I read that interesting essay by Jim Wright. This is what stands out to me, and what some people probably miss: “The very notion of a national morality is counter to liberty; it is tyrants and the totalitarianism of theocracies and ideologues which attempt to impose morality on the citizenry by force or threat.” Yet, we have always done that.

And that is exactly what some are trying to do in the 21st century. There are thousands of examples, in every walk of life, why it is so. For instance, the woman who doesn’t want to get pregnant on a whim and is denied birth control, for instance, by those whose personal morals say she should be “abstinent” from sex until she’s married and if she gets pregnant, no matter the circumstances, well, tough shit because they don’t think birth control should be available for her, nor abortion. This is anachronistic moralism being foisted on a modern populace.

It’s also a removal of the woman’s liberty to choose for herself, to make her own moral decisions. No decision of law should be made based on anyone’s religious convictions because it would be against the very first tenet of the Constitution: the Establishment Clause and Free Exercise Clause of the First Amendment. Yet, this is the same document that declared that slaves were 3/5 of a human being for purposes of representation and taxation in the “3/5 Compromise”, Article 1, Section 2, Paragraph 3. In the first example, women weren’t even a consideration of those who wrote the Constitution—they didn’t even have the right to vote or have any say-so in writing it since at the time they were considered an extension, almost property, of men, just as slaves were considered actual property. And those conditions were the moral failings of the men who wrote it.

So you could say that the morality of the 18th century has always tainted US law unti it has been changed by those who see its flaws. And a modern country simply cannot function on the “morality” of another era.

Even though we are a nation of “laws”, those laws didn’t develop in a vacuum. And you certainly can see how the law has developed from the Constitution forward where people’s rights have been denied because of those “morals” which would deny freedoms which everyone should enjoy, and which were overturned because of that denial.

Only one thing is absolutely clear to me: That every human being in this country should enjoy the same rights as every other human being, no matter who they are. The “immorality” occurs when it doesn’t happen.