When kindness is against the law

[T]he fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control; against such there is no law.- St. Paul In the face of domination of the world by the Roman Empire, the most energetic of the Christian apostles asserted that moral virtue was still lawful. Of course, Paul knew that virtues were not widely practiced or held in high regard. Are virtues any more safe to practice now than they were two millenia ago?

This question may strike some as perverse, for are we not living in a society, as Abraham Lincoln once said, "conducing more essentially to the ends of civil and religious liberty than any of which the history of former times tells us[?]" And are we not committed to caring for the less fortunate through vast government programs?

It is true that, while the tribulations of the human condition are not absent in our country, the daily practice of the virtues by millions of people–in families, at work and play, in government and the private sector–make self government not only possible but eminently desirable.

But no blessing can be taken for granted. Virtuous living, like any other great and good thing, requires practice and even habituation. Are there any threats here and now to the continuing beneficial effects of human virtue in our midst?

Let’s focus on the virtue of kindness. Some years back, genuine concern was expressed about the utter lack of kindness implicit in the random acts of violence too often committed in our inner cities, college campuses, places of business and governmental offices. The not entirely playful response by some was to urge everyone to engage in random acts of kindness instead.

No doubt the suggestion was well meant. But a moment’s reflection makes it clear that violence can be discouraged much more by habitual acts of kindness. In a well-governed political community such as ours, it is no accident that people tend to be kinder to each other than in tyrannical regimes in which the rulers treat their subjects as if they were a lower order of being.

Indeed, when slavery was legal in America, even the most benevolent slave master was free to indulge his whims. Thomas Jefferson, a slave master himself, wrote, "The whole commerce between master and slave is a perpetual exercise of the most boisterous passions, the most unremitting despotism on the one part, and degrading submissions on the other."

Classical philosophy and Christianity both teach that friendship is the cement that holds societies together. The Greek philosopher Aristotle observed that democratic societies, which are based on the principle of equality, are more conducive to friendship than any other. Jesus taught us where we can to make friends out of enemies.

Those of us living today, as Lincoln observed in 1838, "toiled not in the acquirement or establishment of [these fundamental blessings]." As in antebellum days, so in ours, we have the obligation to pass moral virtue on to our descendants.

The most fundamental threat to the lawfulness of the most gracious virtues lies in widespread rejection of what Jefferson called "the moral law.". Clearly, portrayal of gratuitous sex and violence in the popular arts does not teach kindness. For if other persons are merely the objects of one’s unbridled will, no kindness will be shown except by accident or cold calculation.

The rebel, the person with "an attitude," has been glorified in movies and television for years. More, the Constitution and laws of the country have been perverted by the special protections that have been carved out for anyone who does as he pleases with no regard for the rights of others. We are enjoined by elites to be kind to such obnoxious persons rather than expecting them to be kind to us.

The massive government programs that take the responsibility of caring for the needy from families, friends and neighborhoods and assign it to impersonal bureaucracies have made kindness almost unnecessary. Kindness depends on reciprocity as well as good intentions, for people more freely come to the aid of others when they know that, if circumstances were reversed, they could count on that aid. In fact, we are coerced into being compassionate by the law. Is that kind?

There is no law against kindness or the other virtues, but we are living on the edge, so to speak, pushing matters to such an extreme that, as Alfie was inclined to believe in the popular song of that name, "only fools are kind" and "it is wise to be cruel."

The meaning of American independence

The national holiday we celebrate today is more often referred to as the Fourth of July than Independence Day, but at least that makes clear what date we are marking. We should, however, commemorate the historical event and all that it symbolizes, for the common world calendar ensures that the whole world has a July 4^th just we like do. American independence has transcendent constitutional significance. No other nation in the world before 1776 had ever established (constituted) itself in the world on the basis of political principles which are true for all times and places. The most famous part of the Declaration of Independence is "all men are created equal," rather than merely all Americans, or all whites or even all males.

Cynics are fond of ridiculing the language of the Declaration because they think they really know that its authors didn’t mean to include everybody. After all, the pre-revolutionary institution of slavery was not immediately abolished, women were not generally regarded as equal in rights to men, and the vote was not even extended to all males. So it was all a pretense, right?

Wrong. Northern states prohibited slavery by the time the Constitution was ratified, women had the right to vote in several states, north and south, and the voting franchise was extended to most white males within a generation or two.

Of course, we had no power to "secure these rights" anywhere else but on our own soil, and that was hard enough, as the Civil War and the long struggle for civil rights attest. But the meaning of independence, in the first place, is that the American people, through their chosen representatives, were free to throw off ancient shackles as soon as possible, however much they might disagree about the timing or even the wisdom of that welcome change.

In other words, no European nation, however powerful or influential, could impede the progress of the American people toward their fullest security for equality and liberty. America would long remain the only country so free, as Europeans underwent a cycle of violent revolutions and even world wars before that greatest of all battles was won. And the rest of the world took even longer, with a decidedly mixed record of success.

For much of our history we have been a beacon to other nations and peoples, drawing millions to our shores and inspiring revolutions abroad. An almost inevitable consequence of the influence was that the growing power of the United States has spared the world some of its greatest evils.

Depending on their agenda or what part of the Constitution they are talking about, both liberals and conservatives like to argue that the American government is severely restricted in its power and authority in order to ensure our freedoms against infringement. But they fail to understand what Alexander Hamilton, for example, understood, which was that "the vigor of government is essential to the security of liberty; [and] that, in the contemplation of a sound and well-informed judgment, their interest can never be separated . . . "

The most fundamental obligations of the government of the United States are to "provide for the common defense" and "promote the general welfare." In the midst of revolution without a national government, the Continental Congress had to find a way to fulfill these obligations, and barely succeeded. The object of the Constitution was not to give us a weak government but rather a powerful one.

Living in a world of monarchical governments, hostile Indian tribes and fierce pirates, the government needed to be, in Hamilton’s words, "energetic," not lethargic. The world is a dangerous place always, the only difference at any time being the nature and scope of the dangers. Had the national government not possessed the requisite power, the authority of the Union would not have been upheld against secession.

A united America is a boon to the world. Consider if our nation had not been united under one energetic government when in 1916 German submarines began to sink our ships and patrol our Atlantic and Gulf coastlines, not to mention block our shipping lines overseas. Only a strong American government could have kept the Gulf of Mexico from becoming a German lake.

More ominously still, consider the horrendous consequences if we had not had the means to keep Great Britain in the war against Nazi Germany until such time as the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor and brought us into a two-front war. Our military, industrial and financial power was critical.

In both world wars, American power was decisive. In the earlier conflict, Germany defeated Czarist Russia at about the same time as America entered the war on the side of the Allies.  Absent American intervention, how does the thought of a Prussian dictatorship all over Europe strike you?

In the later war, an even more tyrannical German regime left unchecked would have held sway all over Europe, the Middle East and North Africa, and perhaps farther, doubtless putting an end to liberty for decades, if not centuries.

The superpower status of the United States kept most of the world safe from Soviet domination and ultimately proved too much for that evil empire to survive its own inherent weakness and inferiority. Today our government is the primary check on the world's despots and their blood brothers, the Islamist fanatics plotting against our freedom.

In sum, American independence means that we Americans alone decide how we are to be governed, and our formidable power has blocked or ended the rule of overbearing empires. This great good we celebrate today is a blessing for all mankind.

Family ties through music

Recently I attended a wedding of a friend at church, followed by the customary reception. After a delightful meal, some charming innovations to commemorate the occasion and the cutting of the cake, there followed hours of dancing, slow and fast, as also is customary. What struck me in this quite ordinary and conventional setting was how a kind of folk music has returned to our society that had been practically banished long ago by the popularity of ballroom dancing with the waltz, foxtrot and two-step and the decline of what was called folk dancing, not to mention square dancing. The latter are by no means dead but it would be inaccurate to say that their appeal had not been eclipsed by the dancing of couples as distinguished from larger groupings. As a children, many of us developed a decided prejudice against folk dancing as quite beyond the pale, for squares and old fogies. But those who have attended ethnic weddings, as we tend to call them, particularly Jewish and Greek (or just seen movies), experience, if only vicariously, group dancing on as big a scale as the number of people in attendance will encourage. Young and old, "cool" and "uncool," will join hands and dance with abandon with no reservations about being out of place, or worse, mixing adult dancing with kid dancing. I still recall a comment made by a friend who suggested that we not object to loud, raucous music played by young people because it is "their" music. That divide always has bothered me.

However, partly because I am widowed and partly because I like the exercise, I have taken to the floor and "danced' for hours to whatever music was being played, occasionally but not often well, and enjoying it. (I just learned how to line dance too.) At the wedding last week I danced with my 30-something daughter and two teenagers from her church youth group and realized that it might just as well be a Jewish or Greek wedding, because adults were dancing with children and bonding by means of music. Indeed, the bride was holding a small child and dancing around the room, quite common these days. I realized that some of the music was the sort that I have long disdained, especially "rap," but because the occasion called for a sort of communal expression, I danced to whatever was playing.

I used to criticize the rather unstructured form of dancing that has become so popular, on the grounds that there were no partners per se. But that presupposed that the only legitimate form of dancing was the kind I grew up with. (Granted, growing up in the 1950s, as I did, meant learning to dance to rock 'n roll, etc.) As a parent I tried to impress upon my children the virtues of slow dancing, and that lesson has been learned well enough. But now I'm just having fun and glad that the generation gap can be bridged at least under the circumstances which originally threatened to foreclose that possibility. If it is natural for families and friends to bond, then nature has found a novel way to reassert itself. That's a gain.

Abortion, slavery both founded in violence

The recent murder of George Tiller, the famous late-term abortionist in Kansas, brought differing reactions from the pro- and anti-abortion movements. The former saw it as the predictable consequence of anti-abortion speech and the latter reaffirmed their commitment to peaceful political action to overturn abortion on demand, the decree of Roe v. Wade (1973). The defenders of "reproductive choice" have declared in statements to the media that it is not enough that Tiller’s murderer be charged and ultimately convicted of that crime, but that it be treated as a form of "domestic terrorism." U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder is already pursuing that course.

The pro-life movement is very concerned that it will be unfairly besmirched by the actions of a tiny few. I don’t know if the acts of violence against abortion clinics or practitioners are as numerous as abortion supporters say or as few as abortion critics maintain. But I do know that pro-life organizations do not endorse violence.

In any case, abortion is an act of violence. If successful, it always results in the death of a preborn human being, developing in the mother’s womb. As such, it is a violation of the natural right to life, not to mention liberty and the pursuit of happiness, with which all human beings are endowed by their Creator.

However, it has been the law of the land for 36 years and it must be obeyed. Laws can be changed, and this one ought to be as soon as a majority of both houses of Congress and the President pass a law removing the regulation of abortion from the U.S. Supreme Court’s jurisdiction.

That will be a long time, I fear. If it is any consolation to all of us who are pro life, slavery was legal in this nation for 250 years before its demise, the latter thanks to Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation (1863) and the passage of the Thirteen Amendment (1865). I pray that we do not have to wait that long, but I know that it will never happen unless Americans come to look upon it as a wrong, just as they did slavery.

It so happens that an event akin to the murder of George Tiller occurred in October, 1859, when the radical abolitionist John Brown led a raid on Harper’s Ferry, a military outpost in Virginia, in order to seize arms and ammunition for the purpose of equipping slaves sofor an insurrection to destroy slavery. The plan failed and culminated in the hanging of Brown and his collaborators.

Soon slaveholders and their allies were demanding a federal law to suppress all speech and writings against slavery, on the grounds that it incites violence against an institution which was, sad to say, protected by the U.S. Constitution. President-elect Lincoln made it clear that he would never sign such a law, not because he believed no speech whatsoever should be curbed, but because it would be wrong to prosecute anyone for speaking the truth!

In a letter Lincoln wrote to his life-long friend Joshua Speed in 1855 when violence broke out over the attempt to introduce slavery into the Kansas Territory, the future president saw a link between  introducing slavery and the violence that resulted. The Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854, he wrote,

"was conceived in violence, and is being executed in violence. I say it was conceived in violence, because the destruction of the Missouri Compromise [which had kept slavery out of the Louisiana Territory], under the circumstances, was nothing less than violence. It was passed in violence, because it could not have passed at all but for the votes of many members [of Congress] in violence of the known will of their constituents. It is maintained in violence, because the elections since clearly demand its repeal; and the demand is openly disregarded."

These strong words are no less applicable to Roe v. Wade, which legitimated the violent act of abortion, was made supreme law without the action of our elected representatives, and has been declared a "super precedent" that cannot be overturned even by peaceful means. In the wake of the Tiller murder, we are seeing calls to suppress the opinions of those who oppose the "procedure" which has resulted in the lawful deaths of more than 45 million babies.

We should condemn the murder of anyone, whether it be a man empowered by an unjust law, or the victims of his despicable acts.

The Constitution is still the supreme law

"We must never forget it is a Constitution we are expounding"- Chief Justice John Marshall Last week I discussed the controversy over the nomination of Sonia Sotomayor as Associate Justice of the United States Supreme Court, focusing on the standard for evaluating nominees. This week I will examine our Constitution, the basis for that standard.

Ours is a limited constitution, one that delegates powers to a federal government and denies certain powers to state governments which they had exercised to the detriment of our prosperity. It is necessary to recall these circumstances which originally gave rise to the Constitution in order to appreciate its authority and legitimacy today.

The Constitution did not come into being in a vacuum. What we now call the founding generation could not be sure that their nation would survive. Partly because of a suspicion of distant centralized authority and partly because of an attachment to their states, many Americans were far from assenting to a national government.

The Continental Congress (1774-81) and the Articles of Confederation (1781-89) were based on the good faith of the colonies until Independence (1776), and then the states which formed in that fragile union. Nothing of consequence could be accomplished without the approval of nine of the 13 states, and no independent and powerful national legislative, executive or judicial branches existed.

The major domestic threat to our nation was faction. The comparatively small size of the states which rendered them responsive to the wishes of their constituents also made them vulnerable to domination by majority factions determined to assert their rights but loathe to accept their responsibilities.

In the midst of a depression caused by the end of wartime production and the lack of access to continental and foreign markets, many Americans were broke and in debt. The war had been financed by an almost worthless Continental currency, made worse by the states' issuance of paper money as well. As debtors and their allies soon outnumbered their creditors, state after state passed laws which, in one way or another, repudiated debts.

Such legislative acts constituted more than an attack on the property rights of one class of people by another, as wrong as that was. They also sent a signal to nations from whom we borrowed money to finance the War that those debts were susceptible to repudiation too. After all, the same factions that controlled state governments dominated the weak Confederation Congress.

Reverence for the Constitution and the laws was not necessarily in the hearts of many of our ancestors at their moment of great crisis. How to counter this? As vital to the defense of our rights as a strong legislative and executive branch are, the courts have more immediate impact than either on the lives of our people. It is there that contracts are upheld and private property protected.

Thus, the Constitution, in Article III, provides for a supreme court, and "inferior courts" established by Congress, the judges of which hold their offices "during good behavior." When combined with Article VI, which declares the Constitution, federal laws and treaties to be "the supreme law of the land," binding every state judge, we gained a truly national judicial branch. This was soon to be the chief restraint on the states which, at that time, were coining or printing money, and passing bills of attainder, ex post facto laws, and "laws impairing the obligation of contracts."

It would be strange for the Constitution to permit at the federal level what had been curbed at the state level. Thus, the Fifth Amendment to the Constitution forbids the federal government from taking private property for public use without just compensation.

But since New Deal days, Congress has passed laws which have encroached on rather than merely regulated our trade and commerce. In other words, it has been doing what the states long ago had been restrained from doing by our Constitution. And just as it once took state judges of uncommon fortitude to resist what James Madison denounced as the states’ "rage for paper money, for an abolition of debts, for an equal division of property, or for any other improper or wicked project," so now it requires federal judges of equal fortitude to resist that same impulse in Congress.

For as Alexander Hamilton put it so forcefully, we must turn for the defense of our property and other rights to "courts of justice, whose duty it must be to declare all acts contrary to the manifest tenor of the Constitution void."