Alan Keyes
High court's homosexual prejudice threatens our rights
By Alan Keyes
What purports to be a movement for so-called homosexual "rights" is in fact intended to discard, once and for all, the idea of God-endowed unalienable rights, inherent in the Creator's information of all human beings (i.e., our human nature). The transcendent authority of "the laws of nature and of nature's God" is the source or origin from which certain natural penchants or inclinations derive their special claim of right. Without reference to it, as the authoritative first principle of unalienable right, the logic of democratic, republican self-government collapses.
This is so because the "consent of the governed," from which governments are supposed to derive their just powers (according to the organic law of the United States), has no lawful authority but what derives from the common exercise of right that informs it. Ancient Rome's law of conquest notwithstanding, the mere fact that a gang of murderous thieves succeeds in plundering the innocent inhabitants of a prosperous village, and/or exterminating them, does not make their crime an application of the just power of government.
But when the innocent villagers resist the criminal assault, their exertions in common defense of their belongings (beginning, of course, with their own lives and the lives of their children) are an exercise of right, justified by the law of nature, which places the preservation of these God-endowed lives among the first obligations of their existence, as individuals and as a species. Their consent to associate together in joint and mutual fulfillment of this obligation is an obvious example of the "consent of the governed," illustrating the common impulse of nature it involves, but also the just power of government it produces. The justice of that power obviously derives from the fact that the common action of the villagers arises from the God-endowed natural imperative that governs their conscientious actions in defense of their lives and common life.
The American republic arose in consequence of just such conscientious action. America's Founders sought to erect a framework for permanent government consistent with the justice of that action. Albeit with constant disquiet, they expected the U.S. Constitution to allow a moral, vigilant, and energetic people to perpetuate and extend the justice they had, by God's Providence, temporarily secured.
Throughout my lifetime, elitist elements in America have been working to substitute Ancient Rome's conquering vision of rule by superior power for America's persuasive republican vision of government by and with the consent of the governed. To accomplish this, the elitists have worked (so far successfully) to stop politics in the United States from being a turbulent but authentic exercise in which people, with a common sense of right, compete in pursuit of justice. They have made it into a mockery of just competition, exclusively preoccupied with power instead of justice. Elitist groups, defined by common greed, lust, or other such appetitive ambitions, quietly manage things amongst themselves to manipulate and subdue a people they are determined to dominate and exploit.
In consequence of this agenda, this elitist faction has more and more pervasively encouraged Americans to base their sense of individual and communal identity on need, greed, sex, and other forms of appetitive ambition. This foments a social culture that impels people to live in the moment: the sound-bite characteristic of the so-called news media; the flittering image of the entertainment media; the twittered word or phrase increasingly characteristic of the cyber-social media. This preoccupation with fleeting perception and momentary experience truncates thought, pushing people toward a state of consciousness that more and more resembles what we assume to be the condition of animals or even insects. It is the enemy of conceptual thought.
Conceptual thought is for people who are used to holding diverse moments of thought together in their conscious minds all at once. This concatenation of thoughts allows the perception of concepts, and the development of logical reasoning by way of concepts, so that different activities and courses of action can be considered not just in terms of their immediate outcomes, but also in light of a standard that determines the character and moral quality of the end one aims to attain.
The preoccupation with momentary experience also predisposes people to succumb, without reflection, to the impulses of the moment. Individuals so disposed are more susceptible to the pricks and goads of pain and pleasure, or of passionate aversions and attractions, so that, by premeditated manipulation of their experience, others can dictate their patterns of behavior. It's easy to see why elitists bent on dominating their society would want to transform individual consciousness along these lines.
Throughout the ages, people have engaged in various hedonistic sexual practices, but not until now have some sought, by force of law, to pretend that the failure to approve such barren practices somehow disparages humanity. This pretense erases the distinction between the general natural law, which has no special regard for what is distinctively human (what the Apostle Paul called "the law in my members," Romans 7:23) and the law arising from and on account of the self-recognition and self-possession that is the distinguishing feature of human nature (what Saint Paul described as "the law of God in my inner being," Romans 7:22).
But if, in practice, respecting this distinction of laws reflects an essential quality of our humanity, deliberately denying or ignoring it degrades humanity in a way that practically extinguishes our claim to special consideration as human beings. Pretend, if you like, that this is just a side issue in our politics. But where liberty is itself defined as an unalienable right, entailed upon the title of humanity by our Creator, then whatever destroys respect for the distinctions that make our humanity self-evident – that is, evident to the self, the conscious apprehension of which distinguishes the inner being of our humanity – also destroys the special status of the exercise of right derived from that respect.
This is why the elitists are so obsessed with promoting claims of homosexual so-called "rights," rooted in sexual appetites that have no specific purpose or regard for our humanity. In this way, they mean to substitute a specious, arbitrary, government-fabricated understanding of right for the God-endowed unalienable rights of human nature, which spring from a source beyond the reach of government's power justly to disparage, alter, or bestow.
[To the reader: FYI, this article contains material adapted from a post on my blog that is part of the series "How the 'homosexual rights' claim destroys the logic of liberty." I think that anyone who wants to appreciate the profound threat to American liberty and justice involved in the U.S. Supreme Court's obviously prejudiced consideration of the issue of so-called "marriage" for homosexuals will greatly benefit from reading all the articles in this series.]
June 15, 2015
What purports to be a movement for so-called homosexual "rights" is in fact intended to discard, once and for all, the idea of God-endowed unalienable rights, inherent in the Creator's information of all human beings (i.e., our human nature). The transcendent authority of "the laws of nature and of nature's God" is the source or origin from which certain natural penchants or inclinations derive their special claim of right. Without reference to it, as the authoritative first principle of unalienable right, the logic of democratic, republican self-government collapses.
This is so because the "consent of the governed," from which governments are supposed to derive their just powers (according to the organic law of the United States), has no lawful authority but what derives from the common exercise of right that informs it. Ancient Rome's law of conquest notwithstanding, the mere fact that a gang of murderous thieves succeeds in plundering the innocent inhabitants of a prosperous village, and/or exterminating them, does not make their crime an application of the just power of government.
But when the innocent villagers resist the criminal assault, their exertions in common defense of their belongings (beginning, of course, with their own lives and the lives of their children) are an exercise of right, justified by the law of nature, which places the preservation of these God-endowed lives among the first obligations of their existence, as individuals and as a species. Their consent to associate together in joint and mutual fulfillment of this obligation is an obvious example of the "consent of the governed," illustrating the common impulse of nature it involves, but also the just power of government it produces. The justice of that power obviously derives from the fact that the common action of the villagers arises from the God-endowed natural imperative that governs their conscientious actions in defense of their lives and common life.
The American republic arose in consequence of just such conscientious action. America's Founders sought to erect a framework for permanent government consistent with the justice of that action. Albeit with constant disquiet, they expected the U.S. Constitution to allow a moral, vigilant, and energetic people to perpetuate and extend the justice they had, by God's Providence, temporarily secured.
Throughout my lifetime, elitist elements in America have been working to substitute Ancient Rome's conquering vision of rule by superior power for America's persuasive republican vision of government by and with the consent of the governed. To accomplish this, the elitists have worked (so far successfully) to stop politics in the United States from being a turbulent but authentic exercise in which people, with a common sense of right, compete in pursuit of justice. They have made it into a mockery of just competition, exclusively preoccupied with power instead of justice. Elitist groups, defined by common greed, lust, or other such appetitive ambitions, quietly manage things amongst themselves to manipulate and subdue a people they are determined to dominate and exploit.
In consequence of this agenda, this elitist faction has more and more pervasively encouraged Americans to base their sense of individual and communal identity on need, greed, sex, and other forms of appetitive ambition. This foments a social culture that impels people to live in the moment: the sound-bite characteristic of the so-called news media; the flittering image of the entertainment media; the twittered word or phrase increasingly characteristic of the cyber-social media. This preoccupation with fleeting perception and momentary experience truncates thought, pushing people toward a state of consciousness that more and more resembles what we assume to be the condition of animals or even insects. It is the enemy of conceptual thought.
Conceptual thought is for people who are used to holding diverse moments of thought together in their conscious minds all at once. This concatenation of thoughts allows the perception of concepts, and the development of logical reasoning by way of concepts, so that different activities and courses of action can be considered not just in terms of their immediate outcomes, but also in light of a standard that determines the character and moral quality of the end one aims to attain.
The preoccupation with momentary experience also predisposes people to succumb, without reflection, to the impulses of the moment. Individuals so disposed are more susceptible to the pricks and goads of pain and pleasure, or of passionate aversions and attractions, so that, by premeditated manipulation of their experience, others can dictate their patterns of behavior. It's easy to see why elitists bent on dominating their society would want to transform individual consciousness along these lines.
Throughout the ages, people have engaged in various hedonistic sexual practices, but not until now have some sought, by force of law, to pretend that the failure to approve such barren practices somehow disparages humanity. This pretense erases the distinction between the general natural law, which has no special regard for what is distinctively human (what the Apostle Paul called "the law in my members," Romans 7:23) and the law arising from and on account of the self-recognition and self-possession that is the distinguishing feature of human nature (what Saint Paul described as "the law of God in my inner being," Romans 7:22).
But if, in practice, respecting this distinction of laws reflects an essential quality of our humanity, deliberately denying or ignoring it degrades humanity in a way that practically extinguishes our claim to special consideration as human beings. Pretend, if you like, that this is just a side issue in our politics. But where liberty is itself defined as an unalienable right, entailed upon the title of humanity by our Creator, then whatever destroys respect for the distinctions that make our humanity self-evident – that is, evident to the self, the conscious apprehension of which distinguishes the inner being of our humanity – also destroys the special status of the exercise of right derived from that respect.
This is why the elitists are so obsessed with promoting claims of homosexual so-called "rights," rooted in sexual appetites that have no specific purpose or regard for our humanity. In this way, they mean to substitute a specious, arbitrary, government-fabricated understanding of right for the God-endowed unalienable rights of human nature, which spring from a source beyond the reach of government's power justly to disparage, alter, or bestow.
[To the reader: FYI, this article contains material adapted from a post on my blog that is part of the series "How the 'homosexual rights' claim destroys the logic of liberty." I think that anyone who wants to appreciate the profound threat to American liberty and justice involved in the U.S. Supreme Court's obviously prejudiced consideration of the issue of so-called "marriage" for homosexuals will greatly benefit from reading all the articles in this series.]
To see more articles by Dr. Keyes, visit his blog at LoyalToLiberty.com and his commentary at WND.com and BarbWire.com.
© Alan KeyesThe views expressed by RenewAmerica columnists are their own and do not necessarily reflect the position of RenewAmerica or its affiliates.
(See RenewAmerica's publishing standards.)
