Just Law

The United States of America were founded to be a nation governed by law, not by the will of man. That is the essence of the revolution Americans fought against George III of England. Usurpation of God's law by man is always evil, and the founders risked everything to restore the good on American soil.

What did they say was the source of the law that would govern our new nation?

In the Declaration of Independence, Congress claimed the right to assume the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God entitle them, recognized that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, and appealed to the Supreme Judge of the world for the rectitude of their intentions.

In the Articles of Confederation and Perpetual Union, the signers acknowledged it "hath pleased the Great Governor of the World to incline the hearts of the legislatures we respectively represent in Congress" to adopt those articles. That perpetual union lasted only eight years, until the United States were to be governed by the Constitution and its amendments.

In the Bill of Rights, the States agreed that Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.

There was a great deal of discussion about the nature of God's provision for the new nation.

Among the most inestimable of our blessings, also, is that... of liberty to worship our Creator in the way we think most agreeable to His will; a liberty deemed in other countries incompatible with good government and yet proved by our experience to be its best support.

Thomas Jefferson - 1807

It is hard to find in the historic record a claim that the government was instituted to grant powers to mankind that originated from a source other than the Creator. It is also hard to find in the struggle that our nation waged to end slavery a claim that the rights of those persons - and they were always persons under the Constitution and laws of the United States - derived from the laws of man. It is quite easy to find appeals to justice for slaves that rest, not on the role of government in granting rights to citizens of the United States, but on the freedom God ordained for man as recorded in Genesis.

Now we are engaged in a struggle in this land over the law: whether laws should conform to God's will, or to the will of man. Since the Progressives took the helm of this nation a century ago, the law has moved inexorably to defile the right, to ignore the Constitution, and to empower the vagaries of human conscience in preference to the will of God. Congress, many presidents, and countless judges have set aside the reasoned and enlightened direction of our founders to build a regime of laws that bears no resemblance to the structure our founders created.

It isn't just that the past century of abuse has yielded a huge government leviathan, it isn't merely that states have seen their lawful authority looted by Congress and the courts, and it isn't only that individuals have been hemmed in by laws, regulations, and fear. The saddest result is that the nation has become a morass of amoral and immoral standards and laws, and that men rule in lieu of the law.

Sadly, the charlatans who love the current state of the law and society are the men who bend the law to their will. They are joined by compatriots to their perverse world view who deny the history of our nation and claim for themselves the right to shape our society to their Godless views. They have owned the academy for more than four decades, they have polluted two generations with secular humanism, they have lobbied for laws and practices that our grandparents would know are profoundly un-American.

And our chief charlatan, elected by a bare majority of the voters last November, cares not at all for the law as written, but instead for his power to push our society even farther away from its just framework to enforce his personal vision of justice. His vision has many precursors: environmental justice; amnesty for foreign national invaders; political correctness; the homosexual agenda; Islamic cultural equivalence; and labor superiority over capital and management. His anodyne tone and skill in inflecting when he reads from the TelePrompTer won over the product of two generations of cultural deracination, abetted by a tired and corrupt opposing party that has for decades offered up the same, but less, to a jaded electorate.

Our very freedom is in grave peril. And with that freedom, our souls are also at risk. We must be in this world, but we cannot allow ourselves to be of this world. We must honor the commandments of our Lord and Creator, and follow His revealed word. No person should be compelled to participate in the murder of an unborn, no person should be compelled to condone the pretense that living a homosexual life follows God's law, no person should be compelled to sacrifice freedom to operate a restaurant, a hotel, or a professional practice. While we live with the threat of losing what freedom we have left, we walk a tightrope on which merely acting on our belief in God and the freedom He ordained for us risks our future, merely for obeying His will.

That risk is the very one the founders took when they threw off the oppression of George III. They very nearly lost, and they paid dearly for our freedom - the freedom that has been so eroded over the last century. Are we made of the same stuff as those great men?