The Ultimate Victims

Who are the ultimate victims?

On a micro level, our children are the victims—but on a macro level, our free society will be the victim.

As President John Adams said in 1798:

“We have no government armed with power capable of contending with human passions unbridled by morality and religion. Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.” [39]

George Washington expressed this same idea in his 1796 Farewell Address:

“Of all the dispositions and habits which lead to political prosperity, religion and morality are indispensable supports. In vain would that man claim the tribute of patriotism who should labor to subvert these great pillars of human happiness—these firmest props of the duties of men and citizens.” [40]

In other words, our secular form of government was designed only for a non-secular people.

150 years later, President Harry Truman confirmed that a moral and religious people were still necessary for maintenance of our free society: [41]

“The fundamental basis of this nation’s laws was given to Moses on the Mount. The fundamental basis of our Bill of Rights comes from the teachings we get from Exodus and St. Matthew, from Isaiah and St. Paul… If we don’t have a proper fundamental moral background, we will finally end up with a totalitarian government which does not believe in rights for anybody except the State.”

Adams, Washington, the other Founders, and Presidents through George W. Bush understood that a limited Constitutional government of the people, by the people, and for the people could work only if society is primarily self-policed—based on a common moral code that served as an invisible net of social stability. In America, this has always been the Judeo-Christian values derived from the Bible—most recently expressed in the phrase “one nation under God.”

Some argue that to officially state the United States is “one nation under God” or to publicly recognize Judeo-Christian thought as the source of our legal and political systems violates the rights of atheists and non-monotheists. But the very concept of rights in the United States presupposes belief in the God of the Bible—not by every citizen, but at least by the majority. Like homosexuals, atheists want to invent a right to force their neighbors to lock their religious beliefs in the closet—so no one except the religious ever feels uncomfortable.

To accept the assertion that public sanction of religion violates the rights of atheists and non-monotheists, one must completely ignore the Declaration of Independence, the history and writings of the Founders, and our nation’s history until the last 50 years. If ignored, then this discussion is not about the United States—but a completely new country. How can the greatest nation in the history of the world allow judges and special interest groups to completely redefine the nature and character of this great country without ascertaining the will of the majority through a democratic process? [42]

Do we really believe that the Founders—who created this revolutionary concept of rights and the greatest Constitutional system yet devised by mankind—did not understand what they were doing? Contrary to a historical myth perpetrated by secularists, America at the time of the founding included atheists, Muslims, Buddhists, Jews, etc., [43] and the Founders knew that it was only this unique form of government—based on individual rights from God—that would protect people of all beliefs.

As historian David Barton explains, the Founders were all religious Christians, but they did not oppose pluralism—as long as the beliefs of other religions did not threaten the stability of civil society. [44] In fact, the Founders believed that pluralism survived only within the concept of religious liberty espoused by American Christianity, [45] uniquely different from European Christianity—and based on what we now term the Judeo-Christian Ethic. [46]

The opposite is not necessarily true. As Rabbi Hirsch taught us about the secular fundamentalist: “There will be no well-being and no peace as long as his convictions have not become the only ones recognized as right and valid.” He cannot tolerate a religious worldview outside the confines of church or synagogue. Sadly, the history of 20th-century Europe and the secular liberalism of 21st-century American academia confirm both his prediction and the Founders’ understanding: pluralism of belief will not survive in a secular society.

People yearn for predictability in their lives and communities—and this invisible net provides that predictability. If predictability is lost to chaos, they often turn to dictators or other forms of totalitarian government to restore it.

Without a moral public culture—shared by the majority of citizens—to provide the invisible net of social stability, government could not be limited and would have to encroach into every citizen’s life and freedom. Instead of a free society of cooperation between individuals, more and more human interaction would have to be decided by the legal system and bureaucrats. Morality would be replaced by legality—which helps explain why the judicial system is taking control of our government and our lives. Without a commonly accepted morality, there is no basis for human cooperation other than force. Freedom would rapidly morph into tyranny.

As Rabbi Lapin has explained: [47]

“One unintended side effect of the secular fundamentalism sweeping America is how it erodes the rules that hold together the invisible net of social stability. By encouraging unfettered personal license, secular fundamentalism helps collapse civilized norms… When young people no longer see their maturation leading naturally toward marriage—and when marriage itself becomes threatened by cultural ridicule and purported alternatives—parents feel unmoored… Many Americans feel resentment and alienation.”

This is obviously not to suggest that the hobby of shattering traditional rules… is going to endow America with a future dictatorial tyrant. It can eventually, however, infect ordinary Americans with docility about further Federal control beyond that necessary to protect us from our enemies. In a desperate attempt to recover some sense of normality and predictability in our lives, we might be tempted to embrace expanded government influence over how we live, earn, and worship.

We would yearn for the predictability and normality that used to be supplied by those traditional rules that many Jewish and Christian Americans of faith remember increasingly nostalgically. Biblically-based faith helps to maintain freedom by holding together the invisible framework of social stability.

The Founders understood this lesson well—but we have strayed.

Our free society—as the Founders dreamed it and we once knew it—will be lost forever unless Americans make a political stand to preserve this endangered invisible framework of social stability. That stand must begin with protecting children from the Trojan horse of secular fundamentalism—expressed in such formerly unthinkable legalisms as same-sex marriage.

The secular fundamentalists leading this assault on Judeo-Christian values understand very well that the children are their point of attack.

If you doubt that children are the intended victims, read the words of an openly homosexual woman who was formerly an insider in the leadership of the feminist and radical gay rights movements—until she realized these movements were no longer based on the ideal of civil rights, but on socialism, the foundational model of the Far Left. [48] Her comments about efforts to end anti-gay bias in K–12 schools: [49]

“For people whose entire identity and reason to live is based in their sexuality, what do they need to do in order to fit comfortably into our society? They must work to sexualize every part of society—and, as every good marketer knows, that effort must begin with children.”

“The efforts of gay establishment organizations, if the future is really their concern, should be focused on persuading the horde of bacchanalian boys to change their lifestyle. Instead, they are demanding that we accept their degeneracy, and the destruction of our future in the process. We dare not judge them. We dare not question their actions. And we are to hand the nation’s children over to them.”

This is why a free society such as the United States—where the vast majority believe in Judeo-Christian values—can tolerate unrestricted private sexual activity between consenting adults, but cannot allow public sanction and endorsement of homosexuality as a cultural norm.