Why do we write down our laws? I recently read an article providing a practical reason for writing down the laws of a nation, but I would also like to add one historical reason for why we write down our laws.

This country is supposed to be a nation of laws and not men. We haven’t always lived up to the vision, but that is what we are to aspire to achieve. When you write down a law, you give it a fixed meaning. A government with laws with precise meanings is a government of law not of arbitrary power. You know what rights the government acknowledges, and you know what prohibitions will be punished.

In my booklet on A Biblical Point of View on Constitutional Interpretation, I talk about two different views. Originalism attempts to understand the mindset of the framers who constructed it. That is why some have referred to this view as “strict constructionism.” The other view is modernism, also often called “the living Constitution.” It attempts to find meaning for the Constitution today and rejects attempts to view it through the eyes of white men who lived in the 18th century. Ultimately, rights and legal definitions become putty in the hands of judges and justices.

Historically, we write down laws because of the Puritans. They wrote out their covenants because they understood that they were to answer to God for their actions. These covenants bound each person to another person and the whole community as an agreement under God. They also understood that the rights they enjoyed came from God. Ultimately, these Puritan Covenants became a model for the US Constitution.

Americans want to live under a government of law, not a government where justices find principles in the unwritten “penumbras” of a living Constitution. Laws are written down to fix their meaning and protect against judges and justices that want to change the law arbitrarily.

Americans are concerned about crime and will likely vote in these midterm elections based on those concerns. But crime is scarier now, and many politicians who might have addressed the issue in the past now ignore it.

The first point is the theme of a commentary by Peggy Noonan. She says that “the scary thing isn’t that crime is high, though it is, though not as high as in previous crime waves. What’s scary is that people no longer think the personal protective measures they used in the past apply.” It used to be that you knew not to walk in the park at night. You knew not to be downtown after midnight. But you felt safe going to an afternoon parade.

What has changed? We are no longer just at the mercy of criminals but are now at the mercy of the seriously mentally ill. They are unpredictable. She asks what was “obvious about the shooters in Uvalde and Highland Park? They were insane and dangerous.”

The second point is that we can do something about the crime problem, but many politicians don’t want to address the issue. Kyle Smith acknowledges that Democrats are willing to discuss “gun violence.” But then points out most of them show little interest in reducing it because their party leaders are willing to go easy on criminals.

He reminds us that this was not always the case. Senator Joe Biden in 1994 promoted the crime bill that he argued would reduce crime by putting more police on the streets and locking people up. At the time he boasted to law enforcement that he was on their side and claimed to be for any law that would make the streets safer.

The latest survey of voters shows that nearly nine out of ten think crime will be a major issue in the midterm elections. They also know that crime is scarier and want candidates to address the problem that is making the country less safe.

America is fragile. That is the conclusion of Victor Davis Hanson. We assume that this country can take anything thrown at it. The republic, however, is more fragile than we might imagine. He has many examples.

“We can afford 120 days in 2020 of mass rioting, $2 billion in damage, some 35 killed, and 1,500 police injured. We can easily survive an Afghanistan, and our utter and complete military humiliation. There was no problem in abandoning some $70-80 billion in military loot to terrorists.” Also, “we can jettison merit in every endeavor, from banning the world’s great books to grading math tests to running chemistry experiments. And still, a resilient America won’t notice.”

Of course, we are starting to notice. He reminds us of cities that have turned lawless, dirty, and toxic. Stores are boarded up, women cease to walk alone after sunset, and police officers rarely walk the beat.

There are solutions, like “doubling the police force, bringing back broken-windows policing, electing tough prosecutors, moving the homeless from the downtown into hospitals and supervised shelters.” Unfortunately, there doesn’t seem to be the will to do what worked in the past and will work again in the future.

He also mentions the fact that we have an open border where upwards of 4 million illegal aliens will flow into this country in a mere two years. Most arrived and were dispersed without audits, English, capital, income, and vaccinations. And we have no idea how to house, feed, and provide health care to these millions without background checks.

We may think this country is strong and resilient. But you can only throw so much at a country before it begins to crumble. Then you realize it is more fragile than you thought.

Mass shootings have many things in common. The perpetrator is an alienated young man who usually broadcasts his intent on social media. Instead of focusing on gun laws and mental health, we should focus attention on the psychology of the shooters.

David French writes about “The Lost Boys of American Life.” In his essay, he quotes from two authors I have discussed in previous commentaries. Robert Putnam is best known for his book, Bowling Alone, that addressed the crisis of loneliness when few were aware of these dangers. He then went on to write the book, Our Kids, that explained how kids in crisis grow up in relative isolation from children in healthy families.

The other author is Malcolm Gladwell, who wrote about the need to see all the school shootings together rather than looking at each incident independently. As I have mentioned in previous commentaries, he says the school shootings (and later, mass shootings in general) represent a form of slow-motion riot. Each new shooter lowers the threshold for the next.

His conclusion is ominous. “The problem is not that there is an endless supply of deeply disturbed young men who are willing to contemplate horrific acts. It’s worse. It’s that young men no longer need to be deeply disturbed to contemplate horrific acts.”

We know the profile and can almost write the script. “Is the shooter an alienated young man? Yes. Did he meticulously plan the shooting? Yes. Did he purchase the gun legally? Yes. Did he repeatedly broadcast his deadly intent on social media? Yes.”

The “red flag laws” haven’t been effective in the shootings in Buffalo, New York and Highland Park, Illinois. To stop these shootings, we need to be involved in the lives of these lost boys in America. To put it simply, we are our brother’s keeper.

We are living through a period of “bullhorn politics.” Who would have imagined that people with bullhorns would not only be marching in the streets but even in front of the homes of Supreme Court Justices?

Daniel Henninger reminds us that after the draft of the opinion by Justice Samuel Alito was leaked, a high fence was set up that surrounds the Supreme Court building. But think back to 2015 when the Supreme Court ruled in a 5-4 decision that same-sex marriage was legal. Many Americans disagreed with the decision. But no fence went up around the court back then.

There is a difference. “For progressive Democrats, every waking moment is Armageddon. Aimee Allison, founder of She the People, says ‘the future of the Democratic Party is at stake.’”

Protests have always been a part of the American political landscape. The First Amendment protects that. But we must also acknowledge, that the current “bullhorn politics” represent an escalation. There is a reason for that. “Many Democrats in office today were community organizers. Going into the street to ‘upend the system’ with an apparently unlimited rights agenda is what professional activists do for a living.”

I wonder if most Americans are becoming weary of seeing the latest protest in the streets. Protesters holding signs and shaking their fists doesn’t resonate with voters who expect civil and rational discussions of important issues in Congress and state legislatures. Street protests and apocalyptic claims and denunciations don’t seem like the best way to bring about necessary change while strengthening the foundations of the republic.

I would hope that voters in the fall will choose somber and thoughtful voices over street protests and bullhorn politics. It’s a choice between those who want to build up and strengthen over those who want tear down and destroy.

Victor Davis Hanson recently wrote about the “Leftist Mind,” and that got my attention since I have recently written a booklet on the “The Liberal Mind.” My goal was to describe the foundational assumptions of a liberal mindset. Hanson instead reminded us of how leftists supported the Electoral College and every decision from the Supreme Court decision until recently.

A decade ago, Democrats loved the Electoral College. The “blue wall” states made the election and reelection of Barack Obama possible. Then the wall crumbled in 2016 to Trump, and now they condemn the Electoral College as a “relic of our anti-democratic founders.”

Leftist loved the Supreme Court decisions on abortion, school prayer, same-sex marriage, pornography, and Miranda rights. The “Left cheered the Court as it made the law and ignored legislatures and presidents.” They welcomed Justices appointed by Republican presidents who drifted leftward and provided the needed votes on “affirmative action to Roe v. Wade, to Obamacare.”

What was the response? “Was there any serious right-wing talk of packing the court with six additional justices to slow down its overreaching left-wing majority �” or of a mob massing at the home of a left-wing justice? Certainly not.”

But now that there is a narrow majority of originalist justices on the Court, “the once-beloved Court is being slandered by leftist insurrectionists as illegitimate. Every sort of once unthinkable attack on the courts is now permissible.”

If you are looking for any consistency, you will not find it. Each of these examples illustrates the “end justifies the means” perspective of the Leftist Mind. And that’s why it is difficult to take many of these current arguments seriously.

The Supreme Court ruled that Coach Joseph Kennedy did not violate the Constitution when he went to the 50-yard-line after a game and offered a short prayer. It shouldn’t have taken seven years to come to that conclusion, but the fight for religious
liberty can sometimes be a long process.

The court’s decision generated lots of comments and commentary. But I found the comments by George Will to be especially helpful. He is a great writer, but also comes to the conversation as an agnostic observer. He expected other secularists to “bring religious
zeal to their crusade against the incipient theocracy they detect in every religious observance allowed in the public square.”

Justice Neil Gorsuch argued in the majority opinion that “the free speech and free exercise clauses ‘work in tandem,’ protecting both expressive and noncommunicative religious activities.” The First Amendment was intended to protect religious speech, even a quiet prayer at the end of a football game.

Critics of religious liberty cases love to quote Thomas Jefferson. In fact, Justice Sonia Sotomayor cited the Jefferson phrase about “the separation of church and state.” George Will reminds us that “two days after he wrote the letter endorsing a ‘wall of separation’ between church and state, he attended, as he occasionally did, religious services in the House of Representatives.” Yes, religious services were held in government buildings.

He also reminds us of Jefferson’s live-and-let-live philosophy found in his “Notes on the State of Virginia.” “It does me no injury for my neighbor to say there are twenty gods, or no god. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg.”

The Supreme Court ruled correctly, and the critics would do well to go back and read the Constitution and some of the writings of Thomas Jefferson.

George Barna has been doing an extensive inventory of the worldviews of Americans through the Cultural Research Center at Arizona Christian University. He was on my radio program last week to talk about two of his most recent surveys dealing with truth and morality.

Past generations of Americans viewed God as the basis for truth. Not only has that changed for the general population, it is also changed significantly within the church. He found that there were certain groups that rejected the idea of absolute truth. That would be members of the LGBT community, political liberals, spiritual skeptics, Democrats, and young people under the age of 50.

By contrast, those most likely to see God as the basis of truth are the group called SAGECons. That stands for Spiritually Active Governance Engaged Conservative Christians. Nearly nine out of ten (87%) point to God as the source of truth and more than six in ten (62%) recognize the existence of absolute moral standards.

In his next report, he decided to see how we apply moral principles in real life situations. The questions ranged from telling a “white lie” to failing to pay back a loan to speeding to abortion. It was troubling to see what percentage of Americans felt that some of these behaviors were not even a moral issue. In some cases, a significant percentage might have believed it was a moral issue but that it was morally acceptable in today’s society.

Another troubling finding was what Barna calls a “seismic shift” in Christian views about morality. For example, born-again Christians in the survey were three times as likely to say they rely on the Bible for primary moral guidance. But less than half (48%) actually do so.

The latest Barna surveys are a reminder to pastors and other Christian teachers that we need to make the case for moral absolutes based on God’s Word.