Conservative Truth - A Moral Society - Coming Unglued - Brian W. Peterson

Previously, I have written that our great nation has already collapsed morally. The proclamation has been greeted with surprise, disdain, disbelief, and antipathy. My view is simple: the death clinics abort a little over a million babies a year- we are approaching the 60 million baby mark since 1973; the principle of marriage has been shattered by an illegal and historically unfathomable Supreme Court ruling; people are afraid to “judge,” and few understand the Biblical prohibition against judging vis a vis identifying sinful and evil behavior and shunning such behavior.

Oh, and “sin” is a word that evokes laughter from more than half of the population, including by many who claim to be Christians. Yeah, we’ve collapsed morally.

There is more to the effects of moral collapse than just having wicked, perverted, and reprobate people running around. The net effect is not merely more coarse language in television shows or the inability to arrest someone for walking the streets while naked- which actually happened in Kansas. Kansas! No, the net effect, in a free republic, is the loss of that republic. More laws are needed to protect innocent people from immoral behavior, and the more that laws are enacted, the more liberty is broken down until it finally disappears.

Morality is the glue that holds a free nation together. Once that glue disintegrates, political corruption, financial chaos, and legal and judicial insanity are not far behind. Average citizens begin to behave in ways that were previously considered unthinkable and reprehensible. Other laws, which were recently considered reasonable, face legal challenges. Judges and politicians break their oaths of office with no consequences.

Case in point: if marriage is no longer between a man and a woman (which is a book-length subject on its own), then soon States will begin to realize that they need to pass laws forbidding “marriages” between three women and two men, etc. Further, courts might then strike down those laws. Other laws, which we now consider to be matters of “common decency” will be struck down; more lascivious behavior will bring the need for more laws to stop such behavior (if you, dear reader, must ask “why” we would want to stop such behavior, you are likely part of the morality problem).

This same morality theory applies to other sectors of life. The lines between ethical and unethical business practices become blurred (including in politics- imagine that?!), which has an adverse effect on business and financial decisions. What’s a little more immorality/unethical behavior/debt/law breaking when a little has already been committed?

More laws bring the need for enforcement of such laws. If the federal government passes a law that private citizens no longer have the right to private, legal transactions, such as the private sale of a gun, then the government must enforce the prohibition by more closely monitoring private citizens. If the federal government closely regulates contained collections of water on private property, then the Environmental Protection Agency will need to enforce those regulations, to the detriment of private property rights.

The IRS mandates that banks report your large cash withdrawals. Financial and insurance institutions are responsible for ensuring that business income payments are properly reported, through the use of other businesses’ Tax Identification Numbers. There are thousands of these types of examples, and these laws must be enforced. To enforce the laws, bureaucrats and lawyers must be hired. Government grows. Government increases its share of the Gross National Product, and then competes with the private sector, for money (through taxation and making private sector loans more costly) and for employees, to name two examples.

Big and intrusive government, losses of liberty, and debt become the norm; by the day, it seems, “We the People” is becoming more of a slogan than a fact.

There is no secret that much of the above has already arrived. The Framers of our Constitution understood this potentiality and tried to limit government, with the so-called “Anti-Federalists” being the most committed to a limited federal government. None of the Framers, however, succinctly expressed the concept of morality and government as well as outgoing president George Washington, in his September 17, 1796, Farewell Address to the nation. In the speech, which is a must-read for all patriots of all stripes, the greatest president in American history stated, “Of all the dispositions and habits which lead to political prosperity, religion and morality are indispensable supports... Whatever may be conceded to the influence of refined education on minds of peculiar structure, reason and experience both forbid us to expect that national morality can prevail in exclusion of religious principle.”

President Washington went on to say, “’Tis substantially true that virtue or morality is a necessary spring of popular government.” Indeed.

Note that President Washington did not say that religion and morality are merely helpful or important or a good thing. Religion and morality are “indispensable supports.” When the indispensable supports of a building are removed, the building collapses. Washington understood that nations are no different, conceptually speaking.

George Washington was an honest, intelligent, and truly great man. He was famously quiet at the Constitutional Convention because he understood how his opinions swayed others. A study of his life reveals that he was a Christian man who understood liberty and what it would take for the United States of America to survive. He would not have taken moral collapse lightly, and he understood that without Judeo-Christian morality as support for the republic, our society would come unglued.

A Moral Society - Coming Unglued

December 21, 2015