The American Spectator

Special Report

Our elite legal culture says that traditional morality must not form the basis of law. But it is perfectly fine, according to our judicial overlords, if modern immorality forms the basis of law. Similarly, they say traditional religion must not enter the government square. But modern irreligion can parade through it and they raise no objections.

How many acts of self-mutilation can the Founding Fathers' body politic endure? The blows come almost daily. The press reported on Wednesday that a federal appeals court is demanding that a 5,280-pound monument to the Ten Commandments be ripped from the rotunda of the Alabama State Judicial Building. The Ten Commandments, according to the court, are un-American, an affront to the First Amendment.

Our judicial despots, they wish us to understand, will give us the law, not God. The Ten Commandments must go so that their graven images to immorality and irreligion can stay.

Our Courts, of course, often claim "neutrality" about morality and religion. But this claim is an obvious lie: courts "neutral" about morality side with immorality; courts "neutral" about religion end up partial to irreligion. Their lowest-common-denominator "neutrality" simply means no-morality and no-religion will define the public square. Judges who believe the least get to define the most about our government.

We live under a judicial elite determined to define the country according to their decadence. Leaf through the writings of America's most prestigious legal thinkers and you will find zero respect for traditional morality and religion. Moses is out; Harry Blackmun is in.

The highest court in the land has told the American people: You may not pass laws promoting morality, but we can hand down rulings that promote immorality. If you build a wall to protect the family, the court has said, we will tear it down. The anti-sodomy laws the court discarded last week were stones in that wall. "Silly" laws, the jurists nodded in agreement. Well, the Founding Fathers didn't consider them silly. And when the wall protecting marriage and the family comes crashing down, many Americans will not consider them silly either. Americans will soon wake up and find that the courts have placed their marriages on the same level of significance as homosexual hook-ups. Anti-sodomy laws won't seem so absurd then. What's absurd is to think the legal mainstreaming of sodomy won't lead to homosexual marriage. (By the way, if anti-sodomy laws are so silly and meaningless, why do homosexual activists see so much meaning in their destruction? They know that those laws form a powerful wall of resistance to the fulfillment of their agenda.)

One wonders how long Americans will abide this judicial tyranny. Will there come a time when Americans in large numbers actively disobey courts that actively disobey the Constitution? Should that come to pass, the activist judges will have no authority to object, having shown no respect for the law themselves.

By entering the culture war on the side of immorality, the court is widening the very civic cracks into which it will plunge. This is obvious even within the courts themselves. Judges aren't even obeying other judges. Alabama Chief Justice Roy S. Moore, after the federal appeals court commanded him to remove the monument to the Ten Commandments from his court building, told the higher court to get lost. So now the appeals court is threatening him with some sort of police action: "when the time comes Chief Justice Moore will obey that order. If necessary, the court order will be enforced. The rule of law will prevail."

This is a fitting image for the circus our courts have become: judges calling the cops to wrest a monument to the Ten Commandments away from another judge so that the promiscuous positivism they now call the "rule of law" can prevail.

George Neumayr is a frequent contributor to The American Spectator and The American Prowler.

topics:
Religion, Constitution, Law, Founding Fathers, NATO