Sexual Liberation, Natural Law, And the Modern Resistance to Fixed Moral Norms

 By Dr. R. Scott Clark - Posted at The Heidelblog:

Posted March 12, 2025 

In the 1960s it was common to hear American civil rights leaders appeal to natural justice and natural law in defense of the extension of civil rights to oppressed peoples, namely African Americans. Those arguments were compelling to Americans because they are fundamental to the nature of the country. Our founding documents, after all, appeal to “self-evident” truths, among which is the truth that “all men,” including African Americans, “are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” Martin Luther King and others brilliantly prosecuted America for her crimes against natural justice.

Since the heyday of the civil rights movement, many (but not all) of those whose voices resonated so strongly with appeals to natural justice, in favor of liberation, have been quite resistant to the appeal to the same natural justice when it also dictates restraint.

In the sixteenth century, Calvin had a word for the Genevan party who resisted moral restrictions of any kind: Libertines. For them freedom from restraint was paramount. Absolute freedom from restraint, however, does not produce more freedom. The French Revolution (about which virtually everyone seems to have forgotten) did not actually produce genuine freedom, but rather produced terror and tyranny. In this regard R. R. Reno has another helpful, thoughtful essay today in First Things exploring the “glaring moral failure” of Higher Education, namely the development of a “culture of intimidation” of those who dissent from the late modern consensus among ruling elites on homosexuality.1 Apparently, liberalism only goes so far.

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