The following is an excerpt from our January issue:

By: Larry Parrish

The foundation of our freedom is a nation ruled by law and not by men. The cornerstone of our rule of law is precedent. For hundreds of years precedent has guided judges in administering justice. That stands in stark contrast to the administration of ‘justice’ in Communist countries, where judgment is established not on precedent but on the whims of those in power. Unfortunately, our system has been corrupted by judges who ignore the rule of law if they don’t like the outcome.

When judges to whom the public trust has been granted use their office to dictate rules instead of announcing rules that already exist, they become unelected, unaccountable rulers. We have seen the consequences. For instance, the “right to an abortion” is not in the Constitution, yet judges made it law, even mandating federal funds to pay for it. Our guaranteed right to own and keep property has been breached by the recent Supreme Court decision allowing the City of New London, Connecticut to take land from one private owner and transfer it to another who could bring more taxes into city coffers.

President James Garfield once said, “The people are responsible for the character of their elected leaders. If the next century does not find us a great nation . . . it will be because those who represent the enterprise, the culture, and the morality of the nation do not aid in controlling the political forces.” Today we are living with the consequences of not having controlled those political forces, and our rule of law has been up-ended.

Those who have engineered the law instead of enforcing it have exempted preserving public morality from one of the primary purposes for which the law exists. The root of all law in Western civilization is public nuisance law. It was around before the existence of the United States and was adopted on the founding of our country. The existence of a public nuisance requires public officials to react in emergency fashion to stamp out eminent threat to public safety (burning building), health (botulism outbreak), or public morality. Public nuisance cases in court are required to take first priority over all other cases.

Rule of law demands that public officials treat an imminent threat to public morality exactly the same as an imminent threat to public health or safety. But they don’t. Cultural elitists, who don’t want to be held accountable for their own behavior, think morals are a subject for personal interpretation – not public enforcement. Those same elitists have characterized morality as ‘backward thinking’ and used judges to unhook public morality from public nuisance law. The result is a society with no standards of behavior.

As much as cultural elitists don’t like it, the rule of law is grounded in Judeo-Christian ethics and precepts. When those precepts are followed, society as a whole is better served. Judges, who have rejected that foundation and replaced the law with their own situational ethics need to be held accountable for not following the rule of law. Understanding the importance of these distinctions is imperative for the future health of our nation.