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.
