Every year brings its triumphs and its failures; 2016 will be no different. What is unique for this turn of the calendar is the confluence of perils threatening our way of life. Not since WWII have we seen such pervasive global violence and unsettling societal disruption.
The world has always struggled to maintain peace – between nations, peoples and religions – with history recording the outcomes of countless paroxysms of conflict, at all levels of human experience.
Yet…we fail to take the lessons to heart, condemning our posterity to repeat our mistakes, just as we echoed the missteps of our own ancestors. Again, we herald the arrival of a New Year, hopeful in aspect but troubled in practice.
The Golden Rule is tarnished by those charged with upholding and propagating it. Some even declare it void, valuing justice with qualifiers over justice for all.
Our Constitution, the single greatest secular bulwark against man’s proclivity for oppression yet devised – is flouted with impunity and “honored” with false piety by those whom it was written to restrain.
The corrupt and despotic have been with us always, and will remain at our sides until God Himself grasps the fabric of reality and shakes it out like a post-dinner tablecloth, ridding it of the detritus of our appetites. Until then, we must guard against these impulses in others and ourselves by adhering to the rule of law, and insisting others do the same.
I’m reminded of a scene from a movie that has again become particularly relevant to our times, A Man for All Seasons, the story of Sir Thomas More.
Roper: So now you’d give the Devil benefit of law!
More: Yes. What would you do? Cut a great road through the law to get after the Devil?
Roper: I would lay every law in England flat to get at the Devil!
More: And when every law was down, and the Devil turned round on you — where would you hide, Roper, the laws all being flat?
Our foes worship at a different altar, valuing principles that further a vision of existence that is anathema to our own. Their world and ours cannot occupy the same space at the same time any more than chains can accommodate free will and gazelle-like leaps.
Compromise is the heart of politics, but when compromise strays from method to principle, it becomes instead the rotten core which poisons the entire system. So it is with all things worth believing; a reliance on objective truth is our only hope of getting it right.
Much fear is wrought by the major media when referring to a supposed monolithic block of “right-wing Christians,” seeking to “impose our beliefs” on others. Every election cycle includes the tiresome, but obligatory, stories about how “un-American” it is to bring one’s religious beliefs into one’s choice of candidate, or judgment of policy.
It has been said that you “cannot legislate morality,” but as Judge Robert Bork famously wrote “We legislate little else.” I challenge you to cite a law that doesn’t have morality as its foundation. Our laws against theft, violence, fraud, etcetera all derive their legitimacy from the simplest statement of morality – the aforementioned Golden Rule – “do unto others as you would have done unto yourself.” The very rule contravened by the concept of “justice with qualifiers.”
The idea of “hate speech,” the nonsense of “micro aggressions” and the repulsive usurpation of equality known as “white privilege,” spawn hatreds and division where none were intended or, in most cases, existed at all.
All this while an enemy empowered as never before – Islamic supremacism – outmaneuvers the western powers at every turn. The most powerful military force in the history of this planet is hamstrung by a demented fealty to a politically correct worldview that seeks to “impose its own beliefs” upon all of us.
There is a desperate and dangerous fantasy being peddled by the Left; one that pretends to solve problems by merely “raising awareness” about them. A fantasy world where grievances aren’t measured by legitimacy, but rather by the group to which the aggrieved belongs. A fantasy world where groups of people can segregate themselves by race, declare their lives more valuable than all others and, most distressingly of all, find people willing to pander to them, legitimizing their circus-mirror reality.
The New Year ahead of us will surely be challenging and frustrating for those who love liberty and revere truth, but it doesn’t have to be disappointing. We have our faith, our values and God’s aid in times of strife and confusion. No matter how dark the day, take heart this next year secure in the knowledge of how this story ends…God wins.
Happy New Year to you and yours.
Were Joesph and Mary refugees (Jerusalem to Egypt to Bethlehem?
In actuality, Joseph and Mary went from Nazareth to Jerusalem to comply with an order for a census, requiring everyone to return to the city of their ancestry which for Joseph – being of the House of David – meant Jerusalem. They stopped in Bethlehem for the night, where Mary had Jesus in fulfillment of the scriptural prophecies.
They fled to Egypt when an order came from Herod to kill all the firstborn in order to eliminate the prophesied “King of the Jews.”
Technically you could call them refugees, but a more apt description would be asylum-seekers. In any case, the oft-used comparison of the Holy Family to the present crop of refugees from Syria is deeply misleading and willfully distorted.
The comparison presumes that those who wish to curtail refugee resettlement in the United States are motivated by animus against refugees in general and Muslim refugees in particular.
This is a gross misreading of the issue. The refugee themselves are not the issue. The fact that our own government has admitted they have no reliable way to vet the backgrounds of the applicants to ensure the program doesn’t become a tax-payer supported jihadist pipeline motivates citizens to demand a prudent curtailment of resettlement until which time a reliable means of screening may be devised and implemented.
Egypt had nothing to fear from Jewish refugees (like the Holy Family) and routinely welcomed them due to their reputation as skilled workers and craftsmen.
Nice straw man though… 😉