Legislating Morality – Whose Morals Do We Use?

Mandeville, LA – Exclusive Transcript – I think we’re already legislating some horrific strains of morality by making it permissive or by allowing others to be basically conscripted in the act of taking another human life.  If you live in any state where the state provides any manner of support, in any way, shape or form, for the ghastly practice of abortion, you’re basically being conscripted in what you view and what you believe to be a horrific act of taking human life.  Check out today’s transcript for the rest…

 

Begin Mike Church Show Transcript

AG:  Santorum seems like a nice guy.  I disagree with the idea of making public policy out of what he views as morally good.  I think that sets a slippery slope for the next person in power to have a different set of morals and say: So and so did it and that was his moral compass; now this is my moral compass, I was elected, and I’m going to enact these laws.  I guess the concern is do you have the ability to prevent the slippery slope of morality, public policy making — I hadn’t caught ABC’s This Week.  You played, before the show, George Will talking about live and let live, the idea of that strain of the Republican Party being very bright and present at CPAC this weekend.  I just wonder if you’re able to stop the morality policy making once you start down that path.

Mike:  I think many policies and many government actions are based in a form of morality.  I know we get in arguments here: I don’t need a god to not steal.

AG:  But it’s morality when it’s — I guess the idea of morality when it doesn’t affect anyone’s life, property, that sort of thing.  Individual morality for how X, Y, or Z chooses to live their own life, if it doesn’t have an effect on other people, do you want to make policy out of that?  I understand policy when it’s affecting others’ lives, property rights, the ability to pursue happiness or what have you.  The idea of legislating morality when it just affects an individual, I wonder if that’s the beginning of the slippery slope which we don’t want to get under way.

Mike:  I think we’re already legislating some horrific strains of morality by making it permissive or by allowing others to be basically conscripted in the act of taking another human life.  If you live in any state where the state provides any manner of support, in any way, shape or form, for the ghastly practice of abortion, you’re basically being conscripted in what you view and what you believe to be a horrific act of taking human life.  Whether you agree with that proposition or not, you cannot deny that it is the right of the people to hold sacred that life and say: No, not no, but hell no, you will not conscript me and I will not participate in it; I’m not going to do it.  Yet the State forces people into that.  There’s an example of morality in play right there where I believe there are significant numbers of people who would congregate together and form their own polities and would not have that as part of their government.  I don’t know if it would exist privately, but it certainly would not exist so that people would be compelled to participate in it.

When it comes to this fashionable debate of the last two years now about whether or not homosexuals ought to be allowed to be married, and that we ought to be permissive in this, [mocking] “Oh, come on, they just love one another” and all that — if you say that the State doesn’t have a role in marriage and marriage ought to be administered by the clergy, that it is a vow that is taken before God and it has almost primarily been something done inside one of those things we call a church by a man on Earth who is a representative of God.  It’s a religious procedure.  In the Catholic Church, it’s a sacrament.  It is one of the seven sacraments.  To say that someone on the outside ought to be able to force or compel the parson or priest to perform that ceremony under the eyes of God, that is something that is just beyond the pale to some people.  They’re not going to accept it, or they shouldn’t accept it.  Whether or not the leadership in Rome ultimately accepts it, if it does, then that’s the end of many people’s relationship with the official Roman Catholic Church.  That’ll be the next schism and a bridge too far.

AG:  Can I ask one further question in terms of going back to the abortion discussion?

Mike:  Absolutely.

AG:  Me being pro-life, when I try to rationalize the idea of the death penalty, and it’s in the news at least in this area because Maryland repealed it last week.  There’s no more death penalty in Maryland.  Am I hypocritical being pro-life but not necessarily having a huge issue with allowing the death penalty?

Mike:  The Bible says “eye for eye, tooth for tooth,” which is what most people resort to.  I know there are many who have an opposition to the State taking life, to the State executing people.

AG:  Right.  Being — it’s hard to say pro-death penalty — not opposed to the idea of the death penalty necessarily, am I hypocritical in the sense I’m saying my morality, I’m putting it on other people in that stance?

Mike:  When you’re talking about death penalty being meted out for men or for women who have committed the act of murder, I think for an awful long time the death penalty, going all the way back to ancient times, the penalty for taking one’s life has been to lose yours.  I don’t know.  I’ve got to think about that one.  I’m conflicted on that one.

AG:  It’s in the news in Maryland.  If I’m going to be pro-life, the idea that I’m not — I’ve always viewed it as if you’re making an immoral act against someone else’s life and that’s why you’re up for the death penalty and therefore you have forfeited the right to live —

Mike:  If you have as part of your moral penal code that thou shalt not kill, and if everyone knows the punishment for a premeditated act of taking another human’s life is the loss of your life, is the person perpetrating the act choosing — because he or she just wants their own selfish way and they wish to terminate the life of the person they are about to commit the act of murder on — are they choosing to receive the public’s meting out of the penalty?  That’s the question.

End Mike Church Show Transcript