Laws must be moral; they must reflect true morality

A writer for the Canadian National Post, Diane Francis, had this to say recently:

“The ‘inconvenient truth’ overhanging the UN's Copenhagen conference is not that the climate is warming or cooling, but that humans are overpopulating the world.

A planetary law, such as China's one-child policy, is the only way to reverse the disastrous global birthrate currently, which is one million births every four days.

The world's other species, vegetation, resources, oceans, arable land, water supplies and atmosphere are being destroyed and pushed out of existence as a result of humanity's soaring reproduction rate.”

A great many questions come from that missive, not the least of which is whether people are more important than plants and animals (they are, by the way). Beyond that, we have the technology today to produce more than enough food and clean water for anyone here, as well as for an increasing population. If we used our resources rightly, and generally that means getting governments, especially projected world governments and busybody organizations such as the UN, out of the way and letting people find solutions to their problems.

But the real point which needs to made here is that Ms. Francis' views are precisely why, when we make laws and morals choices as a people, they must be moral. They must reflect what is really right and really wrong in this universe.

China's one baby policy is an affront to any all who want to have a family. It is an insult to the personal dignity of any human mother or father, who in their free will exchange of wedding vows have the right to have as many kids as they want. But if morals and law are merely manifestations of the local will, then we have released a power of one group of people over another which can only lead to such ends as governments, and read that other people, calling the shots on true reproductive freedom.

This issue, and a great many others, cannot properly be dismissed as merely what a given society at a given time wants. These are issues of raw power; power just as inhuman and debilitating in a democracy as in a dictatorship. We must remember what Abraham Lincoln said: all democracy ultimately means is that fifty percent plus one can make everyone else do what they want.

It cannot be rationally argued that such is the basis of good government. It cannot be reasonably believed that any group should have such strength, to force the minority to do its will simply because it holds the upper hand in this time and place. Such attitudes promote nothing less than inhumanity, a hatred of all things human.

If we really believe that law is merely a passing fancy, a historical accident of our times, then we have made ourselves less than human. If we are mere animals, then our laws have no useful value. That means of course that any consideration of the world's other species, vegetation, resources, oceans, arable land, water supplies and atmosphere lack meaning as well.

Such is not the sort of world a same man would care to live in.