Tuesday, October 28, 2003

Read something worthwhile by SecretAgentMan

Read something worthwhile, by SecretAgentMan. Gain some perspective about lawyers, sin, law, salvation, and the kind of people God is leading us to be, instead of being the kind of people we settle for. It's a little long, but worth the read. Here's a snippet:


They're trying to kill Terri Schiavo because our country, our culture and its laws, owe fealty to a false god who is coldness itself, a false god of death. We worship this god in our hospitals, in our entertainments, our philosophies, our art and education, in our laws, and by our work and our professions.[5] Every sin, not just the sins of lawyers and judges, pays homage to this god because the wages of sin is death. As it did 2,000 years ago, and in every age before and since, sin stalks the earth like a lion, hungry for its victim. It's eaten ten million babies, it won't notice Mrs. Schiavo. But we notice her, because we see she is the victim our gutless way of life has staked out for the lion's jaws. The grease, the sleaze, the spirit of the world, covers everything, and when it's set against that sum a lawyer's greed and lust for position is small beer. Our salvation won't come from "better" law schools, "correct" constitutional jurisprudence, electoral victory for the "right" party, or any of the other bourgeois conceits that have whited our national sepulcher these past fifty years or more. Our salvation will come from a hundred million personal miracles that will demand the truth in schools, righteousness in law, sanity in politics. The reason why using lawyers and judges to fight lawyers and judges always seems to resemble Canute forbidding the tide to come in is because, well, the tide's coming in. We don't need Canute. We need St. Boniface to chop down the sacred tree of death, to spur our savage hearts to prodigies of love. Nothing else will do, because our God won't settle His case.

So, to return to the reader's questions:"They say that in spite of this bill Jeb Bush has just passed, the decision is ultimately going to rest with the courts again." Yes, that's true -- a nation of people who are cowardly enough to permit a great evil always need to pretend that it's being done by someone other than themselves. It has been some time since I've read our founding documents, but I don't recall that the judicial branch is supposed to be the final authority--is it? It doesn't matter. So long as men are the final authority, they will murder and rape each other no matter what branch of government they happen to occupy. "Where does the system of checks and balances ultimately end?" In Hell, unless men wake up from the American illusion that neatly constructed laws will supply,"by opposite and rival interests, the defect of better motives."[6] "And why is it that a governor can at will pardon someone on death row, but he can't simply intervene in this case?" When the victim is significant enough, even a governor's will must submit to the day's necessities, just as it did 2,000 years ago. Jeb Bush is a courageous man, and his actions so far have shown us the kind of miracles we can expect from the Sacred Heart of Jesus. But there are still too many deadened souls, too many would-be Pilates who, like Antonin Scalia, think "reaching the Governor's mansion" is the important thing in life, for Jeb Bush to turn back the tide of death single-handedly. By all means let's castigate unwholesome laws and the blind scribes who enforce them. But let's not be deluded into thinking that judges and lawyers are leading our collective slouch toward Bethlehem. "For we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places." Ephesians 6:12 (KJV). Anyone who thinks law firms and courtrooms are the kind of "high places" St. Paul had in mind isn't straining his neck enough.