from a democracy than a democracy from a despotism."
In light of the Founders' view on the subject of republics and democracies, it is not surprising that the Constitution does not contain the word "democracy," but does mandate: "The United States shall guarantee to every State in this Union a republican form of government."
Perhaps those complaining think of a Republic in political terms as in the Republican and Democratic parties. Wrong again. The John Birch Society is non-partison and endorses no candidates or parties. We only endorse less government, more responsibility and--with God's help--a better world. All of which is achievable through the Constitution and an informed and moral electorate. Judge for yourself: