Answering a Libertarian’s ‘Assault on Morality’

How can one say that government and morals shouldn't mix? And that "tolerating" homosexuality is compassionate?

Editor’s note: Writer Mark Landsbaum responded to libertarian Doug Bandow (a friend of this editor) who wrote a Townhall.com column making the case against sodomy laws. We think it is an excellent response not only to Mr. Bandow, but it dismantles two libertarian errors: the idea that government and morals shouldn’t mix, and that "tolerating" homosexuality is more compassionate than discouraging it. – Robert Knight, director, Culture & Family Institute of CWA

In your column "Assault on Morality?" you prop up straw men with non sequiturs, and completely fail to make your case.

You suggest that police don't belong in peoples' bedrooms. You know that's a nonsensical argument, a straw man. Shall we permit any behavior as long as it occurs in the bedroom?

How about pedophilia, bestiality, incest? Are those practices okay as long as we keep them in the bedroom?

Of course not. Obviously, even you believe police belong in the bedroom. So we're not arguing whether police belong in the bedroom, only what the circumstances are that warrant them to enter.

It needn't be the "principal threat" to be a serious threat. If someone is raping your wife you don't dismiss it because he isn't murdering her. Homosexual "marriage" needn't be the preeminent threat to humanity to be a serious threat.

Whether 13 or 50 states maintain anti-sodomy laws is merely a measure of current political correctness, not moral correctness.

Not long ago many states legalized slavery. Would you argue on behalf of slavery because many states didn't deem it to be illegal?

You complain that anti-sodomy laws reflect "intrapersonal morality (and) they attempt to mold souls." Then you make the ridiculous assertion that "government's efforts to force people to be good routinely fail."

Anti-slavery laws "force people to be good." Anti-incest laws "force people to be good." Laws prohibiting murder "force people to be good." For every "failed" attempt to legislate goodness that you can cite, there are innumerable successes. Yours is a disingenuously hollow argument.

Then you preposterously assert that the Bible doesn't demand that such activities be banned. I don't know what Bible you're reading, but mine repeatedly – from Genesis to Revelation - underscores the importance of man creating a social order that reflects God's law.

I suggest that you take your own advice and avoid proof-texting. When referring to the Bible, please refer to it in the context of His entire message.

Finally, you made the common, politically correct assertion that to wish for homosexuals to end their sinful ways is not to love them. This is an utter inversion of the meaning of Christian love.

To permit a person to slit his wrists and bleed to death in front of you is not an act of Christian love. It's an act of political correctness that honors the suicidal perversion that compels a person to commit that evil.

Rather, to love a person who is trying to kill himself is to urge and to help him to live instead.

Likewise, to love a person as Christ commands us is to seek that person's good, his salvation and to urge him to turn from his sin, which will send him to an eternally agonizing hell if he doesn't.

To stand by and tolerate or condone his unrepentant sin is not to love the homosexual. It's to stand by while he slits his wrists.

You are right to note that God wants heartfelt compliance with his sexual laws. And with all his other laws, like His stance against murder, theft, incest, etc. That he wants His people to come voluntarily to Him does not mean He wants us to stand around and condone wrist slitting.

Mark Landsbaum (landsbaum@earthlink.net),a former Los Angeles Times staff writer, is an evangelical Christian, freelance writer and author.

The Homosexual Agenda: Exposing the Principal Threat to Religious Freedom Today Alan Sears and Craig Osten, of the Scottsdale-based Alliance Defense Fund, expose the homosexual agenda and its fight for "gay" rights for what it is - an unrestrained, no-holds-barred attack on the family and religious freedom. Using quotes from radical homosexual leaders as well as documented examples of legal battles, entertainment industry complicity and the support of the public schools, this exposé outlines in detail not only how much progress has been made to date in accomplishing the homosexual agenda, but also the grave implications of further progress.

The homosexual agenda has as its primary aim to "trump" the rights of all other groups, especially those of people of faith. The saddest part of the story is that it is working. Sears and Osten provide well-documented proof that America is not only becoming more tolerant of homosexuality, through the indoctrination of children, positive exposure on TV, and the support and approval of corporate America; it is becoming less tolerant of those who disagree.

BEHAVIOR -Gomorrah: Modern Liberalism and American Decline , Bork, December 4, 1996

BORK: And the other major thrust of liberalism has been movement towards equality. And individualism, freedom of the individual, was made tolerable, indeed beneficial, so long as some limits on what the individual could do. And those limits were set by religion, by a common morality, by law and they began to break down. They were breaking down very slowly before the 1960s, but they broke down with great acceleration, great rapidity in the 1960s when the student radicals and the so-called establishment proved to be hollow and just rolled over.

BORK: Well, I think human nature is not -- human, you know, original sin. People, when the constraints are off, a number of them will enjoy salacious, violent material, depraved material. That's why external constraints on human nature are important.

LAMB: How do you do it, though?

BORK: Well, we used to do it through religion and through middle-class morality -- both of which came under heavy attack in the 1960s and who've lost most of their force.

BORK: Oh, yeah. Yeah. People think that gangsta rap is black music. Nine Inch Nails is a white band and 75 percent of this stuff we're talking about, this filth, is sold to white, suburban teen-agers.

LAMB: Parents aren't getting into this?

BORK: Well, I think that's another sign of how much constraints have broken down. Parents must know that this stuff is going on and is being played in the house. But apparently they haven't got the moral courage to say, "Get that out of here. You're not going to listen to that."

{ During the hours-long, beer-logged event that involved about a 100 current and former students, seniors tied pig intestines around the necks of the juniors, smeared them with human feces, and beat and kicked them. Several seniors attacked one girl by putting a bucket over her head and hitting it with a baseball bat until she lost consciousness. In the video that helped cable news networks make the incident a national scandal, one can see the seniors viciously punching and kicking juniors, as the younger kids beg for help. One voice chants: "Kill her! Kill her!" By the end, five girls wound up in the hospital; one girl needed ten stitches to close a head wound. The scene was so bad that prosecutors eventually filed battery charges against 15 students.

Damisch's words reflect the bizarre moral system of at least some of the adult denizens of middle-class America. Beating a girl with a baseball bat is just a goofy prank, or at worst, an unfortunate personal decision. What really matters in life is going to Brown. Lord of the Flies 2003

Once again, if freedom is to be measured by the extent to which all moral restraints have been demolished, then few youth have been freer than those profiled in the 1999 PBS Frontline documentary The Lost Children of Rockdale County. Rockdale is an upper-middle class, predominantly white suburb of Atlanta, which played host to the equestrian events in the 1996 Summer Olympics. Equipped with modern, well-funded government schools and blessed with a strong local economy, most residents of Conyers (the only town in the county) were materially comfortable. Thus it came as a great shock to local health officials when a syphilis outbreak occurred among Rockdale teenagers in the spring of 1996. When officials began to probe the origins of the epidemic, what they discovered all but defied comprehension. The New American - Another Lost Generation? - October 23, 2000 }

BORK: I think it's because people are very anxious about what's happening to our culture. They're very anxious about what they see as a moral crisis in our culture. And they think, as I do, that the trend lines are all down. Now in this book I try to go across various aspects of the culture and, of course, there's a lot that's healthy out there. There's a lot that's wholesome out there. But the trends are not good. They're all down. And I think the culture's in a general decline. I think a lot of people sense that. They're very upset about it. They're upset for their children and their
grandchildren. And when I go around to a bookstore, for example, and give a talk before signing, I get a lot of feedback of that sort.

BORK: Well, I think radical egalitarianism is the change, the move to equality was really one of equality of status about legal rights and also equality of opportunity. That gradually became radical egalitarianism, which is an ideal not of equality of opportunity but of equality of results. And you see that in affirmative action, quotas, multiculturalism and so forth. It causes a great deal of stress and polarization on society.

BORK: Well , you know, I can't predict the future. All I can say is if we continue on the lines we are, I think we'll live in a very coarse, violent, divisive, angry and obscene culture. But it's not necessary that all the trends continue as they have been for a variety of reasons. One is, I think, I don't think many people realize just how bad things are across the entire culture. That's one reason for writing this book and writing about so many aspects of the culture. You know, they read about an outrage in the paper and they say, "Isn't that awful?" Then a week later, they read something else. But if they realize it's a culturewide phenomenon and the decline is everywhere and what the causes for it are, they may begin to resist it. Now when I say "resist it," I mean resist it in a variety of -- for example, not across -- not in a big national sense, but, you know, on your local school board or local public school, in your local church -- many churches have become politicized to the left -- in your faculty departments and so forth. And maybe that kind of resistance by informed people will stop these trends.

The other thing that I think is possibly a hopeful sign are the signs of religious renewal in this country. Whether that will prove to be strong enough and last long enough to restore a better moral sense, I don't know. But the signs are there.

LAMB: You say in your book that this is a secular country and we've had people here that say this is the most religious country in the world. Which is it?

BORK: Secular.

LAMB: What's your...

BORK: Well, yeah, people say 42 percent of people say they go to church every week. It may be, but it doesn't seem to affect their behavior. Now they seem to go to church to be soothed rather than to be given rules to live by, which they don't. The rules aren't much offered because churches have become soft trying to keep up with the culture. Culture's affecting the churches more than churches are affecting the culture. But you can see how -- for example, the abortion rate is higher among Catholics than it is among Protestants or Jews. I picked that because the church's opposition to abortion -- absolute opposition -- is well-known, but apparently it is not affecting the behavior of the Catholic congregations. And I think similar examples could be drawn from Protestant churches and Jewish synagogues.

BORK: ....I'm probably fortunate I didn't get on the Supreme Court, because if I had, I would be in a permanent minority, complaining all the time about what the majority was doing, which is not exactly the way I want to spend my life.

But you can see that now with Justices Scalia and Thomas. They sit there, dissent, dissent, dissent. And, of course, some of Scalia's dissents are really barn-burners. I don't know how they speak to each other after those things that come out. But I'd rather be spending my time reading and writing than I would just complaining about what the majority is doing.

BORK: I'm not very happy with courts in general, not just the Supreme Court.

LAMB: Why not?

BORK: The courts over time have always responded to the dominant class in the society. In the early part of this century and the latter part of the last century, the dominant class was the business class, and the courts were writing conservative and free-market principles into the Constitution that are not there. I mean, it was conservative activist courts. Since World War II, the dominant class in this country has become the intellectual class, the people I was talking about before: university professors, journalists, Hollywood, foundation staffs, so on and so forth. And the Supreme Court is -- all the courts are responding to that class. In fact, they come out of that class and they respond to it. It's really more important to many judges what the law schools say about them and what The Washington Post and The New York Times say about them than anything else. And they'll begin to -- they'll begin to move in that direction, which is a leftward direction. That's the reason I think we have to think of some Democratic check on the courts. Impeaching Federal Judges: A Covenantal and Constitutional Response to Judicial Tyranny

{ Today's opinion is the product of a Court, which is the product of a law-profession culture, that has largely signed on to the so-called homosexual agenda, by which I mean the agenda promoted by some homosexual activists directed at eliminating the moral opprobrium that has traditionally attached to homosexual conduct. LAWRENCE et al. v. TEXAS - Scalia }

By the way, when I spoke of the incentives judges face, if you constantly get praise for one kind of action and criticism for another kind of action, you keep moving in the direction where the praise comes from, even without realizing it. And there was a famous experiment by a professor who taught his students about conditioning, and they decided to try it on him, unbeknownst to him. He was a pacer when he lectured, so as he paced towards the wall with the windows, they would all pay rapt attention and hang -- and take notes furiously. When he paced the other way, they would begin to lose interest and begin to look at newspapers and so forth. And after about five minutes, they had him pinned to the wall with the windows. And that's the way the incentives work. And I think the same thing happens in a more complex fashion to judges.

LAMB: Here comes the Tocqueville question. We ask this all the time because so many books have Alexis de Tocqueville and "Democracy in America" in it. You have a lot of Tocqueville in here. Why?

BORK: He's an enormously astute observer of America and much of what he saw about America, both good and worrisome, came to pass. In the religion thing, for example, in his first volume, he was quite optimistic about religion and its role in America. In the second volume, he was less so. He began to see that culture could affect the content of religion. He began to see that people would pick and choose what they wanted to follow in a church and what they didn't want to follow. And he had a number of observations of that kind which, I think, came to pass and we see today.

LAMB: Another comment: "Multiculturalism is a lie." What is multiculturalism? And why is it a lie?

BORK: Well, multiculturalism is a theory that all cultures are equal. And, of course, in the schools there's been an effort to prevent people from assimilating to the dominant American culture and to retain separate cultures, Hispanic or whatever, or black and so forth. It is not true that all cultures are equal. They may be entitled to respect, but we're talking about preparation for success in a complicated society like ours, all cultures are not equal.

LAMB: Some more odds and ends. "Modern liberals try to frighten Americans by saying that religious conservatives, quote, 'want to impose their morality on others.' That's palpable foolishness. All participants in politics want to impose on others as much of their morality as possible and no group is more insistent than the liberals." BEHAVIOR - Inseparability of Law and Morality

BORK: That's true. You know, I think liberals have passed endless series of statutes requiring others to behave as they think moral and that's fine. But it's just that when they deny that they're doing that and accuse other people of trying to enact their morality, I think that's just foolishness.

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