The Law Is Dying Because Morality Is Dying

The Law Is Dying Because Morality Is Dying

Tuesday, after FBI Director James Comey spent about 15 minutes laying out the legal case against Hillary Clinton, and then spent about three minutes declaring that he was going to ignore the evidence and recommend no legal action against Mrs. Clinton, the Blaze’s Matt Walsh declared that “The law is Dead.”

Walsh writes,

July 5, 2016. 11:15 a.m. One day after America’s 240th birthday.

When historians conduct their autopsy on Lady Justice, that will be the time of death. That is the precise moment when Justice drew her last labored breath, cursed our ridiculous country and our hopelessly corrupt government, and collapsed. Sure, she’d been in bad shape for a while, but there was no surviving the final blow. When it is explicitly announced and made public that the wealthiest and most elite and most liberal are indeed above the law, the charade of “law” cannot continue. There is no law. We are living under the rule of men, not of law. We are subject to the whims of petty tyrants and bureaucrats. They are subject to no one on Earth.
I don’t think Comey’s presser heralds the end of law in the U.S., but he surely did put another nail in the coffin. Like the Supreme Court rulings on abortion and marriage, few should be surprised at this outcome. America has been on a long ugly road when it comes to law and justice, reason and logic, morality and truth.

Two days prior to this year’s Independence Day, noted Christian apologist Ravi Zacharias asked, “Whatever happened to the American Soul?” He continued,

We are truly at the cliff’s precipitous edge and the fall could be long and deadly. Why? We have a deep crisis of the soul that is killing us morally and we have no recourse. We have no recourse because the only cure has been disparaged and mocked by the elite and the powerful. And those very ideologies are now presiding over the slaughter of our citizens while the abundance of speeches is inversely proportional to the wisdom they contain and Reason bleeds to death before our eyes…

How many families will be shattered and offered up at the altar of our foolishness?…I propose to you that multiple killings have preceded the horrors with which we now live. Those killings prepared the ground for the literal burial of our own people.

Three killings in particular are as real as the carnage we see when suicide vests are detonated: the death of morality, the death of truth, and the death of reason.
To illustrate the death of morality, Dr. Zacharias recalls the comments of Robert Shapiro, the famous attorney who helped represent O.J. Simpson in Simpson’s murder trial. While being interviewed by Megyn Kelly, Shapiro was asked if justice had been served in the Simpson trial (Simpson was found not guilty of murdering his wife Nicole and Ron Goldman). Shapiro utters a “pathetic answer,” telling Kelly, “There is legal justice and moral justice. Legal justice was served.” Thus, as is common among those corrupted by liberalism, Shapiro divorces law from morality.

When it comes to the disconnect between law and morality in the U.S., we have long been warned. As I pointed out years ago (and as I’ve suggested often), and as Ben Franklin declared, “Laws without morals are in vain.” Additionally, in 2003, after the Supreme Court foolishly reversed itself and legalized sodomy across the U.S. (Lawrence vs. Texas), the late, great Antonin Scalia warned, “State laws against bigamy, same-sex marriage, adult incest, prostitution, masturbation, adultery, fornication, bestiality, and obscenity are likewise sustainable only in light of Bowers' (the 1986 Supreme Court decision upholding Georgia’s sodomy law) validation of laws based on moral choices. Every single one of these laws is called into question by today’s decision; the Court makes no effort to cabin the scope of its decision to exclude them from its holding.”

Scalia continued, “The Court embraces … the fact that the governing majority in a State has traditionally viewed a particular practice as immoral is not a sufficient reason for upholding a law prohibiting the practice.” He concluded that, “This effectively decrees the end of all morals legislation.”

In other words, over a decade ago, no less than a justice on the U.S. Supreme Court warned us that liberals were “amputating” (to borrow from Dr. Zacharias) the law from morality. However, instead of an “amputation” what we are really seeing is more of a transplant. On November 18, 2003, just four and a half months after the Lawrence decision, the Supreme Court of Massachusetts ruled in favor of legalized same-sex marriage. Thus Massachusetts became the first state in the U.S. to grant marital rights to same-sex couples.

Writing for the majority, the Chief Justice of the Massachusetts court, Margaret Marshal, referenced Lawrence in the ruling: “Our obligation is to define the liberty of all, not to mandate our own moral code.” But of course, the only way to redefine the oldest institution in the history of humanity is to “mandate our own moral code.”

The biggest obstacle to writing one’s own moral code is Christianity. As The Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission (of the Southern Baptist Convention) recently put it, “in the twentieth century, more and more people began to see Christian morality as standing in the way of a new moral code: the morality of self-fulfillment. Throwing off burdensome traditional mores, people began to imagine life without a bothersome God standing watch.” Recent Barna research “highlights the extent to which Americans pledge allegiance to the new moral code.” As Barna summarizes, this “morality of self-fulfillment” can be summed up in six guiding principles:


As we sadly see, this “morality of self-fulfillment,” otherwise known — as I noted last August (referencing philosopher Michael Novak) — as the “theology of self,” has crept into the church. This “morality of self-fulfillment” or “theology of self” is nothing new. As Genesis chapter 3 reveals, the desire to “be like God” — to rule our world — is nearly as old as humanity itself.

What is new, at least for the United States of America, is that such a wicked philosophy has now become deeply embedded in U.S. law. Again, all law is rooted in someone’s idea of morality. We either are going to be governed by the morality of the Law Giver or the “morality of self-fulfillment.” Americans must simply decide, by whose morality we wished to be governed.

Trevor Thomas