Last updated: 12/1/08

The “Federalist” Solution: 'Where exactly is Oregon anyway? (And why should we care what happens there?)'

(For a useful summary of the comparative situation in America today see the opening press statement of the recently founded Jews Against Anti-Christian Defamation.)

In American political discourse it is possible to discern a more subtle dismissal of the demands of morality versus convenience. For example, in Friday's Washington Times (27/1/06), one commentator writes that Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia allowed “his ideology [Scalia is a Catholic] . . . to override his legal principles” when he voted recently in favour of an attempt “to effectively overrule Oregon's assisted-suicide law”. The writer proposes instead a peculiarly American, “federalist” solution: “Why not let different states adopt different approaches to divisive issues, and see how they work out? That way, states could make their own decisions, and great national schisms over volatile issues – like abortion, for example – could be avoided. Clever, those Founding Fathers.” What is missing here is an appreciation of the fact that murder, however it is legalised, is still murder. Yes, Parliament passed an Abortion Act in 1967. Is Britain “at peace” because this was done through the legislative, as opposed to judicial, process? No – millions of people have been killed, whistle blowers are subjected to intimidation by police and public prosecutors, and we are in the beginnings of a demographic free fall. The fact that most adult Britons are oblivious to these phenomena is merely a symptom of what Edmund Burke would have characterised, not as “an experiment in democracy”, but as “good men doing nothing”. Nor are officers of the state, including judges, exempt from the general responsibility to offer moral resistance. (Even Supreme Court judges have accepted this responsibility rather than allowing Liberals to control the direction of American jurisprudence.) Would the Times commentator suggest that Pontius Pilate, rather than washing his hands, should have waved a copy of the U.S. Constitution?

Many baptised Americans appear to believe that Catholicism can be reconciled with the following two political “truths” that they hold to be axiomatic (i.e. “self-evident”):

1) To obey the law is a moral duty; and

2) There can be no compulsion in morality.

As to the first axiom, what this statement actually reveals is that morality has a higher calling on the conscience than law, since the former is the source of the obligation to obey the latter. Consequently, where a law is immoral – such as that which led to the killing of Terri Schiavo – it should not be followed. (Compare this astonishing statement from a prominent American publication: “In a case like Terri Schiavo’s, the temptation to ignore the law is strong, but we need to keep our heads and remember that the fundamental principles of our system of government serve very large interests, interests larger even than the life or death of a single individual”, First Things, October, 2005.)

The second axiom is used to support free political elections as the best known guarantee against compulsion in morality. The outcome of those elections, however, is law, and obedience to law is precisely that part of morality that the State compels (regardless of whether one voted for any of the legislators or not).

Some Liberals attempt to resolve these circular axioms by modifying the second one as follows:

2) There can be no compulsion in non-Liberal morality.

In other words, these Liberals seek to make theirs the established state ideology.

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