Antonin Scalia

Much more reassuring to children is the message from progressive justices that the Constitution is “living.” After all, living is better than dead, right?

It depends on what you mean by “living” and “dead.” When progressive justices say the Constitution is “living,” they mean it the same way a philandering husband does when he says his marriage vows are “living”; that is, evolving with the needs of the times. But the man’s wife probably considers their marriage vows to be “dead”; that is, of no real meaning or effect. And if the vows are to become “living” from the wife’s perspective, they will have to become “dead” from the husband’s.

This is exactly what Scalia was getting at when he told the school children that the Constitution is “dead.” He meant that it has fixed meaning, and interpreting it that way is the only way the Constitution can have living effect today. If the Constitution is “living” in the progressive sense, it has become a ventriloquist’s dummy; it does not speak for itself; it is dead.

The Founders, like Scalia, presumed the Constitution to have fixed meaning. That much is proven by the very fact that they included a procedure for amending it. If the Constitution were “living” in the progressive sense, it would not need an amendment procedure; future justices could simply “locate” new meaning in the words, as in fact progressive justices have often done.

The progressive approach has the beauty of efficiency. Why go through the lengthy, difficult amendment process, when the justices can simply assign new meaning? The only problem is that we are no longer living under the form of government created by the Constitution. And because Supreme Court justices are appointed for life, and it only takes five of them to change the meaning of the Constitution, neither the Founders nor you nor I are the ones deciding what our form of government shall be.

Scalia’s lesson is one every American should learn. While the school children might struggle to understand it, they need only conduct a little experiment, and all will become clear. The children should try assigning “living” meaning to their teacher’s instructions. They will learn soon enough that their teacher’s instructions are “dead, dead, dead,” and they are in trouble, trouble, trouble.  –Alan Burrow

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PP President Cecile Richards

“The depravity of these tactics and the invasion — the willingness of this group to invade the most personal, private space and to violate the medical relationships — I’ve never seen anything as low.”

Those were the words of Planned Parenthood President Cecile Richards this week as she condemned the Center for Medical Progress for its undercover videos exposing Planned Parenthood for trafficking in dead baby body parts. Richard’s moral outrage and the inverted moral system it reveals is astonishing. “Depravity” applies not to her organization for trafficking in baby body parts, but to the organization that exposed it. The “most personal, private space” refers to restaurants and business offices where Planned Parenthood negotiated baby body part prices. “Medical relationships” refers to the relationships between Planned Parenthood and its buyers of baby body parts. “Violate” refers to the fact that CMP turned out not to be a legitimate buyer. How “low” can you go?

There is an important lesson here: Morality is inescapable. It is not a question of whether morality will reign in the public square, but which morality.

America was founded on the morality of a “Creator” who had “endowed” each person with “unalienable rights,” including “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” (Declaration of Independence). This is the morality that gave us more freedom and prosperity than any society in history, and which corrected us whenever we went astray, as we did with slavery.

But that morality is not automatic. It can be replaced.  And it has been. The Creator has been tossed out, and unalienable rights with him. It turns out that without the Creator, there are no unalienable rights, there is only “might makes right.” After all, if we are just blobs of protoplasm, there is no reason we should have any meaning or worth, let alone rights.

The way the new morality has taken over is subtle. It lulls Americans by mouthing the soothing, old language of unalienable rights, but then it redefines who is a “person” and who is not. Without the Creator defining all people as “persons,” the matter is up for grabs. This is where “might makes right” comes in, for inevitably a small class of ruling elites acquires the power to redefine “person” in a way that suits their interests. And when that happens, you can count on it, millions will lose their freedom and ultimately their lives.

In the 19th century, slaves were redefined as non-persons. In the 20th century, Jews and other “undesirables” were redefined as non-persons at various times. Indeed, the 20th century was the great century of redefinition. It is no coincidence that it is the bloodiest century on record, with over 100 million dying at the hands of ruling elites in their own homeland. And all of it was perfectly moral under the new morality. Slave traders felt perfectly justified in what they did, and so did Hitler, Stalin, and Mao. It was all for the “greater good.” But in the end, someone’s convenience took precedence over someone else’s life.

The fact that present proponents of the new morality would condemn those past atrocities is cold comfort. Like the Pharisees of Jesus’ day, proponents of the new morality have proven very adept at murdering innocents only to later make a great show of adorning their tombs. It bears remembering that Planned Parenthood’s founder Margaret Sanger was in perfect synch with the Nazis. Like Hitler, Sanger was a proponent of eugenics and wanted to eliminate “undesirables,” which for Sanger meant African-Americans. It also bears remembering that even today a disproportionate number of Planned Parenthood’s abortions are performed on inner-city African-American women. If Planned Parenthood has changed its goals since Sanger’s day, you would not be able to tell it from the statistics.

There are two facts about the new morality one should never forget. The first is that none of the atrocities of the past or present are inherently wrong under the new morality. The second is that under the new morality, we are at the mercy of the ruling elites, and their mercy has a long track record of being merciless. Their mercy, after all, is guided by the new moral conscience we see in Richards — a moral conscience that is shared by the powerful political and media forces which have locked arms with her to defend Planned Parenthood at all cost.

Hitler, Stalin, Mao — this is the bloody lineage in which America now stands with 56 million unborn babies dead. Like slaves and Jews, the unborn have been redefined as non-persons. And if you think the redefinition process will stop with the unborn, and that the carnage will remain hidden behind the walls of Planned Parenthood, you are mistaken. History has proven to the contrary. There is no logical stopping point between the inconvenient unborn and the inconvenient elderly, the inconvenient sick, or the inconvenient politically incorrect.

Jesus came saying, “My life for yours.” The new morality says, “Your life for mine.” Pick which morality you want to live under. And pick you must, for there is no other choice. —Alan Burrow for FaithWorking.com. Alan is pastor of The King’s Congregation in Meridian, Idaho, which is online at TheKingsCongregation.com.

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