Men Without Feet, II

Yesterday’s SCOTUS decision in Lawrence v Texas is appalling for several reasons. One, it virtually guarantees that future Court decision will be based more on the desired social outcomes than on social precedent. Justice Kennedy has made it clear that any future case that comes before the Supreme Court can be decided on the theory of “substantive due process” – the same theory used in the Roe v Wade Case. It also likely ended the right of states, any state, to regulate not only sodomy but homosexual marriage and any other item on the so-called “gay rights” agenda within its borders.

Russell Kirk summarized the beliefs of Edmund Burke on the nature of government in 3 major points:

1. "The temporal order is only part of a transcendent order; and the foundation of social tranquility is reverence. Veneration lacking, life becomes no more than an interminable battle between usurpation and rebellion. . . . He is emphatic that the first rule of society is obedience - obedience to God and the dispensations of Providence, which work through natural processes."

2. "After the order of God . . . comes an order of spiritual and intellectual values. All values are not the same, nor all impulses, nor all men."

3. "Physical and moral anarchy is prevented by general acquiescence in social distinctions of duty and privilege. If a natural aristocracy is not recognized among men, the sycophant and the brute exercise its abandoned functions in the name of a faceless 'people.'"

It seems to me the SCOTUS decision in Lawrence comes close to the abandonment of these three degrees of order in favor of chaos. It abandons reverence and obedience - the order of God; it abandons the order of spiritual and intellectual values, and it abandons the order of social distinctions. It is the fruit of the great "leveling" project that has been going on in the West for nearly 100 years. We are being "leveled" to the existence of brutes. Our moral understanding and judgment, one of the things that raises us above the level of animals, is being eradicated from society. This in the name of a spurious notion of "diversity," by which is meant a very carefully defined, rigid pattern of thought, deviation from which cannot be tolerated. It goes without saying that this pattern of "acceptable" thought is hostile to both God and man.

May God help us.