WHO IS GOING TO DETERMINE WHAT IS MORAL???

February 7, 2014

 

There is now an obvious and overt move to drive religion, particularly Christianity, from the public square, to silence its voice and squelch its influence.  Amendment one of the Bill of Rights has been reinterpreted to declare freedom from religion rather than freedom of religion.  I say reinterpreted, and deliberately so, because how can “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof…” possibly be seen as prohibiting a nativity scene in a public park or a reproduction of the ten commandments in a courthouse?  I am certainly no Constitutional scholar, but I can read.  The language contained in Amendment one seems deliberately simple and clear.  What is prohibited by Amendment One is the government passing a law establishing some type of national religion.  Question: Have you read of a single law recently passed anywhere in this country seeking to enforce some form of Christianity, or any religion, as our national faith?  I haven’t.  Nativity scenes and crosses are simply a reflection of the roots of our culture in Judeo-Christian beliefs – no more.  Somehow equating their presence with laws forcing the citizenry to worship them or what they represent is a step of legal sophistry.  The establishment clause is being misused by some as a club to pound into fragments “the free exercise thereof” of religion that citizens are guaranteed in Amendment One.  Amendment One declares no physical sphere for the free exercise of our religion.  Yet, there is a determined, and successful, effort to drive any exercise of religion to within the four walls of a church building or the privacy of a home.  What more effective way is there to destroy the influence of Christianity, and its inherent morals and values, than to strip it entirely from public view in the name of separation of Church and State? 

At the same time, there is a determined and effective effort to remove from our country laws rooted in our Judeo-Christian tradition.  Laws based not only in the Ten Commandments, but also in the “Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God” as spoken of in the Declaration of Independence, are being legislated out of existence or summarily overturned by judges.  Laws prohibiting sodomy, prostitution, drug use, gambling, polygamy, and obscenity are being wiped off the books supposedly in the name of equality and freedom.  But the venomous attacks against these laws are very much about their religious foundations.  They are being viciously attacked because they are rooted in a belief in the transcendent, divine law of a Higher Power.  If those roots are seen as valid, the State is answerable to those laws and that power.  However, if those laws and the assumptions that underlie them can be uprooted and destroyed, the State is left not only free from answering to a transcendent moral standard, but is empowered to establish an alternate moral standard of its own creation.  The State is able to take the place of God in determining what is moral and what is not.

Evidence of the success of this effort is all around us.  Not only have laws prohibiting sodomy been wiped off the books, but gay marriage is being legalized in state after state and promoted by the federal government.  Now stripped of its Biblical moral framework as being between a man and a woman, the creative reinterpretations of marriage by an amoral at best, and immoral at worst, government sees the door already being opened to polygamy and other polyamorous relationships.  Not only that, but moral outrage at such reinterpretations and desecrations of marriage is now prosecutable.  The tables have been completely turned by the government.  What was once illegal and immoral is now deemed both legal and moral, and what was once seen as moral and beneficial is attacked and prosecuted as immoral and intolerant.  In these matters the State has successfully supplanted God as the arbiter of what is moral and right.  With its inherent power of coercion, the State is also now able to enforce this new moral code with threats of fines and even jail time.

It is of utmost importance to see this not merely as a battle between Christianity and secular humanism.  It is that.  But it is far more than that.  It is about the State deliberately replacing God as having the right to decree what is moral and acceptable.  The State is, by definition, comprised of human beings.  Thus, this is really about humans seizing the power to play God.  This is a conflict for control that goes back to the Garden of Eden and the Tower of Babel. 

While this is frightening upon multiple levels, allow me to share what frightens me most.  Human beings may choose to rebel against the moral imperatives of God, but there are always consequences when they do so.  In the name of freedom and tolerance, under the guise of freeing us from ancient moral guidelines no longer valid in this brave new world, the State is unleashing forces of destruction upon us far more fearsome than many external threats.      

Allow me to cite two examples:

The State’s embrace of, and support for, sexual immorality has resulted in a rate of illegitimacy that approaches forty percent in the white population and seventy percent in the black.  Households of single mothers are mired in poverty at a far higher rate than married households.  As our national debt spirals out of control, the State is forced to borrow more and more money, much of which is being spent on entitlements to subsidize these single parent households.  The cost of illegitimacy is crippling and destroying the future for our children.

As more states legalize marijuana, and the federal government chooses to turn a blind eye to its usage, we are legitimizing the usage of a drug whose sole purpose is to produce a “high.”  It neither ennobles nor strengthens.  It is proven to arrest development in adolescents.  It has long since been recognized as a “gateway” drug opening the doors to the usage of even more harmful substances.  It demonstrably and undeniably impairs one’s dexterity on the job or behind the wheel of a car.  The social and financial costs of legalization have not even begun to be felt.  Yet the State, in its reflexive revolt against any restraint that smacks of a divine moral prohibition, will clasp yet another asp to its bosom in the name of pragmatism and freedom.

History is replete with lessons, if we’ll only pay attention, of the dangers of an atheistic, secular State determining what is moral and legal.  Nazi Germany decided eugenics made sense, and set out upon a path to destroy those mentally or physically disabled.  The German State also set itself up as the arbiter of the value of human beings and decided, among others, that Jews, Gypsies, and the disabled had no “right to life.”  The result was State sponsored “legal” genocide and the execution of over 13,000,000 human beings.  In communist China it has been a longstanding policy that married couples limit their family size to one child.  A second child will be destroyed by abortion or otherwise, by order of the State.  That policy has been ruthlessly enforced.

This is the kind of monstrous abuse one encounters when human beings, running a secular state unimpeded by transcendent moral values, determine to develop and enforce their own code of morality.  It is wrongheaded and naïve to think such cannot, and will not, happen here.