Letters To the Editor

Manassas

Attacking Our Freedoms

Want to protect your constitutional rights?

So does the group Prince William County Concerned Citizens.

Americans have enjoyed unprecedented prosperity, stability and freedom in large part because of our Constitution. The Prince William County Concerned Citizens advocates our unique constitutional architecture that was designed to protect our American values from foreign threats and to limit the abuse of governmental power. This is even more pertinent today in Prince William County.

The current focus of this peril is local confiscation of homeowner property under the false pretext of environmentalism. Unfortunately, our legitimate environmental interests have been hijacked by a separate political agenda. Our bona fide American environmental movement has largely been commandeered and moved away from ecology to redistribute wealth.

This principally came about after so many disappointed champions of Marxism moved to the green movement when "communism" and "Marxism" became unfashionable terms of a now-defunct Soviet system. For example, Mikhail Gorbachev, in his hasty reconfiguration from "leading Marxist" to "leading environmentalist," exemplified this extraordinary political phenomenon. True to their Marxist design, their collectivist philosophy successfully infiltrated the legitimate environmentalist movement to the point that it now remarkably resembles the agenda of the defunct Soviet regime.

Using environmentalism as a Trojan horse, Gorbachev and his colleagues refashioned the green and environmental movement to focus more and more on government intrusion into the private lives of people.

Most damaging of all in Prince William County is the dawning awareness of this new role of environmental zealotry in confiscating homeowners' private property as "environmental" resource protection areas. So what turned out to be the great failure in the Soviet Union has now reared its ugly head in Prince William County in the form of local governmental property confiscations under the pretext of environmental Resource Protection Areas (RPAs).

These RPA easement confiscations from homeowners are threats that have devastating results in terms of unconstitutional attacks against American homes and the deprivation of homeowner private property rights across the board. In this regard, RPA easement confiscations by local government are deemed as an ingenious attempt to distance it from, and avoid, the U.S. Constitution's Fifth Amendment (i.e. eminent domain) by attempting to veil these takings as "environmental regulatory buffers" that are exempt from due process and compensation.

But what these radical environmentalists and the politicians who endorse and support them do not realize is that the vast majority of Virginians are not hesitant to defend their freedom, homes and property rights. We are fully capable of rising to the challenge of this new kind of peril.

Prince William County citizens are aware of their power to go to the voting booth to get rid of elected scoundrels and to the courts to remedy local governmental abuses. When local elected officials are not affected by decisions that affect the rest of us, we have good reasons to distrust them.