Tuesday, June 17, 2008

Ominous Developments

Two developments in the last few days have made even more clear the danger to the republic we face in our generation. First, the US Supreme Court decision granting constitutional rights to foreign combatants; second, the sponsorship of homosexual marriage in California. Both of these developments are the long-developing fruit of the doctrine of natural rights, the dogma upon which all Western nations are founded.

The conservative cries, "governments are instituted to protect our God-given rights!", to which the liberal retorts, "yes, human rights are the source of law, which is why homosexuals have a right to marry, which is why foreign nationals captured on the battlefield have the same rights as US citizens, because rights are not the product of parchments and covenants but exist in the very nature of things, prior to the state and law and lawmaking, and must be recognized by the state and enshrined in law."

The doctrine of natural rights was introduced as a surrogate for God's law, in a Faustian agreement to have the church removed from public life. This is the fruit of the Enlightenment, be it French or Scottish, the result is the same. Recourse was had to human nature, not to the Word of God. So instead of saying "So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them.... Therefore shall a man leave his father and his mother, and shall cleave unto his wife: and they shall be one flesh" (Genesis 1:27, 2:24), that therefore it is male and female that are to be one flesh, not male and male, not female and female; no, instead of this, we are to stammer, "Why, it's just not right! It's never been done in the history of mankind that such relationships were recognized as marriage!", to which the liberal replied with a yawn, "what of it? That was then, this is now."

A return to the true source of law, God's Word as revealed in the Old and New Testaments, can save this civilization. But conservatives stand dead-set against such a proposition. When will they come to understand that natural rights, far from being a bulwark against government intervention, in fact form a pretext by which to manufacture new excuses for government intervention? It is the Trojan Horse which must be wheeled back out of the city, ere the city perisheth altogether.

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