Sunday, March 04, 2007

The Code

During the murder-torture of Teresa Schiavo, the odious phrase, “We are a nation of law,” kept coming up. Both Bushes, Jeb and George, used it to avoid doing what any honorable man in a position to do so would have done, namely, stopped the murder-torture of Terry Schiavo.

One could make a case, and I would agree with it, that our forefathers, while maintaining Christian customs, severed, by means of the U. S. Constitution, the connection between Christianity and law. Now in the 21st century, without the benefit of Christian behavior and customs, our law stands alone, secular and supreme.

But in the Christian era of Europe and its satellites, there was an honor code that stood above the law. When the law didn’t serve a Christian end, men of honor defied it. If one reads through the novels of Scott or the works of the older historians, one can see that the law often depended on who was in and who was out. Men of honor needed a code that was much less changeable. And it was not the code of the pagan, it was the code of the Christian, exemplified in Nicholas Nickleby’s “Stop! This shall not go on,” and in the Christian knights of the original Ku Klux Klan who also declared, “Stop! This shall not go on.”

If I don’t see the honor code, I don’t see Christianity. Bush can blab about his ‘born again’ status all year long, but I know he is not a Christian because he has no honor. He has nothing but the secularized law, and the law, divorced from Christianity, is a whore.

When, in some distant, future time if you are young enough now, you see men of honor riding to do battle against those who would use the law for evil ends, then you will know that Christianity is once again the Faith of Western man.

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