Understanding the Constitution Quotes

“The unalienable right to life is a gift from God that cannot rightfully be either surrendered or taken away. Our Declaration of Independence requires the government to protect this God-given right to life. Government may not take this right away from us or from our posterity. When a right is unalienable, even the person who holds that right is not permitted to give it away. Therefore, our government must be accountable for protecting the unalienable right to life for all people regardless of their location, their quality of life, or their burden on other individuals or on society.”
― David C. Gibbs III, Understanding the Constitution

“judicial review has permitted the Justices of the Supreme Court to impose their own biases, prejudices, and desires on the rest of the nation under the guise of constitutional interpretation.”
― David C. Gibbs III, Understanding the Constitution

“The biblical principles upon which our Declaration of Independence and Constitution are based were adapted from British common law, which consisted generally of unwritten laws and customs developed over time in England. This common law derived from both natural law and God’s revealed law in the Bible, and was recognized in the English Magna Carta of 1215, when nobles challenged the king with the concept that he was not the highest ruler in the land.”
― David C. Gibbs III, Understanding the Constitution

“Government only acts lawfully when it equally protects the right to life of everyone under its authority.”
― David C. Gibbs III, Understanding the Constitution

“This first unalienable right is the basis for America’s duty to respect and defend life created by God from conception through natural death. Our government has no legitimate authority to trample upon the unalienable right to life of the pre-born, of individuals with disabilities, of the elderly, or of any other innocent person. All are equally precious in God’s sight and equally created in His image. Therefore, the Declaration of Independence holds government accountable for securing the right to life for all people—no matter what their quality of life or station in society.”
― David C. Gibbs III, Understanding the Constitution

“THE UNALIENABLE RIGHT TO LIBERTY IN THE DECLARATION IS NOT A RIGHT TO ENGAGE IN LICENTIOUS BEHAVIOR.”
― David C. Gibbs III, Understanding the Constitution

“That word “equal,” as used in the Declaration of Independence, was not intended to mean that we will all achieve the same station in life or that we are all exactly the same in appearance, ability, assets, character, personality, or status. Instead, it is our equality before God and, therefore, our equality with respect to each other that preserves our unique creation as God’s individual children, all with equal worth.”
― David C. Gibbs III, Understanding the Constitution

“Our God-given unalienable rights are sometimes called natural rights—those rights possessed by all Mankind under the laws of nature in God’s creation.”
― David C. Gibbs III, Understanding the Constitution

“Government is responsible to identify and protect our natural rights, but government has no power to grant or deny them.”
― David C. Gibbs III, Understanding the Constitution

“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” While such declaration of principles may not have the force of organic law, or be made the basis of judicial decision as to the limits of right and duty, and while in all cases reference must be had to the organic law of the nation for such limits, yet the latter is but the body and the letter of which the former is the thought and the spirit, and it is always safe to read the letter of the constitution in the spirit of the Declaration of Independence.”
― David C. Gibbs III, Understanding the Constitution

“The Fourteenth Amendment has been another primary method by which the power of the federal government has been expanded. Until this Amendment was ratified, the guarantees under the Bill of Rights were only applicable against infringements of citizens’ rights by the federal government, not by the states. States protected the fundamental rights of their own citizens through their own individual state constitutions and courts. Since the Bill of Rights was originally written for the purpose of protecting the people from the federal government, the states were free to individually determine which of their citizens’ rights they would protect. This fact was recognized by the Supreme Court prior to the Civil War in Barron v. Mayor and City Council of Baltimore, 32 U.S. 243 (1833).”
― David C. Gibbs III, Understanding the Constitution

“During the 1960s, the philosophical worldview of postmodernism1, which at its core denies the possibility of any absolute truth, became dominant in American higher education, just as it was also beginning to dominate the courts.”
― David C. Gibbs III, Understanding the Constitution

“Whole generations of Americans growing up today have absolutely no idea that the heritage of this nation is based on the Bible. Even many older adults, who grew up under a different educational system, have become convinced that America was founded by a group of “separationists” whose primary goal was to create an environment where all public places like schools, courts, and government buildings would be “religion-free zones.” Many Americans today live as if they really believe that the Founding Fathers intended for us to experience both liberty and licentiousness. Many have been led to believe that our Founders would be comfortable with the moral filth and unrighteousness we now live with every day in America. Sometimes it seems that any idea may be expressed in America today except the truth of the Gospel of Jesus Christ.”
― David C. Gibbs III, Understanding the Constitution

“Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., lauded as a great legal philosopher and jurist of that time, was one of those jurists seeking a way to free mankind from the legal constraints imposed by a Creator. Holmes began arguing in his 1881 book, The Common Law, that the only source of law, properly speaking, is a judicial decision enforced by the State. In other words, judges, not God, should say what the law is. Holmes and other leading jurists and legal scholars argued throughout the second half of the 19th century for a radical new approach to the law, a legal system in which judges would not discover Divine law, as was previously assumed under common law principles, but would actually formulate the law themselves by evolving it, case by case, over time. Judges would then be free to move the law in any direction they determined would improve a progressive and evolving society.”
― David C. Gibbs III, Understanding the Constitution

“The Commerce Clause, used in 1964 to end the sins of segregation and racial discrimination, has now become a mechanism for expanding the power of the federal government into countless other areas. Under the Commerce Clause, Congress and the federal government have gained unlimited power to regulate both civil and criminal activity even in areas once reserved to the states under the Tenth Amendment.”
― David C. Gibbs III, Understanding the Constitution

“Today, a majority of lower court judges and Supreme Court Justices use the liberal/progressive approach to deciding cases. Only a small minority use the strict construction or historical approach to interpret the Constitution. This departure from the original intent of our Constitution’s Founders has given rise over the years to a greatly expanded interpretation of federal government power under the Constitution and to vast changes in our nation’s laws.”
― David C. Gibbs III, Understanding the Constitution

“Judges generally use one of three philosophical methods to interpret the U. S. Constitution: Strict construction, which interprets the document to mean exactly what it states and nothing more or less. Historical approach, which interprets the Constitution by analyzing its history and what was meant at the time of its writing. Liberal (or Progressive) approach, which views the Constitution as a “living document” in the sense that its words and phrases must be interpreted in light of our modern desires and the needs of our modern society and not according to the intent of its authors.”
― David C. Gibbs III, Understanding the Constitution

“the stage was set for a radical future expansion of the Constitution by the judiciary, an unelected body.”
― David C. Gibbs III, Understanding the Constitution

“The Supreme Court first asserted its right to judicial review of all actions taken by the other branches of government in the case of Marbury v. Madison, 5 U.S. 137 (1803). This was the most famous, or infamous, decision handed down by the Marshall Court, and it was important for at least two reasons. First, the Court marked new territory for itself by asserting it had a judicial power to review the acts of other branches of the federal government. Additionally, this case signified the first time the Supreme Court declared an act of Congress to be unconstitutional. This would only happen one other time before the Civil War.”
― David C. Gibbs III, Understanding the Constitution

“Even though today few would argue that the Court does not have the power of judicial review, such was not the case when Chief Justice John Marshall authored the Marbury decision. However, after this landmark decision, the assertion that the Supreme Court had the authority to interpret the Constitution and to void the acts of other branches of government on this basis was rapidly accepted. This decision established the Supreme Court as the supreme keeper of the Constitution to the exclusion of the executive and legislative branches of our government.”
― David C. Gibbs III, Understanding the Constitution

“The concept of “judicial review” has shaped American jurisprudence like no other. The term itself is not found in the Constitution.”
― David C. Gibbs III, Understanding the Constitution

“America was founded as a nation by religious men who understood biblical truth and principles. These Judeo-Christian principles motivated and controlled their decisions. The America they founded, under God, is now having its future shaped and its past re-characterized by judges who are unfamiliar with the Bible, who are uncomfortable with organized religion, and who are unwilling to be controlled by any higher authority or principle beyond their own minds.”
― David C. Gibbs III, Understanding the Constitution

“A whole generation of adults has now been educated in public schools where prayer and Bible reading have been declared illegal. A whole generation of adults has watched abortion consume the lives of more than fifty-five million unborn babies in America. A whole generation of adults has watched sexual immorality come out of the closet, become non-criminal, move into being a fashionable special interest group, and is now on the way to becoming a constitutionally protected category demanding all the rights and privileges of marriage, adoption, and other legal benefits and privileges traditionally preserved for God-ordained marriage under the common law (one man/one woman).”
― David C. Gibbs III, Understanding the Constitution

“The Bible no longer sets the standard for American law. Legislators and judges now write the laws, determine the policies, and decide the cases based on what they think is best for America—their own personal preferences.”
― David C. Gibbs III, Understanding the Constitution

“Instead, statutory law is a man-made law based on what 51% of those voting can agree on in any given court, legislative body or public referendum. In biblical terms from the Book of Judges, we could say that statutory law is essentially men “doing what is right in their own eyes.”
― David C. Gibbs III, Understanding the Constitution

“the professor was letting the students know that any absolute standard in the law—i.e., any Divine standard for law, had now been replaced by man-centered statutory law. By recognizing this, the professor was letting his class know that the law is no longer something that is “fixed, uniform, and universal” at all times and in all places, as William Blackstone wrote and as America’s Founders had believed.”
― David C. Gibbs III, Understanding the Constitution

“We now live in the era of statutory law, not common law. That is the largest change in jurisprudence since America was founded as a nation. It has happened in my lifetime, and while you may not fully understand what I am saying—remember this—it will impact your lives, your families, and your future practice of law. The common law is now dead in America.”
― David C. Gibbs III, Understanding the Constitution

“The professor declared that the biggest change to have occurred in American law was the fact that the common law was now dead in America.”
― David C. Gibbs III, Understanding the Constitution

“Beginning at the end of the Civil War in the mid-19th century, and escalating in the mid-20th century, however, America began to gradually move away from these common law principles. Law schools began to teach a different type of law to their students in the early 20th century and by the mid-20th century the legal landscape had changed significantly in America.”
― David C. Gibbs III, Understanding the Constitution

“Joseph Story, Associate Justice of the Supreme Court from 1811-1845 was an early expositor of the common law in America. In his 1829 inaugural discourse as a professor of law at Harvard University, Justice Story said, “One of the beautiful boasts of our municipal jurisprudence is that Christianity is a part of the common law.” He continued, “There never has been a period in which the Common Law did not recognize Christianity as lying at its foundations.”[3]”
― David C. Gibbs III, Understanding the Constitution