The Short Story of America
Given our proclivity to change wrong to right and vice versa (not only by moody public opinion but SCOTUS decrees, another form of “opinion”), how can we expect the people to maintain a respect for the law and order that is necessary to sustain peace and stability?
Consider how our “law code” – our Constitution – has been changed in our short 300-year history. We can’t even keep a consistent standard on fundamental matters of marriage and murder! Look, by contrast at Rome with its law code, the Twelve Tables. The code remained for 900 years as the foundation for the western world. As Will Durant puts it:
“The Twelve Tables constituted one of the severest codes in history. They retained the old paternal omnipotence of a military-agricultural society; allowed the father to scourge, chain, imprison, sell, or kill any of his children – merely adding that a son thrice sold was thereafter free from his father’s rule. Class division was preserved by forbidding the marriage of a patrician with a plebeian. Creditors received every right against debtors. Owners could dispose freely of their property by will; property rights were held so sacred that a thief caught in the act was given as a slave to the man whom he had robbed. Penalties ranged from simple fines to exile, enslavement, or death. Sever took the form of equivalent retaliation (lex talionis); many were fines delicately adjusted to the rank of the victim. “For breaking the bonds of freeman, 300 asses; of a slave, 150 asses.” Death was decreed for libel, bribery, perjury, harvest thieving, nocturnal damage to a neighbor’s crops, the defrauding of a ‘client’ by a patron, “practicing enchantments,” arson, murder, and ‘seditious gatherings in the city by night.’ The parricide was tied tin a sack, sometimes with a cock, a dog, a monkey, or a viper, and cast into the river.”
The point, of course, is not to gawk at Rome’s superiority but to humble ourselves in the face of our own foolish frailty.
What is the foundation for our laws? What is the basis for discriminating between right an wrong? Between the criminal the upright citizen? What makes one person a good guy and another a bad guy? God’s law! Indeed, preferable even to the Twelve Tables is the Decalogue! Yes, the very Commandments given by Moses and upheld by Jesus and the Apostles.
They are the foundation for Western (Christian) civilization, which was been around for two centuries (indeed, longer than the Roman Empire)! And it will continue. His Law and Gospel will endure until the End! His Word will not fail. Let no laws of the states and nation, then, contradict the Law of God! And let Him not be angered by our foolish flouting of His commands.
Wake up, nation! If you love justice, law, and order, stop the baby murder, Re-criminalize sodomy. Return to the Big Ten and save yourself.
8 March, 2021
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