On Governments and Morality

Let me preface this entire column by stating that I was raised a Christian. I still count myself among their number. More importantly, I was raised Lutheran and went to a church that is part of the Lutheran Church Missouri Synod, one of the most conservative bodies you are likely to find on the planet. At the same time, I went to a school that encouraged its students to think for themselves despite being a Lutheran parochial school.

Every time an election comes, especially these days, you have people who come out of church and walk into the voting booths and make decisions based upon their religious beliefs. I have relatives who are currently making decisions on the president based upon their own religious moral beliefs. For me, there has, and always will be, a very distinct differentiation between my firm and concrete beliefs in being an American and those I have because I am a Christian.

For me, a government is there to provide protection for its citizens. The government should have an army and a way to defend its citizenry. The government should raise and levy taxes to help build and maintain an infrastructure so that roads are not collapsing beneath people. I also believe that a government should provide some assistance for the elderly and those who perhaps cannot help themselves. I also believe that, in this day and age, given the outrageous cost of medical care, that the government should provide some basic form of healthcare for its people. In short, the government should take care of some of the needs of its people, but it should most definitely NOT enforce its morality upon those people.

Some laws are just basic and make sense. In a civilized culture, the people should not be allowed to walk up to each other and blow each other's brains out. People should not be allowed to steal from one another. However, other types of morality should be left up the individual to decide upon and the government should have no say in the matter.

For example, you may have very good reasons to dislike abortion. However, if you do, you should be able to handle and deal with unwanted pregnancies in your own family at your own family level. The government, on the other hand, should allow choices for people. In a truly free society, the choice of solutions for various problems should be as wide and varied as can be within reason.

Banning abortions, will not stop abortions. Anyone who thinks that it will is living with a level of delusion beyond any psychiatric help. Look at how many abortions still happened for centuries before Roe v. Wade. All banning abortion does is force unwanted pregnancies on many young girls and women or makes them seek dangerous methods to accomplish them. What this then brings about is dead girls and women in addition to deceased babies.

There is a book out there called "Freakonomics" that has a controversial theory that the reason crime actually went down in the 90s when everyone else was predicting the world would fall into a "Mad Max" state was due to the Roe v. Wade decision. It was approximately 16 years after that decision was handed down and made abortions accessible to women in low-income areas. In those areas, before that decision, mothers were forced to have their children and then those children were more likely than others to join gangs and end up committing crime. By reducing that number of unwanted pregnancies, there were just less people to join gangs in the 90s and, thus, the crime rate got lower.

There are those who refute that, of course. They talk about increased police presence and stricter gun laws, but to me, it makes about as much sense as anything else. With a smaller pool to pull from, a gang would suffer in personnel alone.

The same issue comes up when discussion homosexuality. Nothing gets Christians more bent out of shape than homosexuality. These people want an actual Constitutional amendment declaring what marriage is.

Again, if you have problems with homosexuals, I think you need to deal with it on a personal level. If you have a child who is homosexual, then you deal with it at your own personal level. At no point should the government declare to me or anyone else what it feels a marriage should be or what love should be.

In my opinion there is no middle ground. I believe firmly in America as a country of freedom. It pains me that the 8 years of conservative rule have greatly diminished the freedom in this country, slowly tearing pieces away at the Constitution. We are either a free, democratic country or we are not. We are either a democracy or we are a theocracy and we need to declare ourselves as such.

There are theocracies in the world. Any Muslim country that bases its laws around the Quran is a theocracy. The Taliban is a theocracy. Their morals are dictated strictly by a religious writing. I see no difference if your government is basing its morality and forcing it on the populace if that government is using and Islamic tome or a Christian one. If you are telling people not only what they can and cannot do, but telling them how to think via rules and laws based upon religion, then you are advocating and participating in a theocracy.

I believe that my morals are my own to decide. If I choose to live my life and ask that my family live its life based upon the Bible, then that is my own decision. Within the walls of my home, the rules can be based strictly upon whatever religion I so choose. Outside, however, there should not be any law that tells me what to think, do, say or believe. Dictatorships and other tyrannical countries do things like that and I feel they have no place here in America.

People like to pick on Clinton because he got oral sex in the White House. At the same time the country was experiencing unprecedented success economically and around the world. To me, this says more than just about anything else about separating your morality from that of running a country. If a president who was getting oral sex would make our country great and sound again I would gladly drive the women to the White House for him and provide them with breath mints and mouthwash on the way out. Whatever morals may be at play there would be between that president and God and not me or the rest of the country.

I think far greater crimes would be engaging in costly wars going after phantom weapons and chasing phantom enemies. I would think leaving the real war behind to engage in one that has no purpose is a far greater sin. I would think leading thousands of young men and women into their own deaths because of a war that was unjustified and poorly planned is a greater moral sin than abortions, homosexuals or oral sex in the Oval Office.