We dodged a bullet last Tuesday. A bullet directed at the heart of the American dream.

In the timely defeat of Hillary Clinton and in the stunning victory of Donald Trump and Mike Pence, a significant battle has been won. Much, however, remains to be done -- at levels strategic and foundational -- if we are to carry days beyond this day.

As a matter of strategic import, we must restore the real-world governing centrality of the U.S. Constitution, as written and not as killed by secularists and their dead "living" "Constitution" -- which they then mangle to make it say and ratify whatever it is they want to do to have their way with the American body politic.

It is a simple fact: The freedoms so central to a humane life here in the U.S. cannot be sustained, and are not being sustained, by mere lip service to a bunch of words on a piece of paper called the Constitution. This is what the presidential oath of office has been reduced to -- just a perfunctory act on Inauguration Day, the content of which is denied all the other days by that massive non-Constitutional monopoly of establishment power that is the federal government, its eyes and tentacles reaching and probing every aspect of our individual lives.

That is not freedom. That is not human dignity. We are made for better than this.

And so we can be thankful that Hillary Clinton's defeat derails what clearly would have been a successful effort to radicalize the Supreme Court by inserting extremist activists pretending to be justices. Pretenders -- not judges, but partisan operatives. Not justices, but political hacks. Using their position to legalize brutality, empower the executioners, and create "law" out thin air. What an inhumane disaster an anti-Constitutional Clintonized court would have been.

Also as a matter of strategic and foundational import, we must restore the Declaration of Independence -- to which the Constitution is inextricably linked. To which it is wonderfully and ingeniously linked. Such that to delink these two foundational documents is to occasion great harm and sorrow. It is to strike at the heart of that liberating dream and beckoning land which is called America.

In fact, if we allow political elites -- whether Republican or Democrat -- to alienate the Constitution from the principles of human freedom and human dignity set forth in the Declaration rooted with practical realism in an actually existing Creator -- well, let's just say that's how tyrants can use the "form" of the Constitution to deny its liberty and thereby impose an authoritarian, centralized power regime upon "We the People." 

What a gross and outrageous offense to the human being. We bearers of publicly actionable unalienable rights endowed by the Creator are made for better than this.

Thus the disaster of Washington elites so alienated from the American people of today -- in very large measure because these elites are already so alienated from those "magnificent" words of the Declaration and the Constitution, to quote Martin Luther King, Jr. Were it not for those magnificent words, there would have been no Martin Luther King. And never could there have been that shining, bright light of cultural advance displayed in the magnificent words of his epochal speech "I Have a Dream."

And so, because of the electoral outcome last Tuesday, we live to fight another day. We live to face down the spiritual terror aching to be unleashed yet more by extremists against the Constitution and Declaration -- by yet more aggressive figures to arise and attack in the mold of Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton.

These are the soft-spoken suit-and-tie totalitarians. The professionally aggrieved pantsuit propagandists.

They call it "transforming America" -- in reality, it's an attack on America. An attack on the indispensable foundations of human freedom and human dignity. An assault on the heart of the American body politic that is rightfully so challenged, and so uplifted to the challenge, by magnificent Constitutional and Declarational words conveying liberating principles that speak to the very center of every human being.

To add insult to injury, and offense to indignity, this attack is so extremely dishonest.

They call it "liberation." They call it "equality." "Diversity." Words and slogans whose hidden purpose is to dominate and control, to elevate into power an elite "more equal" than "We the People," and to impose a phony diversity the better to divide -- that the controllers might more easily conquer and rule.

What dishonesty, how inhumane, and such disrespect. We the human beings are made for so much more than this.

So, yes: Congratulations, O America. We live to fight another day. America lives to fight another day.

Let us make the most of who are. Let us make the most of what America as America always can strive to be. A walking dream from the mind of the Creator. A land of light, liberty, and humanity.

No perfection, it is true. And yet enough of a marvel to draw the people of the world to the beacon of our borders and the shining of our shores.

Note: This column, republished at 3:51 pm, Nov. 10, 2016, has been updated and edited from an earlier version.

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Barbara Boland reports at the Washington Examiner:

Satan worshipers launched a counter-protest against pro-lifers outside the Detriot and Ferndale, Michigan, Planned Parenthood locations Saturday.

Clad in black robes, members of the Satanic Temple of Detriot drenched bound women with milk, simulating water-boarding to "illustrate the theocratic agenda imposed upon female bodies." The milk symbolized breast milk, one of the protest organizers explained on Facebook.

The group attached a symbol of their temple to the American flag and held up a sign that read, "America is not a theocracy. End forced motherhood."

Unfortunately for this Satanic propaganda campaign, the fact is that America is a nation rooted in a verifiable, knowable Creator who welcomes questions ("test everything") and has endowed human beings with "unalienable rights," among them the rights to "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness," the anti-Satanist Declaration of Independence states.

"Members of the Satanic Temple drew inspiration for their 'political theatre' from the nationwide anti-Planned Parenthood protests Saturday," the Examiner reports. "Tens of thousands showed up to protest Planned Parenthood at over 300 locations across the country after a series of undercover videos revealed the abortion giant was harvesting and selling fetal organs and tissue," according to the Examiner.

"The pro-life protesters hope to end Federal taxpayer funding of Planned Parenthood, which currently receives over half a billion dollars per year. Michigan state senators, some of whom appeared at the protests Saturday, have launched their own bill to defund the organization," the Examiner reports.

"The Satanic Temple strongly opposes the promotion of misinformation and believes that all people are entitled to make informed decisions about their health, family and future without coercion," the Examiner quotes the group's website as as saying.

Satanists "consider our action a form of worship; the rejection of tyranny is an affirmation of selfhood. So long as perverted theocratic systems of power attempt to manipulate our communities and distort truths for political gain, we will rebel," the Satanist website also states, according to the Examiner.

"Satan worshipers believe that 'Satan is representative of the eternal rebel, enlightened inquiry and personal freedom,' proclaims the Satanic Temple's web site," the Examiner reports.

The Satanist position faces several difficulties, let us say. "Eternal rebel"? Not quite, because Satan is a creature and therefore is not the "eternal" anything.

"Rebel"? OK, but against what? Well, against what truly is enlightened inquiry -- to be more precise, enlightened inquiry into the inhumanity of Planned Parenthood's murdering of pre-born human beings and harvesting their body parts for profit.

Actually, these Satanist folks are reactionaries -- relying on ignorance and sloganeering to deny, among other things, the "personal freedom" of innocent human life. After, one cannot practice "personal freedom" if one is killed in the womb.

Instead of anti-science Satanism and its reactionary superstitions, far better to embrace knowledge, wisdom, ethics, and humanity living in liberating community with God and neighbor. That is a vision for humanness and freedom.

By the way, I'm all for "eternal rebellion" if that means resisting and overcoming any dehumanizing idol (like Satan, for example) that rises up in opposition to the good, the true, and the beautiful.

As I have written elsewhere: "There is a sense in which" human beings are in fact "hardwired to rebel -- not against good, but against evil. Not against life in community with our Creator and our neighbor, but agains that which, if not resisted, alienates us from the good, the true, and the beautiful -- including freedom. So of course a creature destine for freedom is a creature of resistance against tyranny, and so the founders in the Declaration affirm the 'right' and 'duty' to 'throw off' a government has as it 'direct object . . . the establishment of an absolute tyranny'."

And while we're at, let's throw off the unenlightened reactionary superstitions of Satanic propaganda. Saving the "least of these" from an experience far worse than water-boarding is on the right side both history and humanity. If the Satanists are upset, you might be doing something right.

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Craig Millward reports at CNSNews.com:

At a rally to defund Planned Parenthood on Capitol Hill Tuesday, GOP presidential candidate and retired neurosurgeon Ben Carson criticized  Planned Parenthood, calling it "hypocritical" that "these same people who say that it's a meaningless clump of cells are trying to get livers and lungs and kidneys."

"Well isn't it funny that these same people who say that it's a meaningless clump of cells are trying to get livers and lungs and kidneys, because how could you have such organs from a meaningless clump of cells," Carson said, according to CNSNews.

"Carson was speaking at a rally organized by Women Betrayed, a project of Students for Life of America and Pro-Life Future, to call for an investigation into Planned Parenthood as well as defunding them. The Capitol Hill rally was one of more than 60 rallies across the nation organized by Women Betrayed," CNS reports.

"I think we have gradually slid in terms of our morals to a point where we don't really care about the killing of human beings," Carson is quoted as saying.

"That is the bad news. The good news is that I think we are changing, and I think things like this are starting to change us a lot. There are actually more people now who identify as pro-life than people who identify as pro-death, and we are capable of changing.

"There was a time in this country when people thought it was okay to own other people, and they thought they could do anything they want with them, because they belong to me. I can beat them, I can kill them, I can do whatever I want to do to them, and we fortunately, as a society matured and began to think about what the words of our Declaration of Independence and the words of our Constitution actually meant," Carson said, according to CNSNews.

"Well those words are meaningful today too," Carson explained, "because they talk about life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Well guess what. There can be no liberty and pursuit of happiness if there is no life." 

Read more here.

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Craig Milward reports at CNSNews:

Republican Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal told Fox News' "America's News Headquarters" on Sunday that Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton sounded like she was pushing for "re-education camps" when she said "deep-seated cultural codes, religious beliefs and structural biases have to be changed" on abortion.

"The reality is first of all you listen to her language -- 'our religious beliefs need to be changed.' It sounds like reeducation camps," CNS quotes Jindal as saying. Clinton "didn't say specifically how she wants us to change our beliefs. My religious beliefs aren't between me and Hillary Clinton. They're between me and God."

According to CNSNews, Jindal also assessed Clinton and the left's "dangerous view" on the meaning of religious expression.

"You hear Hillary Clinton, President Obama, when they say you've got freedom of religious expression," Jindal is quoted as saying.

"For them what that really means is you're allowed to go to church and say whatever you want for an hour or two a week. That doesn't mean you've got the real religious liberty rights our Founding Fathers intended. They intended we should be able to live our lives 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, according to our beliefs," Jindal said, according to CNS.

"Our Founding Fathers would never recognize what the left is trying to do," Jindal also said.

In contrast to the the founding ethos, the left is "trying to take God out of the public square. They're trying to make America a much more secular country. They're trying to make faith something that is private, circumscribed, something you've got to put into a corner," Jindal said, according to CNS.

"That's not the America our Founding Fathers would've recognized, not an America our parents would've recognized. It's not an America I hope our children recognize."

Jindal is correct, as should be clearly evident, for example, that the Declaration of Independence publicly actualizes the proposition that human beings are "endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights."

This is public truth, not private religion.

The Judeo-Christian worldview has been and always will be publicly actionable. And thus it liberates from not just from privatized "faith" but also from inhumane worldviews which themselves seek self-actualization and war against human emancipation.

Elsewhere, I have noted the "reality orientation" that characterizes the Christian mindset and practice. In the Foreword to Nancy's new book, Finding Truth, I write:

Paul argued that argued that the events grounding the Christian worldview were not "done in a corner" (Acts 26:25–26). Shepherds, kings, doctors, and tax collectors could all check out the facts that are central to the Christian message.

What is being communicated is an accurate description of reality, not a belief system about it.

This reality orientation is the positive intellectual climate in which the core propositions and events of the gospel live and breathe. It is a mentality in which people are liberated by verifiable truth to challenge tradition, question power, and fight for life and healing against death and decay.

Despite this auspicious heritage, many of our contemporaries find solace in what Francis Schaeffer describes as an "escape from reason." They accept polite society’s dumbed-down redefinition of faith as something totally privatized -- that is, a commitment so private and so personal that evaluation and evidence are irrelevant.

This is a far cry from the holistic respect for information that characterizes a biblical worldview. Scripture nowhere encourages the notion that "faith" equals commitment quarantined from evidence or isolated from the mind -- the "will to avoid knowing what is true," as the philosopher Nietzsche put it his work The Antichrist.

Instead, the Biblical information challenges people to think more deeply about the basic questions of life, and in fact to "test everything" (1 Thess. 5:21).

In this regard, to carefully examine the basic notions of vocal secularists in our day -- be they a Hillary Clinton, a Barack Obama, a Richard Dawkins, or their disciples on Twitter, Facebook, in Hollywood, on campus, or on the evening news -- is to encounter ideologies that "undercut mind and reasoning, choice and freedom, truth and moral ideals.

"Inevitably, then," I further explain in the Foreword to Finding Truth, "people who place their trust in such solutions begin to order their lives in ways that are less than humane.

"Likewise, cultures in the grip of inadequate worldviews begin to actualize societies that are less than humane.

"Ideologues may advance their idols under politically correct banners of tolerance, diversity, and fairness, but the actual impact is regress, not progress, fragmentation, not wholeness. People are crushed.

"The human being necessarily revolts against gods that fail." This includes human beings who are citizens of the United States of America.

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