By Michele Gama Sosa
America is sick.
From mass shootings, sexual degeneracy, and abortion, to mental illness, and ever-more sadistic crime taking place on our streets — all is not well in the Land of the Free.
Our politicians, whether Democrat or Republican, propose more laws that only give them more power. When it comes to improving public morality, politicians step back in fear of the latest left-wing slur for daring to note that such a libertine, violent, child-murdering society is not healthy.
And no doubt, they will say how giving them more money and electing them into office will solve the problems. Yet nothing changes and the Constitution is eroded daily.
Fortunately, Republican upstart Vivek Ramaswamy has had the courage to diagnose America’s collapsing society as the result of our country’s loss of religious faith.
Now, what does any of this have to do with the Constitution? Everything. The Democrat argument against many of our Constitutional rights is that Americans are too free, making it impossible for society to work toward the “greater good.”
Obviously, the Democrats don’t care about any of that – just power. But even in their disingenuousness, they have a point: the Constitution, on the surface, is just waiting to be abused. After all, unrestricted gun ownership sounds like the perfect recipe for the violence we see today. Freedom of speech is a road to lies, pornography and sexual degeneracy.
But here is what Mr. Ramaswamy has left unsaid: Religion is basically a straightjacket on society’s worst impulses. The word literally means “that which binds,” and provides people with a clear distinction between right and wrong based on immutable principles handed down by an almighty power that watches us from above.
We see this in Christianity with its emphasis on obeying Jesus’ teachings on the penalty of eternal punishment. But Mr. Ramaswamy’s Hinduism has it too in its exhortation to follow the sanatana dharma (the cosmic law) on the penalty of punishment after death. Judaism, whose name originates from the Hebrew word for gratitude toward God and His law, similarly expects its followers to ground their lives in God’s Commandments.
Checks on murder, rape, theft, and sexual immorality are almost always among these precepts. Checks that, as part of Natural Law, are divine in origin — not as atheists would allege, common human decency. They are also the basis of the Constitution’s rights, from life, liberty, and property down to Amendment 10. Thus, the laws of the Constitution become sacred because they flow from God Himself, not from the likes of Joe Biden or J.B. Pritzker.
Alexander Hamiton wrote in a suggestion for George Washington’s Farewell Address that national morality cannot be maintained to the exclusion of religion. How right he was.
Our leaders by virtue of their oaths of office are guardians of the divine Natural Law as enshrined in the Constitution. If they violate it, there will be hell to pay later. But when this role is lost, don’t be surprised at the rampant corruption, overreach and contempt our elected leaders have for our Constitution, the religious belief that underpins it, and us. It is pretty clear this has been lost when you see people swearing their oaths of office on comic books in a mockery of the divine origin of the Constitution’s laws.
And the rot spreads downward. Without John Adams’ “moral and religious people,” who are willing to restrain themselves from taking the laws of the Constitution into excess or violation, you get the unfolding hellscape we have today. Freedom of speech becomes the freedom to slander and produce the most disgusting and degenerate “entertainment,” from pornography to transgenderism and everything in between.
In the past, mass shootings were rare, even with mail-order submachine guns. You simply did not go kill innocent people – particularly women and children in schools and churches. Even the Mafia knew that. Today, though, the Second Amendment starts to look dangerous as criminals abuse the right to firearms to commit ever-more horrific atrocities on the streets of places like Chicago and Nashville. Violence becomes a way of solving local disputes over a ball in a yard.
Those who in the past might have relied on a religious community and faith to help them through their dark moments might turn to substance abuse or various online communities that radicalize them into violent, cultish ideologies or convince them to chop their genitals off.
In other words, the loss of religion changes people’s focus from the safeguarding of God’s law and the rights therein and shifts it to the pursuit of money, sex, and power for their own sake.
Vivek Ramaswamy is still a long-shot candidate. But he alone has had the courage to approach America’s moral rot from the perspective of religious decline – something even many conservative Republicans don’t dare touch for fear of leftist name-calling.
Even if he loses, Mr. Ramaswamy has forced Americans of all faiths to consider how essential their belief is to maintaining limits so that our Supreme Law is not used and abused to destroy us. That, perhaps, will be Mr. Ramaswamy’s greatest service to this country.