Society's need for a spiritual and moral perspective

Q: U.S. Catholic bishops are defending their direct involvement in congressional deliberations over health-care reform, saying that church leaders have a duty to raise moral concerns on any issue, including abortion rights and health care for the poor. Do you agree? What role should religious leaders have -- or not have -- in government policymaking?

That one's ideas proceed from a religious perspective does not make them inferior to ones that flow from a completely secular worldview. Otherwise, laws against murder and stealing would be repealed because they are two of the Ten Commandments. I can't imagine a society absent a spiritual and moral perspective. Wait, yes I can. Totalitarian governments unrestrained by a power higher than the reigning politician, monarch or dictator have contributed to untold misery for their own people and the world.

Unrestrained science results in treating humans as no higher than laboratory rats. There are noted scientists and "ethicists" who believe that. Is anyone comfortable that 53 million (and counting) babies have been aborted in America? Even the pro-choicers cling to a flimsy unease about such things, thus paying lip service to the horror perpetrated on the family tree. A society unrestrained is a society capable of anything and everything. To ignore a moral voice is to listen to that other voice which seeks our destruction.

And in the matter of the District of Columbia government, which is trying to force the Catholic Church to accept same-sex marriage as a price for continuing to receive D.C. taxpayer dollars to help run its considerable programs for the poor, I paraphrase the words of Thomas Jefferson: " To compel a church to furnish funds for the propagation of ideas he disbelieves and abhors is sinful and tyrannical."

By Cal Thomas | November 18, 2009; 10:25 AM ET Save & Share:
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