I think that you know me well enough, Watson, to understand that I am by no means a nervous man. At the same time, it is stupidity rather than courage to refuse to recognize danger when it is close upon you.

--Sherlock Holmes in The Final Problem

             I do not fancy myself a nervous man.  Still, as Holmes observed, to recognize danger is the beginning of wisdom in a threatening world.   For years, there have been people who have envied and hated the United States.  Some of the greatest empires the world has ever known—Britain, France, Germany, the U.S.S.R., China—have raged against it.  All have failed.  And yet, in the midst of the tumult of history, a small thing may prove more dangerous than all the military might of the Soviet Union.  Barely heeded and hardly opposed, we are seeing the quiet junction of three powerful forces:  Judicial Activism, One World Government, and American Apathy.  America, like Holmes, needs to recognize the threat. 

 While a large number of commentators lament these individual aspects (for instance, see this excellent piece by Lisa Fabrizio), few seem to connect the dots to any further implications. 

             Each one of these parts is threatening enough in its own right, and left completely alone could wreck immeasurable havoc on the rights and freedoms of American citizens:        

• Judicial Activism involves the process of changing the United States from a Republic of elected representatives into an oligarchy of unelected judges who wield absolute power.  In the absence of any real, concrete standards, it threatens to become tool of minority elites (in the ideological, not in the racial sense) to enforce their politics and morality upon hundreds of millions of people with no recourse.
• Movements towards a One World Government, embodied by the current United Nations, would logically mean that America would no longer be the mistress of her own destiny.  What goes on within our borders would not be our business, but subject to the intrusive veto of the rest of the world, even on matters that are purely internal. 
• American Apathy speaks for itself.  As Edmund Burke famously noted, “All that is required for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing.”  The more comfortable the average American becomes in his or her surroundings, the less likely they are to be willing to sacrifice them for abstract principles, like “freedom.”

 Together, these three trends could conceivably form a sum greater and more dangerous than the whole of their parts. 

For years the U.N. has complained about U.S. intransigence and independent spirit.  Still, before now it has lacked the military or economic wherewithal to enforce its will, and so had to content itself to clogging the streets of New York City and annoying its citizens.  The emergence of a Russia-China-EU alliance completely aside for a moment, the U.N. has now found a friend in our own Supreme Court.  The Court, long ago having abandoned the Constitution as a legal precedent, has begun to turn to international treaties—agreements that the United States has not ratified—and general international opinion for their guiding light. (Consider the dissenting opinion in the recent Roper v. Simmons and Leah Farish’s excellent commentary)  These guidelines are not based on what is best for the country.  In fact, many of them are anti-American, designed primarily to benefit foreign powers and ideologies at our expense.

This means that while previously America had the option of ignoring the U.N., it now finds itself in a completely different situation.  If the Supreme Court continues to use international treaties and declarations as its guide, having assumed a position of practical absolute authority, the United States will have foreign authority foisted upon it through the back door.  Since any issue could end up before the Court and given that many Americans treat the Court’s decisions with the same deference they do legislative law, it would defacto give the world its long coveted veto over American life and morality.  It would not involve a war or even economic sanctions, simply the good will of a mere five justices. 

What is even more disturbing is that if the court does indeed assume that international law must trump American jurisprudence, the American people are left with no recourse.  There is no court in our land that could overturn international opinion or treaties we have not signed; it could only choose to follow or ignore them.  If the court lacks the will or wisdom for the latter, we are left with the former by default.

This bears specific implications for conservative Americans on issues like abortion on demand.  If the court turns to exterior sources for their opinions, and does not search out either the ultimate truth of the matter or even the wants of the American people, we will find ourselves bound by a radical feminist agenda that we have not even voted on:  An immoral imperative from someone else’s country enforced by a panel of non-representative judges who in practice have never been held accountable for their decisions.  Anyone who thinks this is far fetched need only review the items above, and this one from the new U.N. conference on women’s equality.

The third and final aspect is of course American Apathy.  As the early colonists knew much better than many today, the time to oppose such moves is now, before they have become a reality.  If the British had actually collected a tax, and people accepted it, the patriot cause would have been lost before it begun.  When the U.N. mandate and Judicial Activism have married themselves into a successful social-political convention and the offspring of that unholy union has been accepted in practice, it will be virtually impossible to turn back the clock.  In a way, this makes the comfortable chair I’m sitting in as deadly a threat to my freedom as the U.S.S.R. ever was, even at the height of the Cold War.

Now, bear in mind that I am not predicting anything, and I am certainly not implying that there is any sort of conscious conspiracy between the U.N. and the Supreme Court.  That’s just silly.  And yet freedoms lost through thoughtless actions are often no more recoverable than those lost to outright conspiracies.  The pieces are in place.  It only remains to be seen whether or not we let them move freely.