Newt comes up with the most perfect answers a lot of the time....that he doesn’t always live up to these principles is fact. We need to never venture off the path to truth and justice-—which is outlined in our Founding documents....it is very clear-—our inalienable rights come from God and as such we ALWAYS use his standards for our legal system (not Barney Frank’s standards).
That said, we have gone off the path since the progressive Oliver Wendell Holmes destroyed our “Rule of Law” and created arbitrary laws (Positive Law) not based on “Right Reason according to Nature” which is the foundation of our legal system (and Natural Law Theory).
Faith matters—and our system has to have people who believe in God....that was understood by all the Founders. Atheists could not honestly take any of the oaths for government positions. Allah doesn’t take the place of God either, so the Koran that advocates shariah laws should NEVER be used because it goes against all the principles of our government and is in direct conflict with our Constitution. We used to have to take oaths to be citizens of this country and not all belief systems were accepted.
Communism/atheism was one of them. Fundamentally in direct conflict with our Constitution. Freedoms were only available to those with the concept that their are higher laws than man-made up laws which are not based on the idea of nature and God—Supra Positive Law.
Holmes only reflected the opinion of the time, the naturalism that became dominant during the last forty years of the century. That said, Holmes was deeply scared by the war. I am not sure that he believed in anything after the idealism he brought from his father’s house proved an illusion. Reconstruction was largely fruitless, and it tarnished the great result of the war, the end of slavery. In a sense, Holmes became a dead man walking.