Defending the Nearly Indefensible

When the general election winner takes the oath of office as President of the United States, he vows to defend the Constitution of the United States, and to defend the nation against all enemies, foreign and domestic. He takes a rough ride with that vow, though, if he has Scripturally sound convictions.

As a design template for a free government, the Constitution is a worthy document, as it lays down the structure and operation of the largest free nation on earth. At its creation and adoption it stood as the best governmental document ever created. In that respect it still does.

But where it fails to protect its citizens is in its trend-based sense of law. It has no moral compass of absolute direction. What passes for a constitutional law is always set according to previous case law, not a true sense of absolute morality.

This lack of precise morality dates back to the later part of the 19th Century, when Charles Darwin published his book “The Origin of Species”. Ten years after its publication, Harvard University installed a president who bought into Darwin’s Theory of Evolution hook line and sinker. He then proceeded to place as head of the Harvard Law School, a dean who likewise thought law should evolve, not stand on one thought, or unwavering principle.

This created the slippery slope of legal mandate that is the Constitution now. Rather than anchor back to a concept, the court at the highest level and every level underneath it simply comes up with something that sounds good and it wins by majority vote of the justices involved. The “sounding good” part comes from people of popular thought and ancient or near ancient lineage being quoted. “Separation of church and state” ends up meaning that the quote is in deep trouble if it comes from the Bible, as the Bible is the book of a certain religion, and the court cannot endorse one religion over another by favoring its precepts.

So, law evolves as it does because it is simply based on the thoughts of men and the trends of thought through the ages. Needless to say, technology changes a culture and makes it move in a direction that does make some laws obsolete, but what’s missing is a basic principle behind it.

The US Supreme Court in one year decided that capital punishment was

unconstitutional, and decided the next year that is was constitutional! What, besides popular thought could have changed the justice’s minds about it?

The legal system is created to legislate morality, to decide what is right and wrong. It sets up standards of living and assigns penalties for the violations of those standards. But without an anchor, a widely accepted principle of right and wrong, the Constitution is just legislated and judicially determined immorality.

As a pattern of design for government, the US Constitution has no peer on earth. As a standard of life and how it should be lived, it is nearly indefensible!