Should the government play a role in prohibiting immoral behavior? Is it the duty of the nation to uphold time tested morals in our institutions, public life, and law?
Laws against the destruction of property and acts of violence against persons, remain an unquestioned responsibility of government, but beyond that confusion has settled into the national discourse. The moral compass that in the past left no room for tolerance of abhorrent immoral personal conduct has lost its bearings.
The days of chivalry that protected virtue are vestiges of the past, so rare today are the champions of virtue, that many people question whether the white knight and fair lady ever existed at all. Modesty, Soberness, Virtue, Fidelity, and Innocence were protected by both law and cultural norms, it was widely viewed that traditional values were the bedrock of the family and therefore society.
Legalize Drugs, Legalize Prostitution, and Legalize Gay Marriage are but a few of the public calls made in the name of freedom and democracy. Have we sunk so far that we can no longer see that “freedom” without moral constraint is certain bondage? The moral character of our nation has been transformed in a few generations and we have all together rejected laws that deal in matters of personal morality.
Voices on the left of the political spectrum call for “Freedom of Choice” with no constraint or consequence. They despise the traditional values that have governed society for thousands of years. Voices on the right call for “individual freedom” as the highest virtue, turning a blind eye to the pornification of our culture. Both are equally destructive and threaten freedom at the root.
During Bill Clinton’s presidency the private moral decay of our President put this question to the American people, does private conduct affect public life? Should people pay a public price for what they do behind closed doors? Americans seem to have decided that what goes on in a persons’ private life has no sway on their public ethos. I avow that there can be no separation between private morality and public character. What goes on behind closed doors sends shock waves through our families, culture, and institutions.
Why has the discussion of law and morality become so taboo? It’s uncomfortable to be expected to govern one’s self and to rein in personal freedom for the guarantee of collective freedom. The result has been the twisting of truth and error until they are indistinguishable. What is left over, the “false truth” of relative morality. This thinking denies the foundations of freedom and peace, which are but gifts of God to his children, given with a charge that they be guarded by virtue.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn lamented that those who hold that “there is no God, there is no truth, the universe is chaotic, all is relative” constitute a “relentless cult of novelty … [which] conceals an unyielding and long-sustained attempt to undermine, ridicule and uproot all moral precepts.” (“The Relentless Cult of Novelty and How It Wrecked the Century,” The New York Times Book Review, 7 Feb. 1993, p. 17.)
If we hunger for liberty, we must also hunger for truth. “Truth” is an undisputable fact, principle, reality; the actual state of matter and existence. There is only one source of truth and freedom can only be sustained upon principals of truth. It is incumbent upon us to spend out our lives in the pursuit of it, to sacrifice our comfort in obedience to it, and to be willing to lay down our lives in the protection of it.
We must allow ourselves to be governed by morality to have any hope of peace. We must be able to make “righteous judgments” (John 7:24) to have any hope of justice. These require us to curtail personal freedoms for the sustainment of democracy in America.
Long ago, Tocqueville anticipated how individualism, unenriched by family and community, could produce the “lonely crowd,” saying: “Thus not only does democracy make every man forget his ancestors, but it hides his descendants and separates his contemporaries from him; it throws him back forever upon himself alone and threatens in the end to confine him entirely within the solitude of his own heart.” (Alexis de Tocqueville, “Democracy in America,” as quoted in Andrew M. Scott, Political Thought in America, New York: Rinehart & Co., Inc., 1959, p. 225.)
In an article titled, “Behold, the Enemy Is Combined”. Neal A. Maxwell asked, “How can there possibly be a disturbing loss of individual impulse control without a corresponding loss of collective freedom?” He cited historian Will Durant’s warning that “If the hunger for liberty destroys order, the hunger for order will destroy liberty.” He went on to say that “while I would not shrink the circumference of freedom, the size of that circle is not the sole measure of social well-being. Hence, to exult, as some do, over how much decadence is permissible at the edges ignores the erosive effects of such grossness upon all within that circle.”
Those who love freedom, who desire its protection and sustenance, should be the first to call for the protections of moral behavior in our culture, in our public institution, and yes, in some cases even in our law. For example, “Pornography especially victimizes women and children. Why then the inordinate preoccupation with its protection? Pornography is better protected than citizens on the streets!”
The world is preoccupied with the pollution of our physical environment and completely unconcerned about the harm done by the pollution of our moral environment. Which is the more pressing danger facing the sustainment of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness? We may not be among those actively polluting our culture, but we are passively allowing its pollution when we do not defend public morality.
Defense of the family in law is key, and lovers of freedom should oppose policies that impede the family’s role as the primary incubator of character and success in life. Even with its flaws, the family is America’s “last best hope” and in Maxwell’s words, “no other institution can compensate fully for failure in the family…Why then, instead of enhancing the family, the desperate search for substitutes? Hundreds of governmental departments and programs protect various interests, but which one protects the family?”
“Since democracy depends upon citizens’ “obedience to the unenforceable,” why then the stiff resistance to moral education which could emphasize widely shared and time-tested principles?” The calls to abolish laws that protect the foundations of our nation, whatever side of the aisle they come from, are calls to abandon the bedrock of freedom. “Only reform and self-restraint, institutional and individual, can finally rescue society!”
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