Following up on last night's post, I had a discussion with S. over dinner about the question of where our laws come from. Justice Scalia, and others, vocally insist that the authority for our laws comes from God. Without debating that assertion itself, I'd adamantly insist that such claims actually serve to undermine our laws rather than support them.
While for many Americans, the assumption of God's existence is an unquestionable absolute, there are many, many other Americans who see that assumption as erroneous, debatable, questionable, uncertain and/or irrelevant. We (and I speak here as one of latter, though I won't say which one, perhaps because I'm not certain myself at any given moment) aren't willing to agree that the inalienability of our rights depends upon the existence of a deity or upon the correct interpretation of such a deity's wishes by various individuals. We insist that the inalienability of our rights stems from our status as sentient creatures and members of the human race and not from the caprice of some spirit in the sky.
I realize that this assumption is as open to question as any other, that there are people who insist that the same or similar rights inhere in all living creatures, and that to draw the line at our own species is no less myopic than to draw the line at one's own race, religion or gender. Well, I disagree, for reasons I won't elaborate upon here. (But I'd point out that that argument could be extended to plants, to inert matter, to anything at all, actually, based on how widely one chooses to cast one's net. Yes, to a certain extent it's arbitrary, and time has proven that some definitions are too narrow. I'm willing to live with mine until someone can convince me otherwise.)
But to say that the rights we enjoy in America today derive from God is nonsense. No revealed book of the Judeo-Christian tradition upon which the founders relied provides, for example, for the rights of women or minorities that are now embedded in our laws. To the few who continue to point to this as evidence that we've gone astray, I say what I say to Justice Scalia: our laws may be inspired by the religious convictions of men who lived hundreds of years ago and of men and women who live today. But they have also been improved upon and updated through the inspiration of people of little or no faith and of different faiths and they are no less inalienable because of that.
