Some people that would do everything in their power to prevent this country from becoming a theocracy visited the White House today. Although the concept of religious organizations involving themselves in government has been an ongoing issue for this country from the very beginning, it became a larger concern during the last administration, particularly because of the official acceptance of faith-based initiatives (an issue that was meant to be addressed at the meeting today.)
Another issue that the Secular Coalition of America was meaning to address with the administration today is the closure of loopholes in federal law regarding medical neglect – a situation that allows parents that believe in faith-healing to maintain custody of children that need medical attention to live. This issue can be considered the flip-side of the abortion debate, in that it provides protections for parents that choose to deny medical treatments for their children on religious grounds – something that reveals hypocrisy from some members of the religious right.
Defining precisely where conservatives are supposed to stand was the point of the recent Mount Vernon Statement. The last principle of Constitutional conservatism in this statement lays the groundwork for misuse by the religious right – “It informs conservatism’s firm defense of family, neighborhood, community, and faith.” Defense of faith is a necessary part of our Constitution, as stated in the First Amendment. However, the bastardization of this tenet through attempts to legislate morality can by no means be considered protected by that amendment.
The primary problem is that after years of protecting religion from the state, we haven’t shifted gears to prevent the opposite. Wording of the First Amendment, stating the separation of “church and state”, hasn’t been translated to fit modern needs. The “church” that the framers were concerned with was the Church of England, and since that time, the only time concern over a specific denomination exerting control over our government was seriously considered was when Kennedy took office. Now, government does not need protected from a specific church, but from a specific group of churches – Judeo-Christian faiths.
What then is the relation of law to morality? Law cannot prescribe morality, it can prescribe only external actions and therefore it should prescribe only those actions whose mere fulfillment, from whatever motive, the state adjudges to be conducive to welfare. What actions are these? Obviously such actions as promote the physical and social conditions requisite for the expression and development of free—or moral—personality…. Law does not and cannot cover all the ground of morality. To turn all moral obligations into legal obligations would be to destroy morality. Happily it is impossible. No code of law can envisage the myriad changing situations that determine moral obligations. Moreover, there must be one legal code for all, but moral codes vary as much as the individual characters of which they are the expression. To legislate against the moral codes of one’s fellows is a very grave act, requiring for its justification the most indubitable and universally admitted of social gains, for it is to steal their moral codes, to suppress their characters.
ATTRIBUTION: R.M. MacIver (1882–1970), Scottish sociologist, educator. The Modern State, ch. 5, Oxford University Press (1926).
The previous is a long form of the statement “you can’t legislate morality.” That statement is often mentioned in the context of the abortion and marriage equality debates, as well as a myriad of other issues surrounding the intimate relationships of adults. Those seeking to create laws to prohibit their neighbors from engaging in the supposed “immoral” behaviors regularly assert that there is a majority of citizens in agreement with them, so therefore it is only right and just that a law should be created. However, that claimed majority pales when one considers McIver’s statement.
“To legislate against the moral codes of one’s fellows is a very grave act, requiring for its justification the most indubitable and universally admitted of social gains, for it is to steal their moral codes, to suppress their characters.” A majority of individuals that happen to end up on a list of willing participants in a survey, that is theoretically representative of the population as a whole could never be considered proof “most indubitable and universally admitted of social gains.” There is a group of countries that are attempting to legislate moral codes today – their “code” is called Sharia Law.
Drawing religious beliefs and codes into the political arena is dancing on the sword’s edge. On one side is the oppression of all citizens that do not share the belief systems of the majority, and on the other is the potential to destroy the value of the religious beliefs that the laws are being created to protect and promote. “To turn all moral obligations into legal obligations would be to destroy morality.” The value of morality and faith lies in the fact that it is a choice, not a legal obligation.
Tags: Mount Vernon Statement, Religion, Theocracy
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