North Star Writers Group

The above is one of the more frequently heard clichés in our body politic. It's also one of the stupidest, most trite and misapplied. What most people really mean when they say it is that government shouldn't legislate any morality with which the person speaking happens to disagree. So long as what's being pushed aligns with their personal opinions, they're just fine with it. But reverse that for a moment and suddenly it's the worst thing in the world. And at no point is the inherent contradiction realized.

The simple fact is that every law government enacts, and every action government undertakes is, to a large extent, an attempt to legislate morality. The only questions are whose morality it shall be, and will the rest of us accept or resist that attempt? The Founding Fathers understood this all too well, having had 13 colonies each trying to push their own selfish interest upon the others. That's why they kept the federal government's powers as limited as possible.

But today, with our gargantuan Leviathan of a government sticking its tentacles into every bit of our lives that it possibly can, the pluralistic and small-L libertarian republic the Founders envisioned scarcely still exists. Rather than let states, localities and individuals choose for themselves and freely associate (or dissociate, as the case may be) accordingly, virtually every issue gets decided from the top down in crude one-size-fits-all fashion. And the result is a never-ending series of knockdown drag-out fights, as only one side of each issue can "win" – which is to say, get their way – and therefore the other must "lose."

To employ America's national motto, we cannot get so consumed by the pluribus that we lose sight of the unum.

The quintessential example of the wrong-way to approach this is abortion. Rather than staying out of it, and allowing each state to adopt the policy of its choosing, seven members of the Supreme Court interfered so as to force their personally preferred outcome on the nation as a whole. They not only took away the freedom of 50 supposedly separate entities to conduct their own affairs as each saw fit, but they set that outcome in stone. No longer could states adjust their policies as they went along and as their citizens' minds and hearts might change.

Instead, one rigid rule was to be in place forevermore, merely because seven men thought that's how it ought to be. Not to mention that the inherent "winner/loser", zero-sum nature of such a top-down call was guaranteed to infuriate the "loser" and start off an enormous cultural war, no matter what the call was. This permanent double-whammy of inflexibility and conflict should have caused the Court to be smart enough to avoid it like toxic radiation. But they arrogantly and selfishly barged in, and here we are 34 years later, with two political parties whose candidates have to virtually genuflect toward one side or other of the issue or be exiled in perpetuity therefrom. Not productive, not healthy, not constitutional and not a recipe for unum at all.

We need to realize that tyranny is a two-sided coin. There is the form with which we're all familiar and rightly dislike – that of government preventing a free people from exercising choices they should be free to make. But there is another type – that of government forcing others, at gunpoint, to condone or endorse particular and specific individual choices by prohibiting the pronouncing of verdicts dictated by one's own values. In other words, being bullied with the club of political correctness, and even being required to subsidize the consequences of these choices via mechanisms like "universal health care."

Mostly this takes the form of extinguishing freedom of association – by making it impossible to fire, not hire, evict, refuse service to, or reject from membership in private associations those individuals whom others find to be acting in a morally bankrupt manner. Simply put, freedom to associate must by definition include the freedom not to associate or it's no freedom at all.

And to that end, government can best facilitate not legislating morality (to the maximum extent it possibly can, at least) by simply staying neutral and out of everything, save for that in which it absolutely must be involved. It should neither forcibly prevent nor forcibly sanction specific choices on any issue that can better be left to individuals to decide for themselves. Nor should they require or prevent specific reactions by other individuals to those choices and the consequences thereof. Both mechanisms act to squash individual moral liberty.

To use a sports analogy, government needs to be an impartial referee and to stop trying to rig the contest so one side or the other wins. The integrity of the game is what matters, and without that, "victory" is meaningless. Just as the best games are the ones where the referees are least noticed, so too is "that government best which governs least."

Perhaps Thomas Paine knew what he was talking about after all.

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