The basis of civilization

In the aftermath of the massacre at Columbine High School in
Littleton, Colo., it was refreshing to hear at least a few commentators
suggest it was time to begin teaching the Ten Commandments again,
posting them in classrooms and providing government schoolchildren a
modest grounding in the moral code which forms the basis of Western
Civilization.

But not everyone sees a connection between the senseless violence in
our culture and the breakdown in our system of morality. Take a look at
what’s going on, for instance, in Manhattan — not New York’s island,
mind you, but Middle America’s Manhattan, Kansas.

According to a Reuters report last week, officials there removed a
5-foot-high granite tablet engraved with the Ten Commandments following
a legal threat from, you guessed it, the American Civil Liberties Union
and Americans United for Separation of Church and State.

The tablet had stood outside City Hall for more than 40 years without
offending anyone in the town. But last month the ACLU and the AUSCS
challenged it in court, alleging the tablet violated constitutional
provisions for the separation of church and state.

Well, of course, there are no constitutional provisions for
separation of church and state. Those words appear nowhere in the U.S.
Constitution, nor do any words resembling them. The First Amendment does
restrict the U.S. Congress from establishing an official government
church and from prohibiting the free exercise of religion. It’s quite a
leap from there to absolute separation of church and state, as defined
by the ACLU extremists.

If you truly believe in civil liberties, as these totalitarians
pretend, you would be defending the rights of individuals to form
whatever associations they choose. If a townspeople wanted to declare
their municipality a Jewish town, support Jewish schools and enforce
Sabbath laws, true civil libertarians would vociferously support the
right of those people to do so, free of restrictions from a central
government in Washington.

If you didn’t like living under those rules, you could simply pack up
and move to the next town — or find one that suited your beliefs or
lack of beliefs.

But today’s pseudo-civil libertarians prefer to impose a
one-size-fits-all way of life on 250 million people through coercion,
through the power of the state, ultimately, through threat of violence.
Is that civil liberties? No, that’s tyranny. And these are the same
people who tell you they support “diversity.” Hmmmm.

More than 4,000 residents of Manhattan, Kansas, signed a petition
urging the city to fight the intolerant ACLU fascists. But, like too
many local politicians these days, the officials of Manhattan, Kansas,
caved into the pressure exerted by the anti-religion police. The will of
the people be damned. The will of the busybody ACLU elite prevails,
again.

One wonders if the ACLU and the AUSCS will next direct their
attention to the United States Supreme Court. Perhaps they haven’t
noticed that the Ten Commandments are engraved in the walls of the high
court. How could it be unconstitutional for a little town in Kansas to
display the Ten Commandments but legal for the official interpreters of
the U.S. Constitution to sit below such a display?

It’s also worth noting that our whole notion of civil liberties and
inalienable rights descends directly from the Ten Commandments and the
Holy Bible in which they are contained.

After all, even the framers of the U.S. Constitution did not consider
their document to be the last word on rights and the powers of the
state. They believed the final word was the Word of God. And they were
right.

The ACLU and the AUSCS are sowing the seeds of moral confusion and
relativistic thinking. There is no ultimate truth, no absolute right and
wrong — just laws passed by the state. If civil liberties represent no
more than a set of laws adopted by men more than 200 years ago, why
should we have such reverence for them? Why should they be considered
“inalienable”?

Haven’t we seen enough evidence that all rights are threatened when
the state is the highest authority? Haven’t we seen enough evidence that
such a philosophy leads only to cultural and societal chaos?

And cultural and societal chaos means more Columbines. It means
death. It means an end to freedom. It means the dawning of a police
state.