.

NEWS AND VIEWS THAT IMPACT LIMITED CONSTITUTIONAL GOVERNMENT

"There is danger from all men. The only maxim of a free government ought to be to trust no man living with
power to endanger the public liberty." - - - - John Adams

Friday, January 6, 2012

RIP - A Real Defender of the Constitution Dies

.



"As fine a document as the Constitution is, it is nothing but a scrap of paper if citizens are not willing to defend it."

Gordon Hirabayashi  (1918 - 2012)
Resisted FDR, was arrested and sent to a Concentration Camp in Arizona. 






93 year old Gordon Hirabayashi just passed away.  He had more guts in one little finger than every worthless political hack now roaming the halls of Congress.

When Statist Franklin Roosevelt snapped his fingers Hirabayashi did not march off to the Concentration Camps like a good little Sheeple.

Hirabayashi was one of only three Japanese Americans who refused to comply with Executive Order 9066, signed by Democrat President Franklin D. Roosevelt in February 1942.

He was a senior at the University of Washington in 1942 when the curfew and evacuation orders were imposed. At first he obeyed the 8 p.m. curfew. But one night, as he left his Caucasian classmates at the library to hurry back to his dorm, the injustice of the restrictions suddenly hit him. That realization deepened when the evacuation was announced.

He opposed it on the grounds that it violated the 5th Amendment, which prohibits the seizure of property and rights without due process of law reports the Los Angeles Times.


Opposing his family's wishes and incurring criticism from other Japanese Americans for "rocking the boat," Hirabayashi resisted the order and was arrested and convicted in 1942 for violating a curfew and refusing to enter a relocation camp.

He spent more than two years in several prisons and took his case to the U.S. Supreme Court, which in 1943 ruled against him and upheld the government's argument that the restrictions were a military necessity.

It took more than 40 years to reopen his case, but Hirabayashi eventually savored victory.

"What Gordon should be most remembered for is taking a stand on a matter of principle at a time when hardly anyone — not only within the Japanese American community but the nation at large — sided with him or sympathized with him," said Peter H. Irons, a retired UC San Diego political scientist whose research in the 1980s helped lay the legal foundation for the overturning of the convictions. "It wasn't at all like the civil rights movement where thousands of people engaged in demonstrations and civil disobedience. It was a very lonely stand."

God bless you Gordon.

See our related articles:

THE FEDERALIST - "American Concentration Camps."

THE FEDERALIST - "Justice Department lied to the Supreme Court so Japanese-Americans could be shipped to internment camps."

THE FEDERALIST - "Newly built American Concentration Camps."

Off to the Concentration Camps.
Without a warrant, without a trial, without an attorney the American military, with the help of the Census Bureau, sent 110,000 Japanese Americans to live in prison camps during the Second World War.  All the Japanese Americans in the state of California were sent as well as some in Oregon, Washington and Arizona.

For more on this story

No comments: