PATRIOT ACT RALLY

I want to thank our new organization for inviting me to speak.  It is great to see so many people spend their Saturday morning trying to advance the cause of freedom.  Our country needs to return to the kind of activism that has made large ideas possible so many times in American history.
The large ideas that bring us together today is the principle that Americans should be free from government intrusion into our homes, into our private papers and into our personal conversations.  The United States Bill of Rights is the first firm guaranty of individual freedom ever given to its people by a sovereign nation.  Free people and free markets became and remain today the foundation for the greatest success story in the history of nations.  I could not agree more with Gary Ammons.
Unfortunately, for the first time since the Bill of Rights was enacted in 1791, suddenly here in our 21st Century under the so-called Patriot Act, the powers of our federal government have all but ended any right to personal privacy in any aspect of our lives.  Even in the absence of any proof that a particular crime has been committed or any proof that the suspect may have done something in violation of the law, a Top Secret Washington Court can now allow the CIA and FBI to:

1.      Break into your home and take some of your belongings.  The homeowner may never know what the government has done.

 2.      Banks, physicians, libraries, schools and just about anyone else can be forced to divulge their records and everything they know about you without informing you of what the government has done.

 

3.      All of your telephone conversations can be tapped.  You e-mail and web visits can be monitored.  Your bank accounts, credit cards and credit history can be investigated without your knowledge and leaving no evidence of the FBI search behind.

 4.      The extraordinary methods established by the Patriot Act can be used in any form of federal investigation: not just the field of international terrorism.  This includes agencies like the Internal Revenue Service and Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms.

All this and more can now be done to every American citizen under the Patriot Act.

This law will be fought in the courts.  Hopefully, the Bill of Rights still has strong standing in the courts.  This law is being fought by the state governments and by hundreds of American cities and towns.  Alaska, Hawaii Vermont and New Mexico have already passed state laws defying the Patriot Act.  Other states will likely follow.  Approximately 200 local government resolutions have been passed denouncing the Patriot Act and many more will certainly come.  Finally, this law is being fought on the field of public opinion, including in forms like this one tonight.
Do your part for the cause of freedom.  Take a copy of the state and local resolutions that our organization of community g roups is proposing.  Show them to your friends and family and encourage them to help defend their own freedom.  Take some of the flyers we have.  Circulate the upcoming petitions to ban the Patriot Act.  Register to vote.  Attend your city council meeting in support of freedom when the Patriot Act issue is placed before the council in every city in Hampton Roads sometime very soon.  Call us or check our web site for updates and suggestions.  Let just about everyone you know be told that our country is rapidly losing the very freedoms that have made the United States the greatest nation in the history of the world.  And show our President and our Congress that the best patriotism in America is to stand up for the freedoms that almost all Americans hold dear.