I knew this was going to happen. As I predicted in my first
column on this issue, anyone with enough backbone to say that
something is immoral can expect jeers.
I knew this was going to happen.
As I predicted in my first column on this issue, anyone with enough backbone to say that something is immoral can expect jeers. And here are Dennis Taylor and Ben Anderson fulfilling my expectations.
Some corrections, Mr. Taylor: I am a paleo-conservative, not a neo-con. If visiting the Dispatch weblog a handful of times qualifies me as a blogger, so be it. And I had no idea your wife worked for the planning department. How strange that you would imagine that your private life is so widely discussed. Ben Anderson makes a spirited defense of the status quo, including the observation that “morality does not appear in the U.S. Constitution.” He makes the conventional, tired excuses for the existence of zoning and planning. And he makes it quite clear that he will never take mere morality into account in his planning activities.
This would be of no interest except that Mr. Anderson is a member of the Gilroy Planning Commission. I have no idea what Mr. Anderson’s political aspirations are, but the Planning Commission is frequently used as a rung on the ladder to the City Council. In one way, serving on the Planning Commission is good training. A huge proportion of Council’s agenda is to approve or disapprove building projects, and being able to stay awake during planning commission meetings is good preparation for staying awake during council meetings.
On the other hand, anyone who can stomach a whole term as Planning Commissioner is going to be inured to the idea that the city government can meddle in private property decisions, as Mr. Anderson demonstrates. As Mr. Anderson points out, the word morality does not appear in the U.S. Constitution. Neither do the words zoning, or planning department, but for very different reasons.
The Constitution is a document that limits the power of our government. The idea that a government bureaucrat would decree how many fire-sprinklers should be installed in a private home would be anathema to the founders. Contrariwise, morality, specifically Judeo-Christian morality, provided the foundation for the Constitution.
As John Adams said, “We have no government armed in power capable of contending with human passions unbridled by morality and religion. Our Constitution was made only for a religious and moral people. It is wholly inadequate for the government of any other.”
George Washington was more emphatic: “It is impossible to rightly govern the world without God and the Bible.”(In modern day business parlance, what the founders constructed would be called a “tight-loose” organization, that is, a place where individuals control themselves with morality, so that restrictive laws are unnecessary. But I digress.)
Mr. Anderson writes (and I am taking these phrases and stringing them together because they bespeak a common theme; I do not believe that I am altering his meaning): “What is ‘moral’ anyway?… I will not begin to define for you what morals are… I have not the right. No one person can define or direct the morality of another…. I respect her individual morality but steadfastly refuse her the right to impose her morality on another. How she presumes to is baffling.”
I hope I can clear up Mr. Anderson’s bafflement. Long ago, when I was young and foolish and arrogant, a leftist radical and a card-carrying member of the American Civil Liberties Union, I constructed my individual ethics. I called it ethics instead of morality, because morality was constrictive and old-fashioned but ethics were cool.
By the time I was 26, it was obvious that my individual ethics were not working very well. In fact, all my righteousness was as filthy rags. So slowly, I began to adopt conventional morality: truth, honesty, promise-keeping, all that ridiculous outmoded stuff. I got married. We had a baby. When I was 36, God got my attention by suspending the laws of physics and biology. (The technical term is miracle.) I read the Bible and adopted His moral code. I do not always manage to live up to it.
To answer your questions, Mr. Anderson, morality is either the rules God wrote so that we can live together, or the distilled wisdom of millennia of human experience. In either case, it is not my morality.
Cynthia Anne Walker is a mother of three, a mathematics teacher and a former engineer. She is a published, independent author. Her column appears each Friday.
