Junto Boys

MORE ON NATURAL LAW

I was impressed with Rob's reply to my Natural Law arguments from a few days ago. Here’s my reply via the Plato method. The conversation concerns the validity of the Declaration of Independence as a defense for God in public life. Rob may have misunderstood my argument to be a defense of Judge Moore, and he spent a good deal of his reply on the Ten Commandments themselves and what they mean in legal terms. I agree with him that the Alabama case was certainly sensationalism to make a larger point.

The issue made me reconsider Natural Law. My larger argument was that God can and should be invoked in government locations for the sake of keeping alive in the notion that our rights do not come from our fellow men who can abuse them, but from a higher power.

Here’s the point by point:

ROB: Religious proponents have a long history of invoking the "Creator" passage in the Declaration of Independence, usually failing to acknowledge that it has no legal weight whatsoever. The Declaration of Independence is precisely what the name says: a statement by representatives of the British colonies that the colonies were no longer subject to the rule of either King or Parliament. The Declaration is the poetry and romance of the Night Before; The Constitution provides the messy, mundane practicalites of the Morning After.

TOM: The Declaration was certainly a legal document, even if it was written well. It was debated and amended and eventually signed by the Second Continental Congress. It had enough legal weight at the time to throw us full force into a war. If delegates had trouble with the creator language it would have been expunged. Instead, the creator gave justification for disobeying a king. The weight it holds today is in the eye of the beholder. There is no rulebook as to how to form a country. Legal weight or no, it has an important philosophical importance as to how the Constitution was drafted.

While the Constitution is not poetic, it doesn’t disavow the Declaration, it in fact, continues the essence of Natural Law by spelling out a Bill of Rights. The Constitution doesn’t say that government will decide your rights ad hoc according to the fads of the day. We had already disavowed a king who did that and we disavowed that king by invoking the Creator. By the time the Constitution was written it was a given that man’s rights came from God. Not even agnostics or Unitarians suggested that our rights should derive from some committee. That’s why they passed a 9th amendment to protect rights not spelled out.

ROB: Leaving that aside for a moment to address the proffered argument that the Declaration of Independence grants God a privileged place in American government, I find the position untenable. Reference is made to an unspecified "Creator" as a font of "self-evident" rights for self-realization. The point is not that the Constitutional Congress rejected a terrestrial ruler for a heavenly one; the point, rather, is that they innately possessed the right to rule themselves. This comports entirely with their prevailing Deistic viewpoint that, however we came into being, we're on our own.

TOM: We don’t need to decide as a nation that God is a Christian or Hindu, but God needs to be acknowledged to the extent that we remember that our rights do not originate from kings. It’s not important what each person visions when they hear God invoked, what is important is that everyone sees God as the idea that keeps men from tyranny. If the founders had only intended to rule themselves and the “Creator” was just poetry then they wouldn’t have needed a Bill of Rights, because they already had self-rule. The founding of America was about more than just getting the power back.

ROB: Sadly, little attention is paid to the immediately succeeding passage: "That to secure these Rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the Consent of the Governed, that whenever any form of Government becomes destructive of these Ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its Foundation on such Principles, and organizing its Powers in such Form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness."

That is, the law is the law not because God says so, but because WE say so.

TOM: But by ourselves we have no weight. What keeps us from being as corrupt as the last king? Why bother fighting a revolution to be ruled by another set of despots. In most revolutions since ours, a group of revolutionaries overthrow a government only to be under them thumb of a new dictator. What made us different is the invocation of a creator and the acknowledgement of natural law, followed by a Bill of Rights that spells out the convenant between Nature and man that cannot be infringed upon. This principle has secured our freedom as other countries reel in chaos.

This is why the current Judiciary attitude is so dangerous. It is taking political questions of the day away from the legislative branches and deciding law based on their own values and whims. WE don't say so anymore through the elective branches of government. THEY say so.

ROB: It''s my observation that judicial activism is consistently the scourge of the same group: the losers. The Far Right would have had no problem with the Supreme Court upholding the Texas sodomy law in defiance of the 14th Amendment; nor did it seem to mind when the most vocal states-rights conservatives interfered in the Florida recount. My point is that judicial activism is a tool readily utilized by whichever side has the votes; the moral high ground is pretty well vacant on that one.

TOM: I definitely agree that anyone group can benefit in the very specific, but I argue that we all lose in the general. Even your example of the Supreme Court getting involed in the Florida recount wouldn’t have happened had the Florida Supreme Court correctly ruled that they didn’t have jurisdiction in the case. Since Florida law states that elections are certified by the State Legislature, the Florida Supreme Court should have remanded the decision to them. Had the Florida court followed the law, there never would have been a need for the high court.

As time has passed more judges have transgressed the line between interpretation and legislation. Judges have gone from disinterested mediators to regents. Everything we hated about King George is becoming something that we can hate about our court system. The Creator is the last authority that stands between them and total rule.

If this was just an attempt to free the state from religion then the court wouldn't have ruled unconstitutional a moment of silence in lieu of actual school prayer. That’s the giveaway that their opposition isn’t Christian in nature, but philosophical. They use the Christian argument as a sort of tyranny of the majority, but what they actually resist is acknowledgment of something that has jurisdiction over them. If the court can be successful in eliminating Natural Law from the dialogue, then the coup will be complete. The Creator is the last authority that stands between them and total rule.