Pay Attention: First Dissolve Trust (and with it the economy), Then the Constitiution (and the nation)

“Judges should interpret the Constitution according to other nation’s legal norms. Sharia law [ see below]could apply to disputes in US courts. The United States constitutes an ‘axis of disobedience’ along with North Korea and Saddam-era Iraq.

Those are the views of the man on track to become one of the US government’s top lawyers: Harold Koh.

President Obama has nominated Koh – until last week the dean of Yale Law School – to be the State Department’s legal adviser. In that job, Koh would forge a wide range of international agreements on issues from trade to arms control and help represent our country in such places as the United Nations and the International Court of Justice.”[1]


He is a fan of “transnational legal process” whereby the distinctions between US and international law should vanish.

Let me state that the grounding of “self-evident truths” of the Declaration of Independence, and the grounding truth of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights in the United States is what has traditionally been called “natural law” and would be more properly dubbed “the law of the person.” Such a law derives from the experience of the human person in the act of Christian faith, which is a self-transcending act. Such an act produces a consciousness of the dignity of the self in the image of God as possessor of inalienable rights. Such a self-transcending act is the grounding of the separation of Church and State and the freedom of self-determination that is the core of human freedom, and freedom as it has been understood in the country – until the last half century.

Islam has no such experience of the dignity of the human person and human rights because it is not a religion of faith. Then-Cardinal Ratzinger had this comment:

“The modern idea of freedom is thus a legitimate product of the Christian environment; it could not have developed anywhere else. Indeed, one must add that it cannot be separated from this Christian environment and transplanted into any other system, as is shown very clearly today in the renaissance of Islam; the attempt to graft on to Islamic societies what are termed western standards cut loose from their Christian foundations misunderstands the internal logic of Islam as well as the historical logic to which these western standards belong, and hence this attempt was condemned to fail in this form. The construction of society in Islam is theocratic, and therefore monist and not dualist; dualism, which is the precondition for freedom, presupposes for its part the logic of the Christian thing.

In practice this means that it is only where the duality of Church and state, of the sacral and the political authority, remains maintained in some form or another that the fundamental pre-condition exists for freedom. Where the Church itself becomes the state freedom becomes lost. But also when the Church done away with as a pubic and publicly relevant authority, then too freedom is extinguished, because there the state once again claims completely for itself the justification of morality; in the profane post-Christian world it does not admittedly do this in the form of sacral authority but as an ideological authority – that means that the state becomes the party, and since there can no longer be any other authority of the same rank it once again becomes total itself. The ideological state is totalitarian; it must become ideological if it is not balanced by a free but publicly recognized authority of conscience. When this kind of duality does not exist the totalitarian system in unavoidable.

“With this the fundamental task of the Church’s political stance, as I understand it, has been defined; its aim must be to maintain this balance of a dual system as the foundation of freedom. Hence the Church must make claims and demands on public law and cannot simply retreat into the private sphere. Hence it must also take care on the other hand that Church and state remain separated and that belonging to the Church clearly retains its voluntary character.”[2]

As it stands Koh will be poised to be placed on the Supreme Court. The absence of any sense of reality [the being of the person] (and consciousness therein) as the north for the guidance of reason to be “right” appears in the following remark: “I’d rather have [former Supreme Court Justice Harry] Blackmun, who uses the wrong reasoning in Roe [v. Wade] to get the right results, and let other people figure out the right reasoning.’” This is the master statement of ideology. It would be the undoing of the country.

Sahria Law: Note: Sharia (Arabic: '‎شريعة transliteration: Šarīʿah) is the body of Islamic religious law. The term means "way" or "path to the water source"; it is the legal framework within which the public and private aspects of life are regulated for those living in a legal system based on Islamic principles of jurisprudence and for Muslims living outside the domain. Sharia deals with many aspects of day-to-day life, including politics, economics, banking, business, contracts, family, sexuality, hygiene, and social issues.

[1] Meghan Clyne, “Obama’s Most Perilous Legal Pick,” New York Post Marach 30, 2009, 21.
[2] J. Ratzinger, “Church, Ecumenism and Politics – Theology and the Church’s Political Stance,” Crossroad (1988) 162-163.

[1] Meghan Clyne, “Obama’s Most Perilous Legal Pick,” New York Post Marach 30, 2009, 21.
[2] J. Ratzinger, “Church, Ecumenism and Politics – Theology and the Church’s Political Stance,” Crossroad (1988) 162-163.