LEGISLATING MORALITY IS NOT TABOO

Some people are pro-choice on the abortion issue because they believe government should have no say in the matter. I disagree. I also disagree with the notion that the mother's so-called right to privacy justifies her right to choose abortion.

But I want to focus on the flawed argument that the government has no business legislating morality. Absent a Constitutional amendment on abortion, the matter ought to be decided by the individual states. Those arguing against legislating morality are probably opposed to government at any level making these decisions.

Those who advocate legalizing drugs make the argument that government shouldn't interfere with individual behavior even of the self-destructive type, as long as no one else is directly harmed. I don't buy the argument that individual drug use is solely a private matter. But abortion is even less so.

The only way to claim that abortion is a private matter is to deny that the unborn is a human being. It's one thing to argue that the mother's right to abort is superior to the unborn's right to live. But if the unborn is a human being, then killing it is not a private matter.

I've heard some people say, "I don't know or care if an unborn is a human being, the government has no business interfering with the private decisions of the mother." But some anti-government pro-choicers mean something else when they say the government shouldn't legislate morality.

A recent e-mailer asserted that the First Amendment's Establishment Clause (which he erroneously referred to as the mandated separation of church and state) precluded the government from outlawing abortion in the early stages of pregnancy.

He said that since our society considers brain death actual death, then we must concede that brain activity and the capacity for cognition and self-awareness are essential to personhood. As such, "an argument may be reasonably made that a cell/blastocyst/embryo is not a person in the legal sense ... When you get to the stage of the fetus, and the development of the cortex, you then get brain activity, and the argument for personhood becomes much more compelling."

Believing that he'd established this point, the e-mailer went on to say that since the pre-fetal unborn is not a person, then the only justification for protecting it is the spiritual belief that the soul inhabits "the cell" at the moment of conception. Since that is by definition a religious and moral determination, the government is precluded, on First Amendment grounds of separation of church and state, from outlawing these pre-fetal abortions.

So by "legislating morality," this e-mailer meant "legislating spirituality."

The e-mailer is wrong. Our national, state and local governments have legislated morality since the inception of this country with the full blessing of the Framers of the Constitution. Almost all of our criminal laws and many of our civil ones are based on moral judgments, such as those embodied in the Ten Commandments and elsewhere in Scripture. This entire body of law, based on moral and spiritual judgments, was ratified by our Founding Fathers as they drafted and adopted the First Amendment. They knew there was no conflict.

I dare say that some people then, as now, disagreed with many of these laws on moral grounds. But it is a gross revision of history, and frankly absurd, to argue that the Framers meant to preclude the government from passing laws that had their roots in moral and spiritual beliefs.

~David Limbaugh of Cape Girardeau is a lawyer, author and syndicated columnist.