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S.L. Whitesell, Making Sense

"The alarming question is how we are at a point where a federal bureaucrat decides whether a Christian university can conduct its affairs according to its organizing principles." And that's my general sense of the thing. The burden of proof is on the government to show why its interests are sufficient to override an inalienable right, and, in fact, the first and highest duty of humankind. In the classical way of thinking, rights always come with duties. A person doesn't have the right to an abortion, because there is no corresponding duty that the exercise of that right serves or facilitates. Indeed, abortion (for example) represents a failure of justice, the duty of a mother to her child.

Christians (and others) are losing the battle because the buzzword is "rights" instead of "duties." And we're losing rights even while we talk incessantly about them. Mary Ann Glendon is right about that. Consequently, a viciously positivistic conception of law has taken hold, and its only currency is power. 

This is highly useful. At the end of the day, we have two competing views of totalizing reality. The huge problem is that, whether talking about nature or the supernatural, there's only one reality. A person made for an ultimately spiritual end who gets "religious" about the stuff of Earth is more dangerous than an army of fire and brimstone preachers, and almost infinitely so, the nightmares of  secular leftists notwithstanding.

Today we talk about "freedom" in only one sense: the freedom from coercion. But there are others. There is the freedom to do something, like write this blog post. But any freedom to do something only serves a freedom for something, like peace, justice, loving God, et cetera.

Food for thought.

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