Well, except state actors restrain other state actors all the time. As much as the feds might naturally want to expand, the states push back and so do counties and cities. One government’s expansion is another’s contraction. Look at how California pushes back against Washington, setting its own emission controls, or Chicago against Illinois. It doesn’t fit your big government just gets bigger fantasy nightmare, but those are your tough apples.

“Nearly all of the non-political (loosely defined, clearly) entities you name are not in the business of limiting government, but in shaping the exertion of its power to suit their ends and interfering with competition, trade, up to and including the rights of individuals.”

Right. Got it. So the reason we didn’t restore taxes on the wealthiest Americans is because they didn’t restrain Congress. And the reason that regulatory agencies didn’t inspect Massey is because Massey didn’t restrain government regulation. And the reason why no one in America has the right to conceal automatic weapons is because the NRA hasn’t restrained government.

Or maybe it’s just more fun to pretend you live in the gulag when in fact you live here in America. Anybody interested in real patriotism, a celebration of just how messy democracy actually is?

“Oh, and you forgot to mention trial lawyers (and family law attorneys) who benefit from the erosion of traditional, normative marriage (this includes divorce and adoption laws, not just the redefinition of marriage.)”

See, now, you’re getting it. The evil, big brother, nanny-state government used to tell us whether we could get divorced or not, but then the greedy divorce lawyers figured they could make a buck by persuading women to leave their husbands because the men kept leaving the toilet seat up.

In case, you didn’t follow, no-fault divorce is actually a restraint on state power that had previously been unrestrained. And yes, it is women who ask for most divorces. I wonder why.

But he still believed:

“To him who believes in the Existence and Attributes physical and moral of a God, there can be no obscurity or perplexity in defining the Law of Nature to be his wise benign and all powerful Will, discovered by Reason.”

– John Adams to Thomas Boylston Adams, March 19, 1794. Adams Papers (microfilm), reel 377, Library of Congress. Seen in James H. Hutson’s, “The Founders on Religion,” p. 132.

Just because you don’t want some people to marry doesn’t mean the sky is falling and jackbooted thugs are going to march into your house. Grow up and stop whining. You’re losing this battle because you’re supporting an unsustainable prejudice.

The expositors of the “old” as opposed to the “new” natural law claim God isn’t necessary to make natural law claims. That is the “oughts” of natural law don’t need God, just Aristotle’s metaphysics, to make it binding. The “new” natural law does, as far as I understand it (and it was explained personally to me by George once at Princeton when I asked him) admit to needing an “input” to make it binding else it falls prey to the “is/ought” gap.

Does God have to be the necessary binding “input”? Perhaps. But it need not be the biblical God, or the God who revealed the Bible in an inerrant, infallible sense.

Three days ago, Sen Frank Lautenberg (D, NJ) made my point exactly when he said of pro-lifers “They don’t deserve the freedoms in the Constitution BUT WE’LL GIVE THEM TO THEM ANYWAY.” (Emphasis mine, of course).

Even if Lautenberg comes around to claiming it was a poor choice of words, I would posit that it isn’t even possible for someone who truly believes in unalienable rights to make that kind of slip.

Lincoln & Jefferson defined natural law as relating to which is endowed to us by God, and therefore not to be touched by the state. If I recall correctly this is the definition George used.

The Lincoln definition does not say that humans will naturally do the right thing or that they will even know the right thing (as George said, they might fail to exercise power of reason), but rather that it is not possible for anyone to be free if we forsake our unalienable rights in exchange for a set of permissions from the state. This is why religion and family are the two chains that restrain an otherwise totalitarian state.

As as Douglas Farrow explains brilliantly here, any law that cuts these restraints is ultimately totalitarian.

Robert George et. al. were careful not to rely on a scriptural basis in their discussion of SSM, I imagine because it would be too easily dismissed by a huge segment of the population if they did otherwise.

That said, natural law as discussed by Jefferson, Tocqueville, Lincoln, etc. certainly relies on God as any morality that isn’t relativism must. And Robert George has said the same.

FYI, perhaps the most fascinating book I’ve read in the past two years discussed this idea in depth and I think it lends itself well to the SSM debate.

If you don’t have time for the book or the Farrow article, this is my own attempt to relate their arguments to the SSM debate.

“Thanks, Rob, for your comments on my views about natural law and the Gospel and grace. You are absolutely right: I do not reject reliance on the Gospel and grace. At the same time, I believe that reason, though manifestly fallible, and certainly weakened by sin, is itself a profound gift of God. Indeed, by virtue of our reason and freedom we enjoy a certain (limited, to be sure, but real) sharing in divine power. (I explain this point in some detail and discuss its significance in my 2007 John Dewey Lecture in Philosophy of Law at Harvard, entitled “Natural Law,” available here: http://www.law.harvard.edu/students/orgs/jlpp/Vol31_No1_Georgeonline.pdf.) Even apart from revelation, human beings are thus capable of understanding many very important truths, including truths about morality, justice, and human rights and dignity. As St, Paul said (Romans 2:14), there is a law “written on the hearts,” even of the Gentiles who do not have the law of Moses—a law sufficient for accountability and judgment. I would add that even those who have access to revealed truth still need to exercise the power of reason. Reliance on revelation alone is insufficient, just as reliance on reason alone is inadequate. As John Paul II famously put the matter in his encyclical letter Fides et Ratio, “faith and reason are like two wings on which the human spirit ascends to contemplation of truth.”

http://mirrorofjustice.blogs.com/mirrorofjustice/2011/03/the-gospel-grace-and-natural-law-and-marriage-1.html

Also, practical reason *is* moral reasoning, and not merely, as M.J. Watson seems to imply, pragmatic reasoning.

To take an obvious example – look at the consequences of sodomy (and I’m not even thinking the prodigious promiscuity engaged in by some). Before anyone ever heard of AIDS, there was GBS (a well-recognized syndrome occuring in homosexula men) and other consequences of using the body in unnatural ways.

Kamilla