What is moral vs what is legal leads to confusion | GARY COSBY JR.
There seems to be a great deal of confusion among voters regarding the dividing line between what is moral and what is legal. This leads to many of the cultural struggles that so desperately irritate morally conservative voters.
I totally understand this. I’m a preacher’s kid and I can assure you that morally conservative is an understatement when used to describe the home in which I was reared. There was never any ambiguity in my home regarding moral issues.
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The problem is, we live in a morally ambiguous society, where what is right in one manner of thought is not right to others viewing the same issues. Moral relativism clouds issues that come before the public, which irritates people on both sides.
There are some things we clearly understand. Murder, for instance, is both morally wrong and against the civil law. Homosexuality is morally wrong to a Christian conservative but not against the laws of the land, nor do many view it as a wrong behavior.
If a person is not breaking the civil law, then those people deserve to be treated as I am and as you are by the laws of the land, no matter how any of us feel about the morality of the actions. It is more than possible to be immoral as judged by religious standards and yet be perfectly legal in regards to the law.
This rubs many people the wrong way and leads to a great deal of anger and confusion. But this one point is critical: If I use my morality to enforce laws on someone else because my view of morality happens to be the majority view, I could be denying constitutionally guaranteed rights to a fellow citizen.
What happens if, some day soon, my view is no longer the view of the majority? Will it not be that the formerly oppressed minority will then use its view of morality to stifle my rights?
Yes, the new majority will very likely enforce a view of morality through the civil laws that I will find just as disagreeable as the laws I used to enforce my morality on them. This is a critical point and one that every American, regardless of his or her view of morality, should pay close attention to. Civil laws are a poor way to change the morality of a nation. They are, in fact, counterproductive in terms of changing moral conduct.
Consider this: We have laws against murder, but that does not alter the climate that leads to murder. In fact, many who commit murder could be said to be amoral, or they are so badly misaligned that it seems they are amoral. We have laws but those laws failed to deter the act of murder and certainly failed to create the desired positive action in the would-be killer.
Why? Was the law not enough? Absolutely not. Morality is not generated through the civil law. So what good is civil law if it cannot cause a person to adhere to a moral code? The purpose of laws such as those against murder is to give a framework for enforcement and punishment.
It is popular to think that if we make severe enough laws, then no one would operate outside the moral guidelines those laws lay down. It is a wrong thought, as is borne out by the extraordinary amount of evidence throughout history.
Murder, as one of the more extreme crimes against humanity, has been illegal in virtually every culture and every moral code throughout the history of the world, yet murder has happened, often on a massive scale, despite every law to the contrary.
Laws can’t prevent immoral behavior. That is the work of religions, families, and even schools, since much of a young person’s morality is formed by those three institutions. Even that does not erase moral ambiguity because there are so many differences among people in a diverse culture like the one we have in the United States.
Understanding this diversity is key to not tearing ourselves apart. Our civil laws are designed to govern behavior, be it traffic laws that say you can’t run a red light or the laws forbidding murder. Our moral conduct, however, cannot be formed by the civil laws. Civil laws can and do reflect our ideas about morality, but they cannot create it.
As a nation, we must understand that civil rights are granted to all American citizens. Any attempt to use the law to enforce a version of morality on the public is a hopeless thing and can only lead to more and more frustration. Moral change only comes from what is put into a person by parents, religions and educators.
It is incomprehensible to think that Americans today, many of whom have read the Holy Bible, cannot see that laws do not create morality. The entire Old Testament demonstrates that even a theocratic culture such as the one seen in the scriptures could not keep the law, which came directly from God. To place such an expectation on American law and politics is strange indeed.
Gary Cosby Jr. can be reached at gary.cosby@tuscaloosanews.com
This article originally appeared on The Tuscaloosa News: What is moral vs what is legal leads to confusion | GARY COSBY JR.
