Writing Our Own Moral Code (Redux)

At The Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission (of the Southern Baptist Convention), a recent blog post details the "Six principles of a Jesus-centered moral order." The post is an excerpt from a recent book co-authored by David Kinnaman, the president of Barna Group, a Christian research and communications company.

The piece notes that, "in the twentieth century, more and more people began to see Christian morality as standing in the way of a new moral code: the morality of self-fulfillment. Throwing off burdensome traditional mores, people began to imagine life without a bothersome God standing watch." The post also reveals new research that "highlights the extent to which Americans pledge allegiance to the new moral code, which can be summed up in six guiding principles."

Barna research reveals our "New Moral Code:" 

As we sadly see, this "morality of self fulfillment," otherwise known--as I noted last August (referencing philosopher Michael Novak)--as the "theology of self," has crept into the church. As I also pointed out, this "morality of self fulfillment" or "theology of self" is nothing new. As Genesis chapter 3 reveals, the desire to "be like God" is nearly as old as humanity itself. 

What is new, at least for the United States of America, is that such a wicked philosophy has now become deeply embedded in U.S. law. To a great extent, this is the result of the corrupt and foolish efforts of American courts. 

In Lawrence vs. Texas in 2003, while declaring state laws against homosexual behavior (sodomy) unconstitutional, the U.S. Supreme Court declared that, "The petitioners [Lawrence and Garner] are entitled to respect for their private lives. The State cannot demean their existence or control their destiny by making their private sexual conduct a crime."

In his dissent, Justice Scalia correctly concluded that, "Today's opinion is the product of a Court, which is the product of a law-profession culture, that has largely signed on to the so-called homosexual agenda, by which I mean the agenda promoted by some homosexual activists directed at eliminating the moral opprobrium that has traditionally attached to homosexual conduct.... [T]he Court has taken sides in the culture war, departing from its role of assuring, as neutral observer, that the democratic rules of engagement are observed."

On November 18, 2003, just four-and-a-half months after the Lawrence decision, the Judicial Supreme Court of Massachusetts ruled in favor of legalized same-sex "marriage. Thus Massachusetts became the first state in the U.S. to grant marital rights to same-sex couples. In her majority decision, the Chief Justice of the Massachusetts court, Margaret Marshal, referenced Lawrence: "Our obligation is to define the liberty of all, not to mandate our own moral code."

As I wrote in March of 2013, "mandating our own moral code" is exactly what supporters of the homosexual agenda, and others like-minded, seek to do. Nearly a quarter of a century ago, ruling in favor of the "right" to kill children in the womb (Planned Parenthood v. Casey), Justice Anthony Kennedy wrote, "At the heart of liberty is the right to define one’s own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life." (Thus, no one should have been surprised at his perverse ruling on marriage.)

If Kennedy's above conclusion is not "mandating our own moral code" then nothing is.

What's more, as we debate the moral issues in our culture, in their lust to ignore the eternal truths of our Creator, liberals have long bemoaned the "legislating of morality." Such a conclusion foolishly ignores the fact that, all law is rooted in someone's idea of morality. We either going to be governed by the morality of God, or the "morality of self fulfillment." Americans must simply decide, by whose morality we wished to be governed. 

Copyright 2016, Trevor Grant Thomas
At the Intersection of Politics, Science, Faith, and Reason.
www.trevorgrantthomas.com
Trevor and his wife Michelle are the authors of: Debt Free Living in a Debt Filled World
tthomas@trevorgrantthomas.com

Yes Bill Maher, Sluts Should be Ashamed

Bill Maher is upset. In his pagan mind, now that a significant number of Americans are comfortable with same-sex marriage and legalized marijuana, he recently concluded, “it's time we knocked over the next social domino, Puritanism.”

So, according to Maher, what exactly is “Puritanism?” It seems that anyone or anything that would stand in the way of the sexual desires of any consenting adult would be guilty of Puritanism. For example, France has been in the headlines recently because “the boring guy they elected president last year turns out not to be so boring” (Maher’s words).

It turns out that President François Hollande never married the mother of his four children. He broke up with her a few years ago for a younger woman. As happens so often (amazing that so many first-time “mistresses” don’t figure this out—because if a man will leave the mother of his children, why wouldn’t he leave the next woman) in these matters, the younger woman was then dumped for an actress.

So what? concludes Maher, “the French just shrug and go back to eating snails.” Maher wonders why America can’t be more like France as he then gets to the point of his rant. He points out that newly elected Mayor of New York, Bill de Blasio was shamed into firing Lis Smith, who was in line to become de Blasio’s communications director.

Maher, oblivious to his moral ignorance and hypocrisy, asks, “Was it that she lied on her résumé? Or accepted gifts from a lobbyist? Or injected Alex Rodriguez with steroids? Nope. It's that she's dating Eliot Spitzer, America's evilest, horniest man.” Evidently in Maher’s perverted world, lying on a résumé, illegal gifts from lobbyists, and steroid use are bad things; but abandoning the mother of your children, whoring around with whatever is your current fancy, same-sex marriage, pot use, and the like are okay.

I wonder what moral code Maher and his like-minded pagan friends are using to reach these bizarre conclusions. (Actually, I don’t wonder at all, but I want you to think about it.) I also wonder how Maher would have felt if his father took the path of Hollande and abandoned him and his mother and sister during his youth. Or are such things okay only when they happen to someone else?

Maher’s morality is not only illogical and inconsistent, but is a great example of what happens when morality is defined by infallible (and ignorant, and foolish) humans. When it comes to de Blasio’s former aid, Maher asks, “[W]hat exactly is the sin here? She's an adult in a consensual relationship with another adult who’s in the process of divorcing his spouse.”

Well, the sins are fornication and adultery, for starters. I suppose at least it is encouraging that the word “sin” is still in Maher’s vocabulary. Of course, if we follow Maher’s morality (that whatever is done between “consenting adults” is okay) to its logical conclusion, prostitution, gambling of almost every form, polygamy and polyandry, pornography, almost every form of drug abuse, illegal payments—political and otherwise, and the like, should be not only legal, but moral as well.

Most of today’s liberals, at least those who craft and coach modern progressivism, are little more than present-day pagans. They are fulfilling well what occultist, bisexual, and habitual drug user Aleister Crowley described as the creed of modern paganism: “Do What Thou Wilt.”

Much to the thrill of today’s liberal, the great lure of paganism is that the moral demands are few. Such demands are decided by each individual, and thus we have the chaos that stems from moral relativism. What was once deemed shameful is now celebrated. Tragically, the secularism that is the fruit of modern liberalism has given us a culture that is bereft of shame. 

Thus it is a bit of a wonder that Maher and his pagan liberal friends have a problem with “slut shaming.” In fact, given today’s American culture, it’s a wonder that any form of “shaming” has an effect at all. Also, just like a “twerking” Miley Cyrus, males such as French President Hollande, or the NFL star with multiple children by multiple women, or the nice looking college boy out to hook-up as often as possible, should have their slutty behavior called out for what it is as well.

What’s more, not only can Maher be described as a pagan, but like his editorial friends at The New York Times, he is a fool. And I mean a fool in the Old Testament book of Proverbs sense of the word. In this sense, liberals like Maher are not feebleminded idiots; instead, they are morally corrupt and despise true wisdom. Being wise in their own eyes, in almost every way possible they have rebelled against God and His Word.

Such liberals have knowledge, and they crave the political power necessary to put it into practice. Sadly, too many Americans have given them this opportunity. Thus, many of us have learned the hard way what a British rock band (horribly) sang over 15 years ago, “Knowledge is a deadly friend, when no one sets the rules. The fate of all mankind I see is in the hands of fools.”

(See this column on American Thinker.)

Copyright 2014, Trevor Grant Thomas

At the Intersection of Politics, Science, Faith, and Reason.
Trevor and his wife Michelle are the authors of: Debt Free Living in a Debt Filled World
tthomas@trevorgrantthomas.com

Writing Our Own Moral Code

Ohio GOP Senator Rob Portman, who, for the last several years has frequently been in the conversation for national office, recently reversed himself and declared his support for same-sex marriage. According to Portman himself, two years ago, his son Will announced that he was gay. Not wanting to stand in the way of his son’s opportunity “to pursue happiness and fulfillment,” is, evidently, what led to Portman’s change of heart when it comes to the definition of marriage.

Writing for New York Magazine, Jonathan Chait (a supporter of same-sex marriage) describes Portman’s decision as a “moral failure, one of which he appears unaware.” According to Chait, this “moral failure” is due to the fact that Portman “opposed gay marriage until he realized that opposition to gay marriage stands in the way of his own son’s happiness.”

Chait goes on, “Portman ought to be able to recognize that, even if he changed his mind on gay marriage owing to personal experience, the logic stands irrespective of it: Support for gay marriage would be right even if he didn’t have a gay son. There’s little sign that any such reasoning has crossed his mind.”

Notice that? Chait is appealing to a moral standard (one of which he appears unaware). Chait decries Portman’s “moral failure” while appealing to logic, reason, and what is “right.” What makes Portman’s seemingly self-serving conversion a “moral failure”?

After all, isn’t looking out for one’s children noble behavior? Why must Portman think of others (or, as Chait puts it, “consider issues from a societal perspective”) to be considered moral, himself? What standard is Chait using?

Of course, Chait is appealing to Natural Law. He has rightly recognized Portman’s apparent hypocrisy. However, as I noted in my last column, by appealing to what is “right” in one situation, but ignoring it in another, he is sawing off the limb upon which he is sitting. For millennia, guided by Natural Law, civilizations the world over have deemed homosexual behavior as immoral.

No less than the U.S. Supreme has said so. As recently as 1986, the U.S. Supreme Court declared, “Proscriptions against [homosexual] conduct have ancient roots. Sodomy was a criminal offense at common law and was forbidden by the laws of the original 13 States when they ratified the Bill of Rights. . . . In fact, until 1961, all 50 States outlawed sodomy, and today, 24 States and the District of Columbia continue to provide criminal penalties for sodomy performed in private and between consenting adults. Against this background, to claim that a right to engage in such conduct is ‘deeply rooted in this Nation's history and tradition,’ or ‘implicit in the concept of ordered liberty’ is, at best, facetious [silly].”

Of course, the Court reversed itself in Lawrence vs. Texas in 2003, declaring that, “The petitioners [Lawrence and Garner] are entitled to respect for their private lives. The State cannot demean their existence or control their destiny by making their private sexual conduct a crime.”

In his dissent, Justice Scalia correctly concluded that, “Today's opinion is the product of a Court, which is the product of a law-profession culture, that has largely signed on to the so-called homosexual agenda, by which I mean the agenda promoted by some homosexual activists directed at eliminating the moral opprobrium that has traditionally attached to homosexual conduct.... [T]he Court has taken sides in the culture war, departing from its role of assuring, as neutral observer, that the democratic rules of engagement are observed.”

Unsurprisingly, after gaining the legal justification for homosexual sex, the next moral domino in the sights of the homosexual agenda has been marriage. On November 18, 2003, just four-and-a-half months after the Lawrence decision, the Judicial Supreme Court of Massachusetts ruled in favor of legalized same-sex marriage. Thus Massachusetts became the first state in the U.S. to grant marital rights to same-sex couples.

The Chief Justice of the Massachusetts court, Margaret Marshal, referenced Lawrence in the ruling: “Our obligation is to define the liberty of all, not to mandate our own moral code.”

But “mandating our own moral code” is exactly what supporters of the homosexual agenda seek to do. Again, what existing moral code are they using to justify homosexual behavior? They rarely, if ever, appeal to one. The argument is simply, there are some people who want (it makes them “happy”) to engage in homosexuality, thus “liberty of all” dictates that it should be allowed.

The majority in Lawrence also concluded that, “[Liberty] gives substantial protection to adult persons in deciding how to conduct their private lives in matters pertaining to sex.” Of course, no such conclusions have been reached when it comes to prostitution, or polygamy, or incest, or bestiality. In other words, liberals have decided that homosexuality deserves special privilege when it comes to the law and “private sexual conduct.”

And thus we see the real goal of the “so-called homosexual agenda:” the legal legitimization of homosexuality across all of America. After all, if it makes liberals “happy” then it shouldn’t be illegal. And if it’s not illegal, well then, it must be moral.

(See this column on American Thinker.)

Trevor Grant Thomas

At the Intersection of Politics, Science, Faith, and Reason.
www.trevorgrantthomas.com

Legislating Morality

Being a lifelong fan of football, I have never had a problem with NFL instant replay. I’m in my early forties, so I can remember well the days before instant replay. Whatever the shortcomings of instant replay—and there were some significant ones in the early days—to me, the benefit of the official getting the call right always trumped any inconvenience that might result from a video review of a play.

Unsurprisingly, I find that most NFL fans approve of replay—especially when it is their team on the wrong end of a bad call. Don’t we all wish that there was an “instant replay” for life—a chance for an “official review” always to get things right?

Of course, “getting it right” means that there is a standard, much like the rules in the NFL, to which we all are (or should be) held. Despite notions to the contrary, as we argue and debate the issues of our day, ultimately each of us relies on such a standard, or some notion of right and wrong, or fair play, or rules, or morality, or whatever you want to call it.

What’s more, the very foundation of our government depends upon such a notion. In fact, the foundation of any good government, culture, society, or virtually any situation where human beings interact with one another rests upon what used to be called Natural Law.

Our Founding Fathers understood this well. However, the idea that liberty, good government, and just laws have their roots in Natural Law, or “the Laws of Nature and Nature’s God,” did not begin with the founding of America. For millennia many philosophers, politicians, priests, and lay people alike knew the role that Natural Law should play in the “Governments [that] are instituted among men.”

Jim Powell, Senior Fellow at the Cato Institute and an expert in the history of liberty, credits the Roman philosopher and statesman Marcus Tullius Cicero (106 B.C. to 43 B.C.) with expressing the “principles that became the bedrock of liberty in the modern world.” Cicero was the leading lawyer of his time, and Thomas Jefferson credits him not only with influencing the Declaration of Independence, but also with informing the American understanding of “the common sense” basis for the right of revolution.

“True law,” as Cicero called it, is the “one eternal and unchangeable law [that] will be valid for all nations and all times, and there will be one master and ruler, that is God, over us all, for he is the author of this law…”

“[The] Law of Nature” wrote English philosopher John Locke (who also profoundly influenced our Founders), “stands as an eternal rule to all men, legislators as well as others. The rules that they make for other men’s actions must…be conformable to the Law of Nature, i.e. to the will of God…”

Sir William Blackstone, another renowned and favorite English jurist of our Founders, declared in his presuppositional basis for law that, “These laws laid down by God are the eternal immutable laws of good and evil…This law of nature dictated by God himself, is of course superior in obligation to any other. It is binding over all the globe, in all countries, and at all times: no human laws are of any validity if contrary to this…”

C.S. Lewis concludes that, “Natural Law or Traditional Morality [whatever one chooses to call it]…is not one among a series of possible systems of value. It is the sole source of all value judgments. If it is rejected, all value is rejected. If any value is retained, it is retained.”

Throughout the early colonies, the incorporation of Natural (or “Divine”) Law was prevalent. The Fundamental Orders of Connecticut (the first constitution written in America), as well as similar documents in Rhode Island and New Haven, specifically mentioned that their civil law rested upon “the rule of the word of God,” or “all those perfect and most absolute laws of His.”

References to, not vague religious babble, but specific biblical texts, such as the Ten Commandments, can be found in the civil law of every original U.S. Colony. It is a fact of history that throughout our pre-Colonial, Colonial, Revolutionary period and beyond, America’s lawmakers and laws were steeped in Natural Law.

Thus we can conclude that from the beginning our government has been “legislating morality.” All law is rooted in morality. “Laws without morals are in vain,” said Ben Franklin. Not only that, but as I implied above, every debate we have is rooted in morality.

It is absurd and ignorant to lament conservative Christian efforts when it comes to abortion, marriage, and so on as some attempt to “legislate morality.” The other side is attempting the very same thing! In fact, the lamenter (whatever his political persuasion) has also taken a moral stand. Thus, he is like the bank robber who calls the police because his get-away car gets stolen.

What’s more, those who attack Natural Law (because an attack on a position that stems from Natural Law is an attack on Natural Law) do so with arguments that are derived from Natural Law. It is a self-defeating effort. They are attempting to saw off the limb upon which they are sitting.

As Lewis puts it, “The effort to refute [Natural Law] and raise a new system of value in its place is self-contradictory. There never has been, and never will be, a radically new judgment of value in the history of the world. What purport to be new systems or (as they now call them) ‘ideologies,’ all consist of fragments from [Natural Law] itself, arbitrarily wrenched from their context in the whole and then swollen to madness in their isolation, yet still owing to [Natural Law] and to it alone such validity as they possess.”

Sadly, recent examples of such nonsense come not from Democrats or their liberal friends in the media, but from self-described “Orthodox Christians” within the GOP. Michigan GOP representative Justin Amash recently complained that “We can't legislate morality and force everyone to agree with us.” It appears that Amash was trying to impress John Stossel and his gathering of a “thousand young libertarians.”

Stossel likes the fact that “Amash focuses on government spending.” In addition, conservative author Arthur Brooks implores republicans to focus on “improving the lives of vulnerable people” through the appropriate conservative policies instead of “imposing an alien ‘bourgeois’ morality on others.”

Libertarians and their like-minded friends want to focus on government spending or conservative fiscal policies, but they often fail to realize that one does not leave morality at the door when entering the realm of economics. If you want to make the moral arguments in favor of proper (“right and good”) economic policy (which, of course, are ultimately based in Natural Law), then you must accept the other moral conclusions (killing a child in the womb is wrong; marriage is only between a man and a woman) that go along with them.

In other words, it is folly to make moral arguments in favor of sound fiscal policy, all the while turning a blind eye toward killing children in the womb or the evils of homosexual behavior.

(See this column on American Thinker.)

Copyright 2013, Trevor Grant Thomas

At the Intersection of Politics, Science, Faith, and Reason
www.trevorgrantthomas.com