Posted by
Mike on Friday, January 09, 2009 6:26:05 PM
Anyone who still doesn't believe in original sin should spend a day in the Big Apple.
Today we are led to believe that God has no place in the secular state. Without a point of reference, the goal of the statesman is to advance his or her own selfish interests to any extent possible within the legal confines, and to go outside those limits is viewed simply as risk taking with a willingness to pay the price if necessary. The internal clock regulator is deliberately turned off.
In this respect, did Henry Paulson do anything worse with his gazillion dollar bailout than Madoff, Slatkin or Keating? Giving money to the banks may actually keep Goldman Sachs in business for a while, and help families who had been tricked into exorbitant loans to stay in their homes. Keating was an anti-pornography crusader. Did he forget that the ends cannot justify immoral means? Had these people's clocks worked properly, they would have realized early on that theft, embezzlement, fraud, and usury are all sins. Turn off the clocks by judicial fiat as we did beginning in the 1960's and this is what we get.
To begin the recovery process, SCOTUS will have to come out and say point blank that although there may be some nebulous right to privacy embedded somewhere in the Constitution, it does not give anyone the right to practice contraception at home, to produce and distribute pornography, or let alone to abort one's own or another's unborn child.
Having scuttled the clock and without an internal point of reference, the courts and other branches of government are now left with only precedent as a guidepost, which is another way of saying that because someone did it before, it must be OK. Precedent has value within a narrow context. In our society, it has become a fetish, one to which those in control of the media are particularly susceptible.