Since the fifth grade, to be precise. At last things have gotten so bad that some of my fellow, more conventional American patriots have begun to sympathize. The image, I find, dates to 2010, a Photoshop of the original I-35 "Miss Me Yet?" billboard from earlier the same year. (Interestingly, a t-shirt version outsold an Obama shirt on Martha's Vineyard at the time).

Independence Day though it is, I imagine many patriots are disillusioned from the promise of the American experiment, after the late rulings by the Supreme Court, settled just in time for the 4th. While Sotomayor and Kagan, Obama's appointments, are also to blame for the disappointing rulings, Roberts' decision to side with the liberals twice is particularly embittering. The below is taken from the conclusion of his majority opinion in the Obamacare case:

The Federal Government does not have the power to order people to buy health insurance. Section 5000A [of the Internal Revenue Code] would therefore be unconstitutional if read as a command. The Federal Government does have the power to impose a tax on those without health insurance.

As next to the tyrannies of King George III and his Parliament, imagine if, instead of taxing the colonists by having them pay duties on tea purchased from the East India Company, which had a legal monopoly, they taxed all colonists who did not purchase tea (perhaps for failing to enjoy the health benefits of tea drinking). As much as one Bush justice is to blame for this egregious decision (though the other, Alito, has not so broken ranks), it is hard to imagine the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act as anything but an evil which could have been envisioned by no other administration.

Is the American experiment coming to an end? Maybe, and possibly not for the worse. A part of me definitely hopes so. As I have long said, our regime, at least now, exists essentially to defend the rights of the evil, whilst the law and common sentiment are arrayed against those who would defend virtue and goodness, and expose depravity. The latest example of this happened in the middle of the just passed June, when the website of MassResistance, a courageous voice for family mores and against the sodomite agenda, based right here in Massachusetts (!), was shut down after a homosexual activist threatened the webhost, and the host gave in. As you can read on MassResistance (now hosted by a Christian hosting company), when the conservative WorldNetDaily ran two articles on the affair, the same activist intimidated them, and they dropped the pieces! Of course, some kinds of intimidation are legal, and, as we all know, the Far Left is unlikely to get punished for the illegal kind either. Few people care, and the law tends to look the other way. Free speech exists for the sake of liberals denouncing permanent truths; the necessity of protecting the rights of those who defend them is seen as at best a nuisance. Just think of the ways some conservatives object to campus speech codes which forbid "hate speech" (which the Left simply considers to be "not free speech"); they may defend it as reprehensible-but-legal (a "necessary evil"), but often with the caveat that they actually share the values of the tolerant multiculturalists and relativists. We may retain the freedom to say what we want, but without access to print, television, and Internet venues, who will hear? Even if traditional Christians retain precarious access to the Internet and a few small publishers and periodicals, our voice is almost mute against the liberal establishment, as it exists in every form of media (as much as Rightists place hope in the ease of access to the Internet, so long as Wikipedia, Google/YouTube, and Facebook are run by Bolshevist egalitarians, it too is hostile territory).

Aye, the future looks bleak. Yet, as the world mounts its continuing offensive against all good things God made for us, His real believers continue on. Hearteningly, just last week, the Society of Saint Pius X ordained eleven new priests in Econe. And, despite the threats, MassResistance is hosting a great speech by the (also frequently harassed) Protestant pastor Scott Lively, on The Global Threat of Homosexuality. A good watch, and Banned on YouTube!