The Ashcroft Hearings

Attorney General-designate John D. Ashcroft has promised to "enforce whatever laws Congress chooses to enact." However, that's not the answer the liberal-dominated Senate Judiciary Committee wants to hear. In fact, that answer scares them.

The Committee is looking for an Attorney General who will selectively enforce the laws, supporting only those laws they believe 'appropriate' and ignoring laws inconsistent with their liberal modernist ideology. Had Al Gore won the election, his choice for Attorney General would have furthered their liberal crusade in removing the more "traditional" laws (e.g, sodomy) from the books.

As in the confirmation hearings of Robert Bork and Clarence Thomas, the issue is really about the designate's conception or philosophy of law. The following comments below by Phillip E. Johnson from his outstanding book, REASON IN THE BALANCE, The Case Against NATURALISM in Science, Law & Education provide insight into the dynamic.

LAW AND THE MORAL ORDER The traditional [conservative] and modernist [progressive / liberal] conceptions of law differ not just in their positions on specific matters like abortion but in their basic understanding of what morality is and how it influences law. For the traditionalist, morality provides the essential background to human lawmaking. In Sir William Blackstone's classic definition, human law is "a rule of civil conduct, prescribed by the supreme power in a state, commanding what is right and prohibiting what is wrong." This definition requires much elaboration before it can explain law adequately, but it captures a profound point. For the traditionalist there is a moral order independent (transcendent) of what human rulers may from time to time prefer, and law is just to the extent that it comports with that moral order.		While God's dealing with Israel were distinctly theocratic in nature, the Apostle Paul in the New Testament asserts that ALL government is ordained of God and thus assumes the right of those with a theistic worldview to inform the higher power.
This does not mean that morality leads directly to law, because considerations of practicality, compassion and even privacy may intervene. For example, the pre-Roe traditionalist practice was to punish abortion as a crime much less serious than murder and to direct enforcement efforts primarily at abortionists rather than at their clients. Criminal law was thus in a general way consistent with morality, but not necessarily coextensive with it. In such a system it would be nonsense to speak of a general right to freedom from moral coercion. That would be like saying that the fundamental law is that there must be no laws.		Sadly, the anarchist element in society gained a larger voice during the 20th century. Today, the common man has a more difficult time seeing through such libertarian nonsense.
From the modernist [progressive / liberal] standpoint, morality is subjective. Some people may have the opinion that certain conduct is immoral, but others have an equal right to disagree. The term morality in modernist usage is usually associated with sexual morality, and therefore with traditional prohibitions of sodomy, fornication, adultery, and abortion. With respect to such matters involving personal taste and one's own body, consenting adults must be free to do as they like. [goes the liberal argument].
Modernist lawmaking is based not on morality but on "utility" and "rights". The state has authority to regulate personal conduct to the extent necessary to serve the general welfare (utility) or to protect rights (such as a right to be free from discrimination). Otherwise, the most basic modernist right is the right to do as one likes--as long as one is not thereby damaging the general welfare or infringing on the rights of others. In the modernist context, a general right to be free from moral coercion makes perfect sense. It merely means that an individual does not forfeit her freedom merely because other people happen to disapprove of what she wants to do.		Professor Johnson's description of "the most basic modernist right" is the central creed for political libertarianism. See his thoughts below on America status quo of "libertarian socialism."
Probably the most influential American statement of the modernist understanding of law is a famous lecture titled "The Path of the Law" by the revered American jurist Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., delivered at the Boston University Law School in 1897. This lecture has been so influential in shaping the thinking of American lawyers that it might be described as almost part of the Constitution. Holmes urged his audience of future lawyers to put aside all notions of morality and approach law as a science, basically the science of state coercion. The reason people ask lawyers for advice, said Holmes, is not because they want to hear about morality but because they want to escape the unpleasant consequences that the law will inflict on them if they violate some rule. Therefore, "if you want to know the law and nothing else, you must look at it as a bad man, who cares only for the material consequences which such knowledge [of the law] enables him to predict, not as a good one, who finds his reasons for conduct, whether inside or outside of it, in the vaguer sanctions of conscience."		"For rulers are not a terror to good works, but to evil...for he is God's minister, an avenger to execute wrath on him who practices evil" Romans 13: 3,4.
Mao Zedong's famous dictum that all power grows out of the barrel of a gun was prefigured in Holmes's view that law is ultimately the force that a government will bring to bear to enforce its commands. Citizens obey the law not because they feel morally obligated to do so but because they fear the consequences if they do not. Just as a chemist tells me that gasoline will explode if I bring it too near a fire, my lawyer tells me that I must pay damages if I breach a contract, or go to jail if I steal money. Of course if I am a "good" person I may refrain from promise-breaking and theft for independent reasons, but this, according to Holmes, has nothing to do with law. Goodness has no important role in legal science, because bad as well as good persons can be compelled to obey the law.		Because of its adherence to relativism, the absence of "moral obligation" is the mark of modern day liberalism. Hiring a "good" lawyer amounts to finding a professional who is best skilled at evading the consequence of legal statutes. No wonder we want to cut their amoral heads off.
Holmes defined law as simply "the prophecies of what the courts will do in fact." What, then, of the lawmaker? If Supreme Court justices are in doubt about whether to create or maintain a right of abortion, or legislators are in doubt about whether to allow divorce on demand, they need to be told something more than that whatever they enact will be law. They need to know how to tell the difference between good law and bad law. Should the law reflect traditional morality, or should it strike out in new directions to further social utility and personal freedom?
Holmes urged lawmakers to put aside considerations of morality and tradition and to base law squarely on rational policy, informed by scientific disciplines such as economics and psychology. In short, to Holmes the practice of law was the prediction of outcomes, the making of law was an exercise in policy science, and the law itself was basically a statement about when the state would use its overwhelming force to coerce its citizens. We can see this concept of law in the modernist framing of the abortion issue: morality becomes a matter of personal preference. The law is concerned only with the extent to which state coercion should be limited by considerations of personal freedom.		To the twisted and amoral liberal mind, fundamental Christians or Jews "informing" government on the subject of reality, represents a violation of the doctrine of "separation of church and state."

Similar to the observations of Sigmund Freud, Holmes wasn't entirely wrong in his view. In his first letter to Timothy, the Apostle Paul wrote in verses 8 to 10:

While the Apostle Paul's teachings would certainly be included with Holmes' "vaguer sanctions of conscience," this is no argument against anchoring civil law in a theistic philosophic framework based on transcendent absolutes. Contrary to liberal opinion, it is fully "lawful", indeed imperative, for the Christian worldview to inform government (both legislative and judicial) on how to maintain a civil society in a fallen world. The alternatives are totalitarianism or anarchy, or both.

Vocationally, Christians are well suited to participate in the political process. But therein lies the problem. The liberal mind refuses to acknowledge either "transcendence" or "absolutes", and consequently believe Christians are disqualified from serving. They engage in discrimination!

According to current liberal ideology, the government and its leaders must be entirely secular (naturalistic or atheistic) in viewpoint. To support this argument and further their grip on power, they make the spurious claim that government policies in-any-way linked to the theistic worldview violate the so-called Constitutional principle of 'separation of church and state'. Understandably, exceptions are made for religiously hypocritical individuals who demonstrate that religious tenet in no way influences personal behavior or legislative process.

Christians need to understand the absurdity of these liberal arguments and counter them wherever found.

The Ashcroft Hearings

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