The concept of "Natural Law" is not widely used or understood these days, either.
You do hear natural law used when discussing the Constitution. I don’t think the Founders spoke of natural law as something like the law of the jungle which applies to animals, rather natural law is the moral law that is written in the hearts of human beings. Without natural law there would be no sense of right or wrong.
Natural law is what makes us a nation of laws not of men. Without an understanding that rights come from God we would be a nation of men, that is a nation where might is right.
“The Dawn of Sex” puts forth the theory that man, like 9.99999% of the animal kingdom, is by nature polygamous.
Natural law also implies the village participating in bringing up children communally.
So natural law as espoused by the English settlers is, if not fully debunked, fairly open to interpretation.
By natural law, do we mean natural law exclusively as espoused by European colonists (that’s what America was, colonies) at the time of the adoption of the Constitution? With all of their prejudices and unscientific notions? At the time, they thought it preposterous that Man was related to apes, and evolution as a theory had yet to be discovered by about 80 years. If the Constitution is based in part on Natural Law, and science has advanced since the time
the Constitution was written, then how if at all does
the law as a whole reflect the advancements made
in science with regard to Natural Law-
Or by Natural Law do we mean something other than science—
specifically, something such as religion??
I don’t think religion as a basis for Natural Law will fly logically. In fact, it would seem to be a rather logically repulsive end
run around the concept of separation of church and state.
Just my dos centavos...
There's more to making a family than producing children. Children are a very necessary but not sufficient condition for creating a strong family unit that is also a social and political unit. The bond of one male plus one female forms that foundation, as a unit. More females might mean more babies born but they don't contribute to and enhance the building of that strong unit.
“Polygamy works fine for producing children, so I don’t see that Natural Law prevents it.”
In fact, Natural Law probably encourages it. A woman is out of action while she is pregnant while the man who impregnated her can go on to impregnate other women. Our closest wild relatives, apes, are polygamous. It makes sense from a survival standpoint when infant mortality rates are very high as they are in the wild. I think maybe the traditional nuclear family makes sense when you see civilization begin. As man began to build permanent settlements and start engaging in trade and specialized labor a nuclear family is probably easier to survive in than a pack.
Natural Law is used by Catholic Theologians all the time—and in profound ways.
The reason Natural Law prevents polygamy is that it reduces a woman to cattle and unequal to men. Christian Ethics were embedded into Natural Law by St. Thomas Aquinas in 1245 and the Natural Rights of children to be raised by their own biological parents (only) is actually a basic component of the Laws of Nature.
All children have the Natural Right to be raised by their biological parents. Any system that denies this “right” reduces children to a commodity to be bought or sold. It is dehumanizing and should be unconstitutional. It uses human beings as a “means to an end”—like slavery. It is immoral. Laws have to be moral to be “Just”, since Justice is a Virtue. There is no such thing as an immoral “Just” law. Promotion of Vice is unconstitutional unlike what Justice Holmes stated, whose socialism/progressivism destroyed our “Justice” system.
Polygamy puts in a system where women are not equal to men. The only system which guarantees “equal rights” to all involved—even children is the one-man, one-woman system which created the most free successful country in the world.