Ditching Relativity: Part One

Lately, the Constitution has taken a bit of a beating. Former presidential candidate and Chairman of the DNC Howard Dean said that he doesn’t care if legislation is constitutional or not.  Joy Behar expressed concern that “Constitution-loving is getting out of hand.” Washington Post  columnist Ezra Klein claimed that the Constitution has “no binding power” and is too “confusing because it was written over 100 years ago.” And across the board, Republicans were mocked for reading the document before Congress and introducing new rules which will require lawmakers to cite the Constitutional authority that allows them to pass each piece of legislation.  Although ridicule has long been a favorite political tactic, the Constitution has always been somewhat off-limits.  It was just assumed that American politicians respected it.  Rather than attack it outright, liberals  spent decades telling us that it was a “living document.”  And that only they really cared about finding a modern application for it.  They have built their entire movement upon advocating for “rights” which they have supposedly found in the document.  And for a large portion of the voters, this approach worked.  So why the sudden reversal?  Why ridicule the very thing that you have publicly sworn to cherish for so long?

I think the sudden shift in strategies reflects an overall shift in the public’s thought process.  As people have grown increasingly uneasy with the world around them, they seem to have rejected the progressive notion that “everything’s relative.”  They want rules, boundaries, and little consistency.  Which leaves liberals in the uncomfortable position of either defending the Constitution as it was written or rejecting it outright.  It’s not just that Americans view of Constitutional law or political theory has changed, but for a large number of Americans, their entire worldview has shifted. I think that this is a little easier to understand after examining the ever-changing relationship between the left and another one of its favorite enemies.  Christians.

The Decline of Moral Relativism

I once took a college course on “contemporary ethics.”  The class was largely a great bore and a tremendous waste of time.  Every week the professor led a discussion on one of the major schools of thought, existentialism, hedonism, structuralism, and so forth.   I found the class to be frustrating because the teacher was one of those people who thought every single philosophy was good (despite having agreed with a conflicting philosophy the week prior) and would not tolerate arguments to the contrary.  But, I will admit that when we got to the discussions of religions and morality, she said one thing that has always stuck with me.  She was making the case that even the most atrocious acts (such as forced female circumcisions, and Islamic jihad) were “right” in their own culture and therefore it was wrong to condemn them.  As a number of students began to point out the hypocrisy of condemning us for condemning others, she became angry.  She said that her job had become much more difficult in the past few years.  She claimed that it had always been “accepted” by her students that moral relativity was the only answer to the globalized world, but that changed after September 11th.  She said that “this new brand of student” insisted that some things must be wrong.  Although they disagreed on where the line was, they almost all agreed that it was there.  While she attributed this shift to a sort of paranoid intolerance for other cultures, I believe that terrorism is just one of the forces that have driven people back to the notion of absolute right and wrong.  A growing welfare state, the collapse of the traditional family, bailouts, European riots, economic disasters, and even reality TV have led most Americans to say that some things just aren’t right.  It may not be an earth shattering revelation, but it is a dramatic shift from the “everything’s relative” culture that preceded it.  I believe that the frustration my professor felt is something that many of her liberal peers shared. In the war for the hearts and minds of the public, it was no longer enough to simply declare all lifestyles as “neutral,”  they now had to convince people that the lifestyles which were traditionally considered immoral are righteous and good.

But admitting that some things are good, even liberal sacraments like abortion, comes with its own set of complications. When everything was relative, progressives could make up the rules as they went.  They had the advantage of subverting traditional morality without ever having to confront it.  They simply denied it’s existence.   This allowed them to claim that things like marriage and personal responsibility were of no value while sidestepping any real debate on the issue.  If someone pointed out the consequences of abandoning these ideals, they could simply throw up their hands and say “You have your beliefs and I have mine.”  Now, they had to compete with the traditional standard of   morality in American life, the Bible.  Because almost all of their most cherished causes are in direct opposition to Christianity, they were left with two options.  They could (a.) openly laugh at it and declare that there is no God, as the Bill Mahers of the world do, or (b.) they could claim that the Bible actually teaches liberalism.  Because the former leaves such  a bad taste in the mouth of even the purely nominal Christian, most progressives chose the latter. Of course, this too had its own set of problems.

There is a reason why people say “you can’t teach an old dog new tricks.”  Few things are more uncomfortable than watching a not-so-youthful politician who has had nothing but disdain for Christianity and the Bible their whole lives pretend as though it were their guiding light.  Take the now infamous incident of Nancy Pelosi speaking of her love for “the word” as an example.  She looked as though she were speaking about something as distasteful as bowel movements and as foreign as neurosurgery.  Oh how she loved the word!  She said that we must make sure our public policy is in keeping with its teachings and she was awaiting the day when “it” would come again.  She warned the audience that we would all have to answer for our actions one day, so we had better get in line.  Although her statement was carefully calculated and came on the heels of her numerous pleas for churches to get on board with Democratic legislation, it turned out to be an enormous misstep.  Shortly after she had declared her love for the word, a young reporter threw down the gauntlet.  “You said at a recent Catholic Community Conference that your favorite word was ‘The Word, as in the word made flesh,’ and that we need to quote, ‘give voice to what that means in terms of public policy that would be in keeping with the Word.’  When was the Word made flesh? … When Jesus was conceived by the power of the Holy Spirit, as the Creed says, or was it at the nativity when he was born of the virgin Mary? And when did the Word get the right to life?”  Uh-oh. She balked briefly and then said that she only “liked to talk about that” in church.  And just that quickly, her  year-long campaign to make ObamaCare the “Christian” choice came to a halt.  In her defense, I’m sure that when her career began she never imagined that she would be forced to make a moral argument for her beliefs, but the decline of moral relativism has forced the left to do just that.

Progressives down the line, from Nancy Pelosi to Barack Obama to the “Reverend” Al Sharpton, would like you to believe that Jesus was pro-choice, a supporter of gay marriage, and a socialist through and through.  They are prone to quoting verses wildly out of context, but even that can work against them.  It provides  Christians with a wonderful opportunity to tell people what the Bible actually says about today’s most controversial issues.  They have foolishly stepped onto a playing field on which they have no chance of winning.  The problem with claiming to have the Bible on your side is that it’s a pretty easy thing to fact check.  If Christians will simply speak the truth without reservation it should be none to difficult to force progressives out into the open.  They will have no choice but to join Bill Maher on the loud-mouth atheist front, or to go back into hiding for a few years.

The same is true for the Constitution.  In Part Two, I hope to explore the tremendous opportunity that liberal progressives have given us.  I believe that Conservatives are now in the perfect position to expose the leftist movement for the anti-Constitutional un-American campaign that it is.  Just as they claimed to represent Christianity, they have long claimed to advocate for the Constitution.  But that too is pretty easy to verify, all we have to do is tell the truth.