Moral Versus Legal
The decay of societies isn’t caused by guns, drugs, or crime, it is caused by a weakness of the spirit, a moral rot that kills conscience.
It took a year and a half, but the Biden, Garland, Wray, and the Democrat Party finally got their “white supremacist terror” attack.
Of course, the broken clock fallacy is in play, and the shooter, while claiming to be a white supremacist, also claims to hate Fox News, Jews and to be a leftist authoritarian. It also happened in upstate New York, not in Dothan, Alabama.
Democrats immediately, and predictably, focused on the weapons used and not the permissive environment established by Democrats going soft on crime.
In his treatise “Common Sense”, Thomas Pain wrote:
“Society is produced by our wants, and government by our wickedness; the former promotes our happiness positively by uniting our affections, the latter negatively by restraining our vices.”
It is my long-held belief that the Founders understood that two systems, one societal (moral) and one governmental (legal), were necessary for the maintenance of the American experiment in freedom.
This necessity is the reason that they expressly constrained the government from encroaching on the province of the moral through the Constitution. That is the reason for the enumerated powers of the federal government and powers reserved for the states – the states being closer to the people. I believe that the wisdom of the Founders included the recognition that morality could not be legislated because it rested on the character and the belief system of the individual and to regulate morality would be an unacceptable breach of individual freedom.
It is true that the survival of an open and free democratic society depends upon the character of the individual, not on the collective qualities of any group.
The decay of societies isn’t caused by guns, drugs, or crime, it is caused by a weakness of the spirit. It is caused by people willing to break moral laws because they have no moral compass, no conscience, nothing that causes them pause when an urge to indulge in harm to others arises.
Many of us have said it – or at least heard it said - that “you can’t legislate morality.”
But just because the Founders assumed legislating morality was not the role of government, what can the response be when factions within government use legislation to prohibit or change morality?
My observations of history note that man can only exist in one of two dimensions – moral or immoral. Amorality is not sustainable, over time men tend to trend to one or the other side of the continuum. Sooner or later, people must make a choice. The American left has worked very hard to eliminate any vestige of religious belief from government (and public life). By preventing traditional moral positions from becoming part of governance, they have essentially legislated a substitute morality.
Looking back at our founding, I think it is at least arguable that the Founders such as Jefferson and Adams DID intend for government, if perhaps not to directly legislate morality, at least to legislate to protect it.
An oft cited quote of Adams about the Constitution is that it is only capable of governing a “…moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.” Jefferson acknowledged our Creator’s role in American public life by writing in the Declaration of Independence that we are “…to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle them…”
Reasonable people may disagree, but one must acknowledge that Divine Law played a role at our founding, being both the asserted basis for King George III to rule over the British Kingdom AND the reason cited for man’s natural state of freedom in the nascent United States of America. As the individual threads are woven into cloth, Divine Law was woven into the fabric of this country and became the basis for much of the initial views of morality in America.
Societies are fluid entities and culture changes over time – America was changed with a Supreme Court decision that legalized abortion and we have continued to change in our views regarding many things, same sex marriage is an example…but where does that lead? The SCOTUS decisions in Obergefell and Roe, changed a system of morality that had been in place since America was founded.
Perhaps the most frightening aspect of government excusing itself from the traditional role of protecting the founding tradition of Judeo-Christian morality is not abortion or gay marriage – it is the path that this moral recusal has put us on.
An example of how far the rationalization of immorality has progressed comes to us from Australia. About a decade ago, a judge in Australia said that incest and pedophilia may no longer be considered taboo. There are active movements in the US and the UK to “mainstream” the sexual fetish of pedophilia.
At an academic conference at the University of Cambridge in England, a paper was presented that continued this shocking statement – “Paedophilic interest is natural and normal for human males,” said the presentation. “At least a sizeable minority of normal males would like to have sex with children … Normal males are aroused by children.” Similarly in America, NAMBLA, the North American Man-Boy Love Association promotes the same idea -that there is nothing inherently unnatural or immoral about a sexual relationship between an adult male and an adolescent child.
Is it really that shocking transgenderism is now being mainstreamed in American elementary schools?
Where do we draw the line? Why would we expect government to consider pedophilia a crime? Why would we be able to prevent any behavior that deviates from traditional moral codes? What about polygamy, incest, bestiality, prostitution or even euthanasia?
We should stop trying to fool ourselves – governments can and do legislate morality and furthermore, it is both expected and necessary to the maintenance of an ordered society. The question is not whether they can or should but what is the moral basis by which they do it. For the first two centuries of our country our recognized basis was the Christian Bible, now we have decided that following Divine Law is not only less than desirable, it is illegal (by virtue, not of a direct admonition in an of our founding documents but of a letter of Thomas Jefferson to the Danbury Baptists). We have lost this traditional anchor and now are drifting on a sea of societal fad and human whim.
I don’t know where this will end. Sooner or later the anchor must gain purchase on the sea floor and the ship of state will be yanked to a halt.
In years past, the anchor chain made of Divine Law has held, it remains to see if one such chain made of man’s law will hold.
It ain’t looking good.