Pat Robertson is a dick

[smoothmoniker]

The bigger issue at stake is not, I think, whether there is a theistic basis to the institutes of governement (and theism is a big enough word to encompass deism, so I'll just use it for convenience), but what that theism has to say about the idea of natural law.

We would all probably agree that there ought to be some moral basis for justice, some mode of assigning moral value to some actions as over against some other actions. The founders seemed to hold very strongly to the idea that this moral value was not assigned by human action or established by common cultural perspective, but was inherent in the natural order.

Why does this matter? When the authors of the founding documents set to work drawing up the protections of human liberty, they didn't think of themselves as creating or establishing new rights or freedoms, they understood themselves to be giving protection to rights and freedoms that already existed as part of natural law. The right to speak is not created by the 1st amendment, the right to speak is recognized and protected by the 1st amendment. This distinction is crucial. The moral value of the right was already established by natural law, it was now being codified by written law.

Do today's lawmakers still hold to this idea, even a little bit? I don't care really at all if anyone on the bench or in the legislature, or even in the oval office, believes in a higher power, or how they understand that higher power as operating in the world. But I want to know, with great assurance, that they see the moral value of their actions as accountable to something other than, higher than, personal perspective (subjectivism), public sentiment (relativism), or brute pragmatism (consequentialism). I want them to view themselves as explicators and protectors of priorly existent moral law, not as omnipotent moral powers creating their own moral values.

-ml