Legislating Morality
By Monty Rainey (06/30/03)
Last weeks decision by the Supreme Court to overturn the Texas Sodomy law has sparked a great deal of controversy. Opponents of the decision say the SCOTUS has eliminated the State’s right to legislate is citizenry in accordance with its wishes. The claim has been made that SCOTUS has taken the position of political correctness over morality.
This claim brings about vehement cries from supporters of the decision that the government should not legislate morality. Such charges are utter nonsense. Every law that exists is the legislation of morality. As Declaration of Independence signer John Witherspoon explained; Consider all morality in general as conformity to law.
Consequently, it is never a matter of if morality can be legislated, only whose morality will be legislated.
The Founders believed the Bible to be the perfect example of moral legislation and the source of what they called “the moral law”, which was referred to by such notables as Thomas Jefferson and John Jay. For nearly 150 years, the Courts relied on that moral law as a basis for our civil laws.
Take for example, the case of The Commonwealth v. Sharpless (1815). In this case, the Court said, “This court is … invested with power to punish not only open violations of decency and morality, but also whatever secretly tends to undermine the principles of society … Whatever tends to the destruction of morality in general may be punished criminally. Crimes are public offenses not because they are perpetrated publicly, but because their effect is to injure the public.”
Even Jefferson and Madison, touted by today’s liberal groups as champions of tolerance, strongly opposed anything except monogamous heterosexual relationships. This is established by the fact that they enacted the death penalty for bigamy and polygamy. In Jefferson’s Notes on the State of Virginia, he proposed castration as the penalty for sodomy.
This Supreme Court is touted as a “conservative” court, yet this decision by the SCOTUS is anything but. We continue to remove ourselves further and further from the original intent of our founders, and I believe that is and will always be, the wrong direction for America.
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