Subtitle: Whose Morality?
When I was a teenager I remember what passed for wisdom from the older college kids: “Hey man, everyone knows you can’t legislate morality.” I wasn’t comfortable with that and eventually learned why. Law reflects the morality of the lawgiver. It can’t be any other way. A self-governing people can’t avoid imprinting the law with the essence of their beliefs and traditions.
In contrast, lawgivers disconnected from the people cannot act in the people’s interest. In 2016, one of John Podesta’s emails released by WikiLeaks exposed how progressive elites intended, after Clinton won, to exploit the people. The email features one of Podesta’s colleagues from the Center for American Progress admitting that the institutional left “conspire(d) to produce an unaware and compliant citizenry,” to impose their radical agenda without much resistance. This exposes what we’ve known all along. The Deep State, and not the people through Congress, are America’s lawgivers. Their morality extends no further than avarice and ambition, money and power.
While a Biblically based morality figured large to the Framing generation, they left religion (other than a prohibition of religious tests for office) out of their Constitution. Nor did their design offer a federal means to suppress Christian traditions and morality in and outside the law. The people and states were free to exercise and promote Christianity. Nothing in the Constitution then or today prohibits the free exercise of religion within public institutions.
This perspective shifted in the late 19th century with Woodrow Wilson, a really bright guy who didn’t think very well of America’s foundations in religious and civil liberty. To Wilson and his fellow Progressives, government was a living and breathing organism. He thought an administrative government of really bright guys like himself as the dispenser of secular morals independent of religion, traditions, the people and states. The people were free to elect their betters, people like him, to rule them. Wilson was just a little early, by about twenty years.
Once a popularly-elected Senate fell in line with a popularly-worshiped FDR, the die was cast for Wilson’s other-than-congressional-lawmaking. Lawmaking steadily slipped over the decades from Congress and into the judicial and executive branches where Progressives and their morality awaited.
This wasn’t the first era in which elites sought the mantle of lawgiver to impose their secular beastly ethics. But to be successful, they first have to rip the old Judeo/Christian beliefs out of society. Where the Enlightenment in America gave us a Constitution that left a Biblically based community alone, the Age of Reason in France not only destroyed the government’s bond with religion, it justified terror to achieve revolutionary ideals and rid France of the religiosity that stood in the way of the revolution. Once disarmed of Christianity, the public is ready for Godless transformation.
So it was with the elitist monster of the French Revolution, Maximilien Robespierre (1758-1794). To him, the function of government was to direct the physical and moral powers of the nation. If the basis of popular government in peacetime is virtue, the basis of popular government during a revolution is both virtue and terror; virtue, without which terror is baneful; terror, without which virtue is powerless. Terror is nothing more than speedy, severe and inflexible justice; it is the emanation of virtue; it is less a principle in itself, than a consequence of the general principle of democracy.1
Terror is a consequence of democracy.
Fast forward a couple hundred plus years in which another elitist promised to fundamentally transform a nation. The scene was ready; Christianity in the US had for generations been proscribed from public schools and was relegated to a personal matter quietly exercised on Sundays. Only ignorant rubes fear God. As in revolutionary France, fundamental lawgiving fell to similar committees of safety: a supreme social justice court and the secretaries of regulatory agencies headed by a secular god-president. In the tradition of Robespierre, today’s Squad Terrorists find virtue in an inflexible social justice morality enforced through spitting in food, doxxing, shadow-banning, media, academe, antifa shock troops, sharia, anti-semitism, LGBTQ, baseball diamond assassins, and digital scrubbing of conservative voices.
Not Robespierre or the worst communists, who relied on street mob support, ever thought of throwing their borders open to invaders who suffer few consequences for rape and murder and impossibly burden schools and social services. Last week, Massachusetts’ Rep Ayanna Pressley pressed for open borders when she said, “Our Squad is big. Our Squad includes any person committed to building a more equitable and (moral) world.” Conformity isn’t optional. Join the future. Fall in line, or else.
Squad morality is secular tyranny. Instead of liberty under government that respects a just and almighty God, they, like Woodrow Wilson and John Podesta, believe in nothing beyond themselves. Live a pious life according to the THEIR principles. Vote for them, sit down, and shut up about your Christianity. Terror in democracy.
The Squad Terrorists wouldn’t spew their revolutionary diktats if they didn’t think they could get away with feasting like parasites on America’s bounty. Left unchecked, their open Anti-Americanism will knock off a once God-fearing republic. No nation can survive once a critical percentage of its people hold it in contempt. The voice of the sovereign people grows weaker every day they don’t reclaim what is theirs, their Constitution. Lawgiving is largely out of their hands and into those of The Squad and their sympathizers.
The time is long past to resume the mantle of lawgiver and save ourselves; restore our Constitution and its Christian foundations.
1. The Law, Frederic Bastiat.