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Liberals hate the distinction of personal values from political values.

Posted on 06/06/2003 12:08:17 PM PDT by AdrianSpidle

Why do Liberals feel so morally superior when they have no real morals?


TOPICS: Miscellaneous
KEYWORDS: faq
On the first Friday of each month we have "coffee" at the Montessori School my 8 Y/O daughter attends. Not surprisingly, being in Massachusetts, my wife and I are absolutely the only conservative parents in the whole school so these coffees tend to involve me arguing with everyone else.

While I have actually made headway with some of them, most of them are still convinced of their moral superiority, some to the extent that they are openly hostile to me.

Our nation really needs a remedial moral education program for that majority of Liberals who confuse political positions with moral behaviour... and this while so many of them live totally amoral lives according to the standard definition of morality.

Sheesh,

Adrian

1 posted on 06/06/2003 12:08:17 PM PDT by AdrianSpidle
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To: AdrianSpidle
Why do Liberals feel so morally superior when they have no real morals?

Well that's the million dollar question; isn't it?

2 posted on 06/06/2003 12:11:03 PM PDT by RAT Patrol (Congress can give one American a dollar only by first taking it away from another American. -W.W.)
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To: AdrianSpidle
"Our nation really needs a remedial moral education program"

Could Mullah Omar be your first leader, or do you have some other member of "The Authority for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vices" in mind?
3 posted on 06/06/2003 12:42:51 PM PDT by John Beresford Tipton
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To: AdrianSpidle
Why do Liberals feel so morally superior when they have no real morals?

But do they really feel this way, or are they merely putting on an act? It may very well the case that your agreement or acquiesence in his supposed moral superiority is his only actual source of this feeling!

Ever read The Emperor's New Clothes? If you know the story, the solution of how to deal with these people presents itself.

4 posted on 06/06/2003 12:45:33 PM PDT by kesg
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To: John Beresford Tipton
Who was it that said..."A moral people do not need a government"...

I will give you a hint...He said it back in the 1780's

5 posted on 06/06/2003 12:54:03 PM PDT by Zavien Doombringer (Private 1st Class - 101st Viking Kitty.....Valhalla.....All the Way!)
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To: John Beresford Tipton
"We have staked the future of all of our political institutions upon the capacity of mankind for self-government, upon the capacity of each and all of us to govern ourselves, to control ourselves, to sustain ourselves according to the Ten Commandments of God." -James Madison

"Bad men cannot make good citizens. It is when a people forget God that tyrants forge their chains. A vitiated state of morals, a corrupted public conscience, is incompatible with freedom. No free government, or the blessings of liberty, can be preserved to any people but by a firm adherence to justice, moderation, temperance, frugality, and virtue; and by a frequent recurrence to fundamental principles." -Patrick Henry

"A general dissolution of the principles and manners will more surely overthrow the liberties of America than the whole force of the common enemy.... While the people are virtuous they cannot be subdued; but once they lose their virtue, they will be ready to surrender their liberties to the first external or internal invader.... If virtue and knowledge are diffused among the people, they will never be enslaved. This will be their great security." -Samuel Adams

"Your supposed right to destroy yourself infringes on my right to pursue happiness, being sad at having to sit by and watch people needlessly suffer and die. When you abrogate the unalienable right to life, doing so abrogates my unalienble right to pursue happiness, being sad at watching people needlessly suffer and die." -The Forecastle

"[N]either the wisest constitution nor the wisest laws will secure the liberty and happiness of a people whose manners are universally corrupt. He therefore is the truest friend of the liberty of his country who tries most to promote its virtue, and who, so far as his power and influence extend, will not suffer a man to be chosen onto any office of power and trust who is not a wise and virtuous man." -Samuel Adams

"Those people who will not be governed by God will be ruled by tyrants." -William Penn

6 posted on 06/06/2003 12:59:52 PM PDT by RAT Patrol (Congress can give one American a dollar only by first taking it away from another American. -W.W.)
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To: John Beresford Tipton
A Moral and Religious People
© 2000 vaughn hromiko

"You can not legislate a respect for life, or for property or for any of the rights that we recognize in one another. You must instill that respect through the teaching of morality. And you can not instill lasting morality without the influence of religion and the transcendent."
"Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other."1 The man who made that statement, John Adams, served under our illustrious Constitution as the second president of the United States. Born in 1735, John Adams' life spanned the decades of religious and political evolution—and revolution—that resulted in the birth of a free nation.

Reflecting at the age of eighty years, Mr. Adams wrote, "What do you mean by the revolution? The war with Britain? That was no part of the revolution; it was only the effect and consequence of it. The revolution was in the minds and hearts of the people, and this was effected from 1760 to 1775, in the course of fifteen years, before a drop of blood was shed at Lexington."2 This was indeed a time of preparation for liberty, a period of political and moral progression preparing the colonist to define, defend then live within a free system of government.

Mr. Adam's bold statement begs for justification on two counts. A moral and a religious people? Such a statement, if made today by a prominent public actor like an American president, would stir a firestorm of controversy. Who's definition of morality must we apply? And which religion?

The founders lived in a largely Christian society. The foundations of law that they passed down to us do have their basis in Judeo-Christian religion and history. These are facts of history. However, my honest response to these two questions includes a liberal dosage of flexibility. I will address that; but first we must consider why a moral people? And why a religious people?

Last month, I attempted to define for my readers the concept of individual rights in terms of moral restrictions. Every right can be expressed in terms of moral restriction upon the agency of other persons who might otherwise abrogate the right. For example, my right to live places a moral restriction upon the behavior of every other person who might otherwise take my life from me.

Subsequently, the law of the land, if it recognizes the right, adds the force of arms to the pre-existing moral restriction. Applying my previous example again, a good government will attempt to protect the life of individuals with laws to punish those miscreants who would otherwise choose to disregard the moral restriction. Those who are not internally bound by their own sense of morality will therefore (hopefully) feel restrained by a fear of punishment.

This definition of rights also explains the source of the individual duties that arise in a free society. My right to live implies a moral duty in me to respect every other person's similar right. This is the foundation of true liberty. As this principle ripples through the magnificent range of noble rights that we claim for ourselves, we see an ordered and peaceable social structure emerge. A structure in which every person's right is safe. Where peace settles naturally in the heart of every person, without defense and without fear. If we do not live in such a society, it is because of immorality.

Remember that liberty is more than freedom. It is freedom properly organized and structured. There must be restraints upon our freedom — upon the natural man whose too natural tendencies lead to harm and disorder. But it is freedom tempered by wisdom, by internal constraints upon the heart, that removes the need for external restraints. Edmond Burke expressed this simple truth with clarity.

"Men are qualified for civil liberty in exact proportion to their disposition to put moral chains upon their own appetites--in proportion as their love of justice is above their rapacity;--in proportion as their soundness and sobriety of understanding is above their vanity and presumption;--in proportion as they are more disposed to listen to the counsels of the wise and good, in preference to the flattery of knaves. Society cannot exist, unless a controlling power upon the will and appetite is placed somewhere: and the less of it there is within, the more there must be without. It is ordained in the eternal constitution of things, that men of intemperate minds can not be free. Their passions forge their fetters."3

In the words of John Adams, "our Constitution was made only for a moral . . . people" precisely because it requires a self-governing people. And self-government really does begin in the grass roots of the land. Nobility, character and jealousy for the continuance of liberty within the government must spring up from there.

Now, what about religion? Why a religious people? Is it not precisely because religion is the wellspring of morality? President George Washington admonished, "let us with caution indulge the supposition, that morality can be maintained without religion.... Reason and experience both forbid us to expect, that national morality can prevail in exclusion of religious principles."4

Religion informs the moral sense. It maintains a rational framework for moral living while vitalizing the profession of virtue with the expectation of reward or punishment in the hereafter. You can not legislate a respect for life, or for property or for any of the rights that we recognize in one another. You must instill that respect through the teaching of morality. And you can not instill lasting morality without the influence of religion and the transcendent.

Without a fixed moral anchor in God, human virtues succumb to relativity. The differences between honesty and dishonesty become lost in a quagmire of situational ethics. The contrast between sexual virtue and fornication are lost in "wonderful contentions"5 over the relative virtues of heterosexual versus homosexual self-identification. Gradually, our families decay, criminals become heroes and the masses bend over backwards to defend the lawlessness of their political leaders. Truly, all contentions for a fixed morality must ultimately rest upon faith in God. God's word provides the only secure, the only solid foundation for such belief.

Nevertheless, in a free nation the sect or even genre of religion must be left open and ambiguous. Alexis De Tocqueville noted in his legendary work Democracy in America, "There is an innumerable multitude of sects in the United States. They are all different in the worship they offer to the Creator, but all agree concerning the duties of men to one another. Each sect worships God in its own fashion, but all preach the same morality . . .."6

All who place their continued hope for peace, prosperity and for liberty in the character and morality of the people (and that is the only place where that hope can survive) must join in a common cause of defense. As we speak out on current important moral issues (like the recent defense of marriage initiative in California for example) we are not simply supporting a single principle of virtue. We are in fact defending the very foundations of virtue against the ravishing tide of moral relativism.

I raise my voice with Father Washington. "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 labour to subvert these great pillars of human happiness, these firmest props of the duties of men and citizens."7


  1. C.F. Adams, ed., The Works of John Adams (Boston: Little Brown Co., 1851), 4:31.
  2. Quoted in Catherine Drinker Bowen, John Adams and the American Revolution, Boston: Little, Brown and Company (1959): xiv.
  3. Edmund Burke, Works, 4: 51-2. Quoted in Jerreld L Newquest, ed., Prophets Principles and National Survival (Salt Lake City: Publishers Press, 1964), 33.
  4. George Washington, Farewell Address
  5. Book of Alma, 2:5, in The Church of Jesus Christ of Later-day Saints, The Book of Mormon: Another Testament of Jesus Christ, Salt Lake City (1989): 211.
  6. Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, J.P. Mayer, ed., translated by George Lawrence, (Harper Perennial, Harper Collins Publishers, 1988), 290.
  7. Washington, Farewell Address

7 posted on 06/06/2003 1:03:57 PM PDT by Zavien Doombringer (Private 1st Class - 101st Viking Kitty.....Valhalla.....All the Way!)
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To: Zavien Doombringer
WOW!!! I'm going to make a copy of that.
8 posted on 06/06/2003 3:50:53 PM PDT by RAT Patrol (Congress can give one American a dollar only by first taking it away from another American. -W.W.)
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To: RAT Patrol
Because if they ever admit their failings, they fail..
9 posted on 06/09/2003 1:25:34 AM PDT by holyh2o
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