Bob delivered the lines with all the pathos at his command, and urged Shane to: “Go ahead - call them - destroy us all, and everything we’ve ever cared about! Call them, and endure the fires of hell throughout the eternal ages! Call them, and explain why to Jesus on judgment day before God the Father, the angels, all the heroes of Hebrews 11, and the assembled universe! Explain why you destroyed us all! Explain why you destroyed our church! Explain why you threw in your lot with God’s enemies! Tell Jesus why you threw in your lot with the men who crucified Him! But go ahead - call them - I’ll let you! Throw in your lot with Judas Iscariot! Go ahead and betray me, and everyone who’s ever cared about you. But you go right ahead and call CPS!”

No one was holding Shane; he was simply standing there, transfixed by what Bob was daring him to do. Anyhow, somewhere in the speech, as Bob thrust the phone at him, and Shane was screaming “No! No! I’ll burn in hell if I do!” Shane whipped out his pocket knife, opened it, and vowed to cut off his hand so it could never call CPS, and condemn him to perdition.

Bob lunged for the knife and shouted, “No, Shane!” But Shane yanked the knife away, shouting, “Yes!” and then quoted the verse about “if thy right hand causes thee to sin, cut it off; for it is better for thee, having one hand, to enter into life.”

Bob managed to keep Shane from actually using the knife on himself, or on anybody else; but I swear, I could actually see the flames of hell dancing around that cell phone, as Bob dared Shane to “Go ahead - call CPS!” and bring eternal damnation upon himself.

Of course, none of us had any intention of calling CPS, with or without Bob’s fulminations. But to my dying day, I will hear Bob, like the tempter in Eden, offering to let a guy avoid being beaten, if he will give his soul as a forfeit. And I know that I could never call CPS, even for the most benign or insignificant reason, without expecting the chasm of hell to open beneath my feet, and swallow me live into the bottomless pit - and, I would surely feel, deservedly so.

Sic Semper Tyrannis is a memoir about a time, not so long past, when men were free, religious values were taken seriously. and parents were allowed to pass on the cultural heritage to their children without governmental interference. As David Selznick remarked concerning the Antebellum South, "Look for it only in books, for it is no more than a dream remembered, a Civilization gone with the wind . . . "

This fictional account is the story of what might have been, had Christian parents possessed the courage of their convictions. It depicts the use of spanking and other types of physical correction, from the perspective of an adolescent boy.

Twelve year old Billy Martin has been suddenly uprooted from the only home he knows, in liberal Stockholm, and sent to live with his eighteen year old brother, Bob, who has recently joined an ultra-conservative religious group in Idaho.Billy, a high-spirited youth, has been allowed to run at loose ends for his entire life, and has never experienced discipline of any kind. He now finds himself in a vastly different world. Bob immediately sets about bringing his kid brother into line, and giving him the “Biblical discipline” that he, and the other sect members, consider essential to proper child rearing. Billy strives to come to grips with the new reality.

While the characters are wholly imaginary, the issues they confront are real, and threaten to undermine the very foundations of our civilization. This work does not contain any erotic material, but is a sobering assessment of today’s child rearing practices in the United States and Western Europe.

This is the tenth volume of a more extensive saga, which traces the course of Billy and his friends as they struggle through the years of adolescence. It should be required reading for every adolescent boy, his parents, and all those who seek to influence him.