Court Rulings Cannot Negate the Law of God
Court Rulings Cannot Negate The Law Of God
By Frank Morriss
An obviously educated and literate letter writer to Denver's major newspaper recently proved that literacy and education don't guarantee intelligent thought. He wrote: "Murder in a democracy is a legal definition. . . Since abortion is not classified by law as murder that particular commandment (of the Decalogue God gave Moses) does not apply." Obviously, the letter writer has accepted the Holmesian philosophy that law is solely and exclusively what courts and justices, often relying on public opinion, want it to be. It is the same philosophy that dominates the present U.S. Supreme Court, and contradicts the philosophy that declares that all men possess certain unalienable rights given by their Creator.
In fact, the writer implies that statement of a truth higher than man-made law can be nullified in a democracy when he asserts:
"Debates [about such things as abortion] are, in a democracy, settled peacefully by lawmakers and the courts, not by fanatics screaming and howling on the sidewalks in our neighborhoods."
This letter writer is under the prejudiced opinion that to protest abortion vocally in a public venue proves fanaticism, whereas peace is inevitable when courts approve as legal (which they have so far) deadly violence against the unborn. It is strange that he would come down so apodictically against public protest "in a democracy" where the voice of many are heard, but in favor of a court decision in which the voice of a mere five out of nine justices decides the matter. Can it be he thinks pro-abortion voices are democratically reasonable, whereas anti-abortion, pro-life voices are fanatical? Is he prejudiced in favor of present legal forums where abortion always wins, as against the broader democratic forums of opinion where abortion doesn't fare nearly as well?
In any case, this letter tends to lend support to some telling comments by Dr. Charles Rice of the University of Notre Dame School of Law in a recently published volume, Common Truths: New Perspectives in Natural Law. Professor Rice points to certain 1960s Supreme Court decisions that banned all legal consideration of whether God exists, and hence (as the author concludes) established an official "agnostic secular humanism" as the reigning state acknowledgment.
Dr. Rice Comments:
"This implied establishment of secularism requires that the right to life of the unborn child and others must be evaluated in secular, utilitarian terms. Similarly, any legislative treatment of homosexual activity, pornography, condom distribution in schools, etc., cannot be based on the moral law, let alone the Ten Commandments. The result is a jurisprudential Gresham's Law, with bad laws and policies increasingly driving out the good, to the point that the state comes to subsidize fornication and other conduct that, only a few years ago, it had seen itself obliged to discourage.
"Every society has to have a god, and ultimate moral authority. If the real God is displaced, another will take His place. Today the replacement god is the autonomous individual who makes himself the defining authority; ultimately, of course, such authority will be assumed by the state" (Rice, "Natural Law in the Twenty-First Century," p. 303, op. cit.).
If condemnation of something by both God's positive divine law -- the Ten Commandments -- and the unwritten but discernible natural law can be overthrown by a vote of five Supreme Court justices, can it be said democracy or republicanism truly exists? Both democracy and republicanism imply a rule of reason. They are based upon humans judging issues on the basis of what it means to be a human, in other words, on the basis of accurate human perception of the human reality. If a philosophy is adopted that denies any certain human reality -- thereby denying fundamental human rights and allowing wrong acts against such rights to be enacted and enforced -- then surely there is no rule of reason, but of a type of artificial agnosticism such as described by Dr. Rice.
If the letter writer finds such a fundamental thing as the right to life subject to court determination "in a democracy," then surely he must agree all truths and laws must be determined by court opinion alone. Thus, as when the Communists in the Soviet Union outlawed private property, that law being upheld by the Communist courts, he would have to hold the right to private property abolished should it be similarly decided by "law" in the United States. And his own logic would dictate that an abolishment of the right to worship or to speak and publish one's own opinions would, if upheld by court decisions, have to be considered as "the law. "
But the existence of such rights beyond the reach of the opinion of rulers or jurists was the main reason offered by the founding fathers for their revolution against a system of government claiming a monarch and his ministers and jurists were supreme.
What is "democratic" about the majority of a nine-person court declaring the killing of the unborn not to be murder, or in fact not to be illegal in any way at all? Those in authority being answerable to nothing but their own intellects and will is not democratic; it is a dictatorship of the arbitrary. Mere opinion, whether that of a legislature, or the majority of a court bench, or in fact of the populace as a whole cannot determine right or wrong, truth or nontruth, justice or injustice.
Opinion on such matters must turn to some objective norm, some sure reality, beyond what is popular, expedient, or socially preferable. From the beginning of civilization the norm that prevailed in such matters was a common law based on recognized reality. The "elephant man" stated it when he cried out. "I am not an animal"; Thomas More explained it when he proclaimed, "I die the king's good servant -- but God's first." And protesters against abortion shout it out when they tell women and their doctors that it is the taking of a human life when a child is slain in the womb.
Accepting a law that is higher and determinative as governing the actions of human legislators and jurists, is not being undemocratic. It is stating something that makes democracy viable and reasonable. Without it, democracy makes everything -- justice, human rights, violations of human dignity, and assaults on human decency -- dependent solely on opinion.
It is that perception appreciated by some even now, though deliberately wrenched from consideration in the post-World War II period, that moved Dr. Rice to write in the same essay quoted above:
"The dominance from the early 1960s of official secularism and the relativist, individualist contraceptive ethic goes far to explain the cultural decline documented by William Bennett, as well as the liberation of science from objective moral standards.
"A coherent alternative to the law and culture of the Enlightenment must be based on the natural law. The idea of natural law is neither sectarian Catholic teaching nor even a Christian invention. Aristotle affirmed the existence of 'natural justice,' and Cicero said that 'right is based not upon men's opinions, but upon nature'."
(The cases cited by Dr. Rice as establishing secular humanism as the official reigning philosophy were Torasco v. Watkins [1961], Engel v. Vitale [1962], School District of Abington Township v. Schempp (1963]. The book Common Truths containing Dr. Rice's essay is published by ISI Books, P.O. Box 4431, Wilmington, DE 19807, edited by Edward B. McLean, 2000.) © The Wanderer, 201 Ohio Street, St. Paul, MN 55107, 612-224-5733.
This item 3122 digitally provided courtesy of CatholicCulture.org
