I have identified with Conservative ideology for most of my adolescent and adult life, and while I have made no internal changes to my beliefs, I have had to divorce myself from conservatism as a political persuasion. Do not misunderstand – I still consider myself a hard-core conservative in how I interact with friends and family, set the policy of my own household and in every way other than what I want in government. What changed was the clarity with which I have come to understand the role of government and the division between where it is and where it should be. I have always known in my very core that government had no place deciding or defining issues of morality, but the government has for so long and so thoroughly usurped this authority that it was not immediately apparent to me where the line should actually be drawn. One thing that led to the confusion was my personal identification with the principles that drive political conservatism. I agreed with what they were doing because it did not conflict with my own ideals. It was only when I started considering what political conservatism would look like if it consisted mostly of atheists or agnostics that the danger became clear.
I had always looked at conservatism from the wrong perspective. For me conservatism was about sticking with policies that were traditional because they worked. It was about striking a balance between my own morality and one that the majority of people could live with. I believed that laws against murder, for example, were universal because humanity shared a common basic morality – we knew instinctively that certain things were wrong, and so we made laws against them. I thought that if the majority of people opposed gay marriage then it should be illegal. Although I can only speak for myself for certain, I believe most conservatives believe they carry the torch for these same reasons.
The issue of morality in government always bothered me because it represented a compromise. I am a Christian, and to us, compromise on issues of morality is a very bad thing. I took this incongruence as simply a necessary evil of living in a world that has been corrupted by sin, and trained myself to ignore it because I could not bring myself to find comfort with it.
My change of understanding was a process rather than an event, but it started when I watched a video on the Internet that attempted to explain the concept of liberty through the founding documents of the United States and what they really meant. The first concept that I knew instinctively but had never articulated is the concept of rights. The Declaration of Independence very elegantly explains rights, but the poetry of the words had always distracted me from the real meaning.
I will not quote from the Declaration – you can read it for yourself if you like (and you should). And I will not try to explain in any amount of detail what is better explained by others who have said it before. But I will give a crude explanation of the realization that I had. Rights are something that we have because there is no earthly authority higher than ourselves to seek permission from. That is why “Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness” are mentioned in the Declaration – these are examples of rights that we have that we have by virtue of owning our own existence (the verbal acrobatics will make sense in a moment). Rights cannot be granted or taken away (though they can be violated and their exercise prohibited or prevented). Rights (ALL rights) are derived from the ownership of property. This is a bold statement that took me nearly six months of introspection and careful consideration to accept. But once I accepted it, everything else started to fall into place and finally fit. The most profound revelation that came with this was the realization that this truth was not relative to ideology. It was true of every known form of government, and in every recorded instance of human society. The reason that subjects have no rights in a monarchy is that the king literally owns them. Citizens of Communism are owned by the state (just read the communist manifesto – it actually spells out the dissolution of private property as a means to remove individual rights). Citizens of a Democracy are actually owned by the majority. In these types of governments, citizens do not have rights, they have privileges. Privileges are given at the whim of the owner (of whatever is in question), and are thus taken away at the whim of the owner. It is this concept of being at the mercy of someone else for your life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness that our founding fathers found unacceptable, and it is for this reason that the United States was built as a Republic. Citizens of the United States were meant to own themselves, and this was a unique concept in the world that made the United States truly exceptional. We are all sovereign kings and queens of our own individual kingdoms (the sum total of everything we own).
This epiphany lent me new understanding of the meaning of “to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men”. The purpose of government is not to ban dangerous dogs, make us wear seatbelts, spend our taxes, or make sure we don’t marry someone of the same gender. Its sole purpose is to secure our individual rights. With so many sovereign kings and queens roaming around, conflict is inevitable. To maintain the peace, our rights to our own property are unlimited except where they conflict with the rights of another individual or entity. That is the sole purpose for which we grant the government the privilege of authority over us.
As I said earlier, when I realized and internalized this, many things suddenly became clear to me. Murder was not illegal because it was immoral. Morality is subjective. In a society where law was based on morality, murder could be made legal. All it would take would be for the majority of citizens to adopt a morality that permitted murder. Thankfully laws against murder are not based on morality, but on the violation of an individual’s rights. In a republic, not even a unanimous vote could make murder legal because of the objective truth that murder is a violation of an individual’s rights. Individual rights are the supreme law of the land in a republic.
As a conservative I was always perplexed by the stupidity of liberals. Why would you vote for people who were going to steal from you to perpetuate entitlement programs? Why would you celebrate policy that replaced common sense with political correctness? What brought a person so far beyond reason that they would restrict everyone just to protect the lowest common denominators from themselves? How did we ever come to a place where prayer was banned from school, or the institution of marriage was insulted by same-sex unions?
I honestly fought the notion for a long time, but I finally had to try looking at conservatism from the point of view of an outsider. Call it common sense, or morality, or whatever you like, conservatism advocates using the law for purposes other than securing our individual rights. Specifically they are trying to imbue the law with their own sense of what is right and wrong. It took me a very long time to see this because I shared that sense of right and wrong. The fundamental problem with this is that, as mentioned above, morality is subjective.
Most conservatives I have spoken with believe that to abandon morality in the law is to espouse chaos and a lack of accountability. But that is not actually the case because of another important axiom that goes hand and hand with the supremacy of individual rights. While it is true that it is of utmost importance that personal liberty supersede even the collective good, I am not advocating a return to the wild west. There are two sides to that coin. All rights come with responsibility. The two concepts are inseparable. Every right comes with a corresponding responsibility – to exercise a right one must take responsibility for the ramifications. If you own your body, that means that you are responsible for what happens to it. If you own a gun, you are responsible for what happens with it as well. The law exists for when these responsibilities are not met by an individual – that is the nature of how our rights are secured. When a person has behaved irresponsibly with the rights they have, their ability to continue to exercise those rights are forefeit, conversely when a person has behaved responsibly with the rights they have, nothing can justify their violation.
From the point of view of a Christian (and I know the majority if conservatives are) the idea that morality is subjective would seem to be a misnomer because our morality is based on God’s law. What could be more black and white? Morality, as defined by God, is definitely not subjective, and clearly superior to any form of morality devised by men (and I say that making no apology whatsoever to those who disagree with me.) However, there are still two very good reasons that we should not base any part of the law on morality – even the infallible morality of God. Firstly, most Christians would be very surprised to learn how little of the morality that they hold sacred actually comes from God, and how much of it is the subjective invention of men. Secondly, and certainly more importantly, not even God advocates violating a person’s right to disagree with Him. Although we are instructed to lead a moral life, to call our brothers and sisters in Christ to account for their immorality, and to call sinners to repentance, nowhere in the Bible are we instructed to force people to behave morally. In fact Revelation 22:11 tells us just the opposite: “He that is unjust, let him be unjust still: and he which is filthy, let him be filthy still: and he that is righteous, let him be righteous still: and he that is holy, let him be holy still.” Everyone has to be judged according to what they have done with their individual liberty. In other words, morality that is forced on someone is no morality at all in God’s eyes.
Because it is not our place to force people to believe in God (or to behave as though they did), we have to acknowledge the existence of morality devised by men and women without God. People can base their own mores on anything they want to, and this, necessarily, makes morality subjective. What is immoral to me, is not to others, and vice-versa. If you can accept this, it starts to become clear that political conservatives, still believing that they are on a mission from God to make moral laws according to His true morality, and acting with the best of intentions, have inadvertently created the opening for immorality to enter into the rule of law. What is political correctness if not the epitome of collective secular morality forged into law?
If you are not willing to have someone else’s morals imposed on you (and I have a hard time conceiving of a person who would be) , then it is necessary to ensure that you do not impose your morality on others.
Now this will lead me to the topic of children. I'm probably going to step on some toes here, but it is important to establish how children fit into this paradigm, because much of the harm that has been done to our government and legal system by mixing morality with law has been done in the name of protecting children.
Children are a special, but not unique, class of human being. Children have the same inherent and unalienable rights as adults do.
As human beings, the first two things we own are our bodies and our identities – we obtain both of these the instant that our distinct DNA comes together from the RNA of our father and mother. Many people have labored to obfuscate this simple fact but they do so for the sake of an agenda rather than the truth. Although I find this to be a self-evident fact, I have endured many arguments on the topic, and so I will elaborate in the hopes that if you disagree with me, at very least you will gain something to think about.
As with anything garnering legal recognition, there must necessarily be a measurable beginning (effective date), and this is just as true of our rights as anything else we know. Some people want to mark this beginning when the soul first inhabits the body, but that is not a measurable event. Marking the beginning of life when we have a certain number of cells is arbitrary and a bit dishonest since even full grown adults will continue to grow and produce new cells. We cannot use the fact that the embryo could not survive outside of the womb to deny it status as a full human being because none of us could survive indefinitely without external support at any age and this would suppose that fully-born children who rely on life-support are less than whole human beings. Since we cannot base rights on survivability, marking this beginning at birth supposes that there is some quality of identity or distinctness that changes at the birth event. While birth is a volatile and potentially dangerous event, our hearts are already beating, and our brains are already working beforehand – there is nothing that makes us more alive or more human after birth than right before it – we are simply changing places. Saying that life begins when our hearts start beating, is based on an emotional attachment to that organ – it is to suggest that a person with a mechanical heart, for example, ceases to be alive. To base the beginning of our humanity on any stage of development other than the very first is to pretend that we do not have the potential to reach the next one, and that is simply not true. I reiterate, biologically we are first identifiable as human beings when we are conceived, and as human beings we begin to own our bodies and identities and the rights that come with them at that moment.
Since an embryonic human being is incapable of being responsible for its own life, the responsibility for doing so falls to the parents who conceived it – it is, after all, the result of something that they did with their own property. They ceased to own that property that became an embryo the moment it became a distinct human being. Instead they became its custodians.
If you still think there is room for interpretation of these facts for some reason, then you have resolved to believe what you have resolved to believe and that is your right. For the sake of moving forward, let us say that whatever else is true, parents must exercise and protect a child's rights until such time as that child is able to take responsibility for its own life, liberty and pursuit of happiness. When it comes to morality, it is the duty of the parents to teach morality to their children – it is a responsibility that comes with the job. So when I say that it is not our place to impose our own morality on others, I mean other adults who are responsible for their own morality.
Just to clarify the point ad nauseum, sharing and proclaiming your faith is not the same as imposing your morality on others. The whole point of mentioning the freedom of speech in the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution was to clarify that.
As I said before, I impose and practice morality in my household because it is my right and responsibility to do so. The law does not and should not enter into it. If a law is made that says I must teach my children about Jesus, that law is wrong whether I want to do it or not, and tolerating it allows for the possibility that the law can come back later and prohibit me from teaching my children about Jesus.
Normally when I have reached this point in explaining why I am no longer a political conservative, conservatives begin to pose questions about how to deal with certain situations where they believe morality in law is a good thing. I will briefly touch on some of the topics I have discussed and the answers I gave (or would have given if I had had as much time to articulate my thoughts.)
Are you for or against gay marriage? When I was a conservative, I found the whole concept simultaneously silly and insulting to the very institution of marriage. But that was because I misunderstood the institution of marriage. Marriage is a moral and social institution, and the government should have never been involved with it in the first place. The marriage license was invented to impose the morality of racist white people on interracial couples. This is actually a perfect example of the danger of mixing morality and the law, because the people who first abused law to impose their own morality had no idea that they were making it possible for homosexuals to marry one day. But by mixing the law with morality they paved the way for secular morality (political correctness) to exert its own influence. It would be unjust to acknowledge one morality in the law but shun another, and therefore it is wrong to deny anyone the privilege of marriage under the state. I simply no longer recognize the state's involvement in the institution of marriage. Marriage is a church/social matter and subject to the rules and regulations of those institutions, not the law. To put it another way, when moral matters are removed from the law, then the conflict disappears entirely.
But libertarians believe abortion should be legal, how can you be a Christian and call yourself one of them? Like any political persuasion, you can't really expect to always agree with every other person who belongs to it. But in this case it is easy to reconcile. Abortion is not truly a matter of morality, but the scientific fact that demonstrates that has been overshadowed by politics. This is all a matter of establishing when personal rights begin. I submit that any libertarian who believes that abortion should be legal does so because he or she has been fooled by pro-choice rhetoric into believing that human life, and therefore individual human rights begin at some arbitrary point after conception. I have already explained why this belief is faulty above. All that is necessary to cause a libertarian to become “pro-life” is for them to understand and acknowledge that identity and therefore rights begin at conception, because to believe otherwise at that point is to undermine the whole concept of liberty.
Drugs should be illegal because children could get a hold of them and end up addicted or dead. It is not necessary to outlaw drugs to protect children from their harmful effects. To harm a child with drugs – even legal ones, violates that child's rights, so doing so is already illegal - morality does not have to enter into it. How does it violate the child's rights? Remember that the reason that children are not allowed to fully exercise their sovereign rights until adulthood is because they are incapable of taking on the corresponding responsibility until then. If exposing a child to drugs kills the child or causes physical harm, it violates the child's rights to his or her body – rights that the child has not yet been trusted with exercising for him/herself. Addiction similarly violates the child's liberty by subjugating him/her to a chemical dependency. The reason the same cannot be said of an adult who becomes addicted is because whether he/she was cognizant of the danger of becoming subjugated to a chemical dependency or not, and adult fully possesses all of the rights and responsibilities that come with that choice. Since harm can be determined without the need to drag morality into it, the law already provides as much protection for our children as it can - and this would not change if every conceivable drug were legal.
If a person is allowed to consume drugs and alcohol without limit, and get behind the wheel of a car and kill someone, what about the rights of the person they killed? Why would drugs and alcohol make the situation special? The person could just as easily have driven into the other person while angry and sober. We can argue about the likelihood of one event verses the other all day long, but the bottom line is that both situations should be treated the same way. The one person violated the other person's rights, and the law should determine action based on that. If someone chose to exercise his right to consume mass quantities of alcohol and as a result deprived another person of his rights, he acted irresponsibly and should be punished accordingly. To create pro-active laws to prevent these sorts of incidents is to punish people who were not irresponsible, and that diminishes all of us.
If [insert law based on morality here] saves even one child then I'm willing to give up my freedom for it. Then I say give up your own personal freedom for whatever you believe in, but you can't have mine. I don't recognize your ability to predict the future, and while I don't mean to be callous, children are still going to die or be hurt no matter how many of our freedoms are taken away.
In closing, I want to make it clear that I have nothing against conservatism as a personal philosophy. Unlike liberals who erode our rights with flagrant disregard, I believe that conservatives that do so are doing it unintentionally, and if they can be brought to an understanding of the ramifications of doing so, many of them will stop. I will still vote for conservatives in the absence of libertarians or constitutionalists because I believe many of them are like I was and simply have not yet discovered that they are libertarians. But I can no longer identify with political conservatism because mixing morality and law is responsible for almost everything that is wrong with our government today and I can not, in good conscience, support that any longer.
If after reading what I have to say, you have rational questions or arguments against the facts that I have offered here, I invite you to discuss them with me. No belief system that cannot stand up to criticism is worth having.
