In Praise of Outlaws

by Ernest Partisan
[email protected]

Special to TLE

           I choose to be an outlaw. There was once a time when a majority of American Citizens understood this and approved. True, there were probably numerically more Tories residing in America at the time, but by definition one who chooses to be the subject of a ruler is not a Citizen, and of no consequence to anyone honorable. America was a nobility-free republic -- a revolutionary creation of outlaws. A land of honorable outlaws who agreed upon a minimal set of laws that even an outlaw could abide and grudgingly lent a tiny fraction of their natural sovereignty and reclaimed liberty to the obvious mutual benefit of all.
           Not all criminals are outlaws, and not all outlaws are criminals. An outlaw lives by a moral code, but blithely ignores absurd laws designed to suppress dissent and control private personal behavior. A criminal lives by no code, external or internal and is an animal to be mistrusted or destroyed. A criminal ignores whatever is inconvenient at the moment while an outlaw often chooses a personally inconvenient and sometimes dangerous course in the name of principle and honor.
           A criminal has absolute freedom, while an outlaw has personal liberty and spiritual freedom. A criminal will steal food from a working man, while an outlaw will refuse to pay child support to a welfare agency. A criminal will lobby into existence a law putting the cash of ten million laborers into his pocket, while an outlaw will refuse to file a tax return. A criminal will carry a gun to intimidate victims, while an outlaw will carry his gun as a symbol of his liberty and to defend against all aggressors.
           Our Bill of Rights is a relic of our outlaw past. It is a set of codes written by free Citizens who understood the necessity of controlling the monster they knew they were creating. They knew that there can be no words so offensive that they dare not be spoken or published. They knew that if anyone had that power to suppress, all had it and no one would dare speak freely, just as it had been in the ugly old world order they had fled. They understood the necessity of faith as well as the irreconcilability of conflicting dogma. They had seen firsthand the use of official religions to control outlaws, and didn't much care for what they saw. So they penned the First Amendment to the Constitution.
           They understood that the right to be armed, and to be a threat to the ruler simply by being, was an absolute. They codified this very clearly in a sentence ending "shall NOT be infringed" which contains not a single allow or permit. They understood that any compromise on this principle of freedom deeded the power of life and death over them to some unaccountable other. The right to be armed guarantees not bravery, nor victory, nor nobility, nor honesty nor honor, nor even safety, but merely the right to honest respect and a fair fight. And so the Second Amendment came to be written down.
           They had seen the tyranny and felt the violation of having the government put soldiers and officers into their homes to keep dissent minimized and politically correct. An outlaw knows this is no longer necessary, of course, since electronic monitoring can work more effectively and less personably in all cases. But they didn't have electronic magic at the time, so the founding outlaws only prohibited the quartering of troops in private homes in peacetime. This was the genesis of the Third Amendment.
           Many of the founding outlaws had felt the humiliation of being routinely searched in hopes of finding something illegal to be used against them or to turn them against their fellow outlaws. They knew of such outrageous offenses as random roadblocks, home invasion searches, searches through bank accounts and payrolls, and the ultimate humiliation of personal body searches. They knew how much could and would be made illegal and used to wrongly label them criminal, when the Tories eventually insinuated themselves into the newly created governments. They knew that actual criminals would use a Citizen's cloak of privacy to conceal misdeeds, and that this privacy must be protected from casual intrusions and mandatory disclosures. For all of this, the Fourth Amendment was drafted.
           The founding outlaws also knew well the coercive and dishonest tactics and abusive methods of executives and prosecutors, and so the Fifth Amendment was written to provide a tool to use against the excesses of the law. Remember, these were our founding outlaws! In the same vein, they knew the Tories would try to render these weapons ineffective in different kinds of legal maneuverings, so they enshrined some more protections, especially the right to trial by jury in the Sixth Amendment. And to avoid end runs around these protections by incorrectly labeling a dispute between law and outlaw as a contractual dispute, they enshrined the same jury trial provision in the Seventh Amendment. The founding outlaws finished up their magnum opus by providing a way for an outlaw to get out of jail in the eight amendment, and specifically prohibiting the creation of most of the laws of which Tories are so fond in the Ninth and Tenth Amendments.
           So what is the point of this little history lesson? I'm one of the proud breed of modern outlaws. For a while, I thought we might be an endangered species. Now, however, thanks to the excesses and impatience of the Clinton Regime, our population has made a tremendous comeback, with our numbers increasing tenfold in a single generation.
           Do you remember the first point about how not all criminals are outlaws and how not all outlaws are criminals? The Tories in their twentieth century guises have been allowed to prey increasingly on the individual outlaw in the name of fighting crime. Every one of the protections in the Bill of Rights and the original Federal Constitution have been violated repeatedly in spirit and in letter. The Bill of Rights is simply the agreed upon part of the outlaw's code. And the government has itself become not an outlaw, but a criminal, by repeatedly proving that it follows no code at all.
           And so, since the outlaw lives by a code, there are government laws he must break and not be silent about, while a criminal lives by no code and can always beat the law. The result is lots of criminals, lots of Tories, and a few angry outlaws. This same situation prevailed at the beginning of this country -- Criminal rulers, Tories obeying, and outlaws standing with manly firmness at Lexington and Concord and Bunker Hill. And since the code or covenant has been broken, the response is and will be to avenge the wrongs, since avenging the wrongs is one of the most sacred items in the outlaw's code.
           Remember Waco!

Next to advance to the next article, or
Previous to return to the previous article, or
Table of Contents to return to The Libertarian Enterprise, Number 68, March 31, 2000.