Wednesday, March 10, 2004

Think now: Where do ‘rights’ come from?

By CAL BEVERLY
editor@thecitizennews.com

Join me as we try to think, together. Think. Stick to the issue. Ask pertinent questions. Attempt to answer those questions.

Let’s talk about rights and laws and where those things come from.

The issue is gay marriage. The question of a state constitutional amendment is before the lower chamber of the General Assembly. The first attempt to gather the needed 120 votes needed for passage failed by three votes.

Some of the votes against the amendment were by folks elected to represent portions of Fayette County. In last week’s paper, I criticized those who voted against passing the amendment on to the voters for their final decision this November.

The predictable responses occurred. To those who believe homosexuals should be permitted by the state to enter into an arrangement known as marriage, I became the usual suspect: Homophobic. Hate-filled. Ignorant. Et cetera.

From those who believe marriage should remain what it always has been, the predictable atta-boys.

So, now that we’ve got that out of our system, let’s try something harder: Think, reason, get to the heart of the matter.

A high school teacher lectured me on my misunderstanding of our democratic republic, a short-coming he assures us is remedied by classes at a local high school. I grimaced at that one, because the good teacher, in his pedantic fervor, entirely missed my point. Besides, I think I learned all those basic lessons a few years before the good teacher walked into the classroom at FCHS.

Another regular writer suggested (gently, for him) that I might be suffering from the “sky-is-falling” syndrome, and that the remedy might be for me to have just a little more patience and wait for the governmental system to go through its processes. He suggests the amendment is unneeded since state law already forbids same-sex marriage.

(An aside: The argument that what happens in one state won’t affect what happens in another state is a disingenuous falsehood that ship-wrecks on the shoal of the Constitution’s Article IV, sections 1 and 2. The “full faith and credit” clauses almost certainly require Georgia and any other state to recognize marriages performed in Massachusetts, same-sex or otherwise. Any defense against those bedrock clauses would be tenuous and temporary at best.)

So let’s deal with these concerns.

First, some basics. Gay marriage advocates present their case as if the invoked “right” is self-evident. Many point to past situations as if those situations are analogous to the same-sex marriage issue, and again they make their arguments as though the comparisons are clearly self-evident.

The comparisons, while dramatic, are not self-evidently comparable. Old laws against interracial marriages and even laws allowing slavery are dragged up as if they prove anything. But they prove nothing in respect to marriage and its long-understood history.

Frankly, after more than 2,000 years of an institution being universally understood as the union of a man and a woman, the burden of proof that such history should be swept aside is on the very ones who strive to change the institution.

The burden of proof should not be upon those of us who say that marriage is and should remain as humans have defined it from pre-history to this day.

If I may say, it is somewhat presumptuous to think that such a profound change in one of culture’s basic units can be accomplished without somebody proving that no other way is right or possible.

Ah, right. Let’s talk about rights.

The discovery of the “right” of same-sex marriage: When did that momentous event occur?

A fair reading of history shows that such a “right” was not even imagined by even a miniscule minority before about 20 years ago. Not even homosexuals in any significant numbers advanced any theory of such a government-guaranteed “right” before the 1980s.

But having gained an inch in the ’80s, 20 years later, the homosexual lobby now demands a million miles.

Be honest, now: Have we all misunderstood marriage for all these millennia? Has most of humanity for more than 2,000 years just overlooked what gay activists now posit as self-evident?

(Pardon me for an aside: How smart we have become, to believe that we are more enlightened than the Church Fathers of the first five centuries of the modern era, than the Renaissance scholars and explorers, than the Founding Fathers of our nation, than all the presidents of the United States so far, than the father of the civil rights movement, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.)

(To read gay activists’ letters, one gets the impression that we who hold moral positions unchanged for 20 centuries are suddenly become bigots, unenlightened, not much better than slave owners, futilely holding back the morally superior future.)

(One gets the impression that there is this vanguard of morally superior people out there, reveling in their “differentness,” impatiently pressing us reluctant homophobes toward a brighter, better world order. Do you suppose there might be just a slight scent of self-righteousness, albeit a new standard of “righteousness,” manifesting itself as moral superiority? And this from people who ardently decry any “judgment” about their chosen lifestyles.)

OK, the heart of the matter is this: Where do rights come from?

In this increasingly secular society, most will laugh if one asserts, as does the Declaration of Independence: “... they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights....”

What Creator? You mean Darwin? You mean pond slime? Not much help from that mode of “Creator.” Otherwise, pond microbes and tadpoles have as much right as we humans to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, including same-sex marriage.

If there is a Creator, certain rules, certain understandings, certain limits on behavior, including sexual behavior, come into play. But let’s discount that Bible-thumping approach. Let’s say for this argument that no Creator created your rights.

So, then: Where do your rights come from?

From the individual? Let’s say an individual like, say, Hitler. You recoil: Why? Because it was Hitler and we all say he was an evil monster?

But if a right originates within an individual, who is to say, who is to “judge,” that the “rights” flowing from Hitler’s mind are any more or any less worthy of being recognized as “rights” than your own internally constructed version of “rights”? Who is to judge?

The government? OK, how does that work? Governments are creations of multiple individuals who willingly band together and cede some of their individually imagined rights to this big group, embodied by the “government.”

In exchange for this diminished freedom of action as private persons, this band of individuals gains the things it agrees upon as necessary: Security from enemies, help for needs, etc. We give up in order to get, in this Western civilization model of government.

(Other societies have other understanding of government. In many places, and for most of human history, the strong rule the weak, and government exists to perpetuate the rule of a relatively tiny minority. In those cases, “rights” are what belong to those in power.)

In America, after an experiment in pure states’ rights, our leaders invented something called a “Constitution.” In it, various mechanisms were placed to balance the “rights” of the more powerful majority with the “rights” of less popular minorities.

For the first 200 or so years of that document ruling our government, nobody discovered a “right” of same-sex marriage.

(An aside: But those first 200 years involved bigots in charge of everything, an entire country of bigots, in fact, who denied “rights” left and right to the almost invisible homosexual minority. A new, enlightened minority demands to lead us majority bigots out of the darkness into the light.)

But here’s the kicker: The Constitution was not delivered from the rumbling clouds atop Mt. Sinai. It is not Holy Writ, chiseled in stone. It is a document of compromise, a creation of politics, a creature, in the end, of the majority.

The Constitution was meant to be changed, although not easily. It can be changed by the majority.

Minorities, under our system of law, get as many rights as the majority is willing to give them.

There: I’ve said it. The unmentionable.

If rights are not from the Creator, then rights are created by the majority of us. And the majority of us can change them.

I can hear the gasps.

But use your thinker: From where else do rights come, if not from the group that can get the biggest crowd to the voting booth or the biggest guns to the battlefield?

So, under that scenario, what makes your “right” morally superior to mine? As a matter of fact, what are morals anyway, but an understanding by the majority of what constitutes “right” and “wrong”?

But what about judges and courts? you say. Surely, the Law will protect this “right” of same-sex marriage.

But what is Law, but an agreement among the majority of what is to be tolerated and what is to be condemned?

I can hear it now: “But we are a government of Laws, not of men.” That is a carefully preserved fiction, but it is simply a myth for which most of us agree to suspend our disbelief. Except lately, when some judges and mayors and county clerks have decided to unilaterally overrule the Rule of Law in support of some Larger “Right.”

Well, who makes the law? The majority. In Georgia, the majority elects the legislators who write the laws, the executives who administer the laws, the judges who decide cases about the laws. The majority, sufficiently exercised, removes any of those who stray too far from the majority’s will: Our democratic republic in action.

There have been some judicial usurpations in recent years, but time and history likely will correct those blips.

What about law and morals and the recent canard that “you can’t legislate morality”?

Liberals and same-sex marriage advocates “seem to assume that the law is, or should be, ‘morally neutral,’ and that Christians should not upset the balance by imposing their morality on others,” writes Adam Mersereau in the March issue of “Touchstone.”

“In reality, however, the law is not, and cannot be, morally neutral,” Mersereau writes. “Every time the government promulgates a law, or refuses to promulgate a law, it makes a moral judgment, because all laws encourage or discourage certain behavior.”

“Judges and legislators can only distinguish between ‘good’ and ‘bad’ behavior by borrowing a moral principle from one worldview or another,” Mersereau writes. “So, as long as the government is making moral judgments on matters such as the nature of sex and marriage, Christians have every right to argue their case.”

In the end, it is the majority that rules. So the question is really this: How far can the minority press the (vast) majority before the majority presses back with lasting disapproval?

We may be about to find out in Georgia.

Now, to all the huffers and puffers, please: Try to argue the logic, the merits of the points raised above. It is just irrelevant to label me a homophobe. It does nothing to advance your counter-argument.

Also irrelevant are your feelings or mine. It is just supreme self-centeredness that drives otherwise intelligent people to make arguments about changing public policy based on whether or not it makes them feel good or bad or produces self-esteem issues.

On behalf of same-sex marriage believers, it’s up to you to make your case, to prove your point. It is not enough to assert your moral superiority to the rest of us benighted bigots. It will not be enough even to rely on the courts to be your savior. They are, in the end, creations of a more or less tolerant majority.

To be successful, your argument must overturn all of human history to this point and convince an overwhelming majority of voters that somehow your “rights” are better and bigger than our “rights.”

Can you make your case, with logic and reason, instead of just calling names or talking about about how all this makes you feel?