Legal Stuff, Part 1

"The ongoing debate continues surrounding the attempt to once again criminalize abortions or to once and for all guarantee the freedom of the individual women's [sic] right to decide for herself whether she will have an abortion
"Those seeking to resolve such disputes would do well to remember that "we gave up" a long time ago on "legislating religion or morality," she said. And "when science cannot determine the facts and decisions vary based upon religious belief, then government should not act."

This quote's been up in a few places today. And it's horrifyingly disturbing. And horrifyingly wrong. Far from us having given up on legislating morality, ALL laws are legislating morality. The only reason we have laws making it illegal to commit rape, murder, or theft is because the Western moral and ethical tradition (read: the Judeo-Christian tradition) forbids them. An even better example is incest and such things -- we still regard this as wrong, but the legal philosophical ground on which that statement stands is increasingly unstable. Only its natural law tradition (which is really what most people mean when they say "legislating morality," they mean "I reject the natural law") nourishes it agains the culture of death. The law is always, by definition, an enshrinement of "subjective" principles, it is always based on moral "values." The only question is whose moral principles will be protected -- those that are true, or those that are false? If you want to get to the bottom of legal and societal problems, you've got this -- the lie that when I impose my view of the world and the universe on everybody else through law, it's unjustified, illegal, and (would be if there were such a thing) immoral. But, when you do it, it's enlightened, progressive, and the Best Thing Ever in the Whole World.

And we're gonna put HER on the Supreme Court?

File Under: Law