While I liked Rick Perry’s earlier (since modified) take on the Tenth Amendment, former Senator Rick Santorum did not:
“We have people who say, ‘States have the right to pass gay marriage,’” Santorum said last night in Waterloo. “I say, ‘No they do not because they do not have the right to do wrong.’”
I have heard that argument for years. The problem is, most of us can agree that there is no right to do wrong, but few of us can agree on any universal definition of precisely what it is that constitutes wrong. (Funny that Santorum never mentioned divorce — something Jesus roundly condemned but all states routinely allow….)
I go by a sort of common sense Golden Rule standard, and agree with Jefferson’s view of legitimate government power:
The legitimate powers of government extend to such acts only as are injurious to others.
Absent fraud, violence or duress, I’m not sure he would have seen marriage as a proper concern for government, whether state or federal.
However, the Constitution can be amended, and if the opponents of same sex marriage can persuade two thirds of the states to adopt a marriage amendment, they are just as free to do that as they were to prohibit alcohol.
Now, let’s apply the Santorum argument to Prohibition. Many people think that prohibition was and is wrong. Others think that drinking alcohol is wrong. If the government (whether federal or state) has no right to allow wrong, does that mean it has no right to prohibit alcohol, or no right to allow alcohol?
Who gets to decide what is “right”?
Guys like Santorum often apply a similar moral argument to individual conduct as they do to state conduct. If a state cannot consent to be “wrong” about sexual behavior, then neither can an individual.
The claim is repeatedly made that consent cannot supply the basis for morality. But that assumes the argument is about morality. Is it? Should it be framed that way?
Isn’t the argument really about freedom?
To illustrate, suppose if you believe (as many did historically and some do today) that money lending is immoral because it violates religious usury laws. (HT Frank.) If the Bible or the Koran says something is wrong, then it is wrong, right?
Except the problem is that we live in a free country, and if two people consent to an agreement under which the borrower agrees to pay interest to the lender, doesn’t that consent end the inquiry? Whether the arrangement is immoral according to whose interpretation of whose religion is of course open to debate, but it would be completely unreasonable to argue that morality trumps consent, because in a free society, consent is what freedom is all about.
If you are not allowed to consent to something, to that extent you are not free.
Comments
6 responses to “Neither states’ rights nor individual rights”
Santorum is one of those conservatives that likes to say that liberty does not equate to libertinism.
What he and other Christian religious adherents should be saying is that liberty does not equate to libertinism FOR the believer/Christian.
The big lie that exists in our culture is that Christianity doesn’t use coercion.
And in a certain sense, it doesn’t. Most Christians don’t believe/approve of forced conversions to their faith.
Yet for centuries, even into our modern times, behaviors Christians deem as vice have been treated as crimes. Most Christians demand others live like them.
In recent years, as modernity overtook superstition, various vice laws and prohibitions have weakened or disappeared. Unsuprisingly, as the fear of punishment has waned in certain areas, more and more people began participating in what was once outlawed.
The Santorums of the world understand this, yet they can’t appreciate the wider meaning of this. The high levels of religious compliance witnessed through the ages was said to be freely chosen by the people. As it happened, that wasn’t true. It was the fear of Hell and the fear of terrestial punishment by the king’s men that kept the people on a narrow path. IOW, one gets a lot more religious compliance if the power of the state is co-opted to enforce religious mores.
In truth, Christians have fashioned a world were it is easy and even rewarding to be a Christian. They did it by punishing sinners as a reminder to themselves and everyone else that they expect others to live like them.
Christians claim the reason they stay away from vice is out of obedience to God’s laws. Yet they’ve used their political clout to enact laws that punish those who choose not to obey God’s laws. Why does a person who says they won’t do X no matter what need a criminal law to remind them not to do X? Why do they insist on punishing those who want to engage in X of their own free will?
The truth is that Christians don’t care about sinners. The pain they inflict on sinners via the criminal law is there to remind the believer to stay on the narrow path. If a sinner has to suffer punishment via the state’s law to keep the faithful on the narrow path, so be it. Evidently, the ends really do justify the means sometimes.
Santorum, like most Christians, have more in common with the Pharisees of 2000 years ago than they do with the Jesus of the Gospels and his teachings.
To them, the Golden Rule applies only to fellow believers and no one else.
Sorry for the long post… lol
States “do not have the right to do wrong”?? Since when? States do “wrong” all the time, and sometimes it is well within their constitutional authority to do so.
I would remind Santorum that if one is not free to make the wrong decision, then one is not free at all.
[…] or banning SWAT Teams. Or a more conservative court might agree with Rick Santorum that states have no right to legalize gay marriage. Or even contraception. The issue is not what is right or what should be done, but whether the […]
[…] on record as calling for anything as insane as that. Santorum believes that his version of morality trumps the Constitution, so I don’t trust him. I worry that Gingrich and Santorum may both be true […]
[…] and Perry, and while Perry is hardly a libertarian, he is at least a constitutionalist. Santorum is not. He clearly believes that his view of morality trumps all laws, including the law of our land, […]