Daily Events... From John Hayward,
Staff Writer
06.09.11
“We have no government armed with power capable of contending with
human passions unbridled by morality and religion,” wrote John
Adams. “Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious
people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.”
It’s not hard to appreciate the wisdom of Adams in practical
terms. A profoundly immoral people would be an unruly mob.
Huge amounts of compulsive, often violent, force would be needed to
maintain the most basic order.
The American Constitution is among the highest achievements of human
enlightenment. It is not a cage designed to hold a nation of
brutal savages. If we would live as free people, governed with
the minimum possible degree of compulsion, we must strive to deal with
each other in a moral way, because we have to trust each other.
How can a moral people suffer the presence of deeply immoral leaders?
Discussion of these matters is often dismissed as the stuffy chattering
of moralistic busybodies, but it’s actually a question of cold
logic. We live beneath a gigantic government, so huge that it
consumes or controls more than half of what America produces.
Much of this government is justified in explicitly moral terms.
We are always being lectured that everything from government-run health
care, to vast subsidies for “alternative energy,” is the “right” or
moral thing to do.
That’s one of the reasons it matters when someone like Rep. Anthony
Weiner of New York is revealed to be utterly reprehensible – a
compulsive liar who betrayed the trust of his wife, beginning not more
than a month after they were married, and tried to ruin those who
exposed him.
Even by the Left’s standards of collective ethics and submission to the
State, it makes no sense to expect proper moral engineering from deeply
immoral people. His sins of betrayal, deception, and negligence
are the exact opposite of everything liberals expect us to believe
about the demigods they would empower to manage our lives.
— John Hayward
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