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Entry: NY Times Not Ready for Prime-Time Link: http://www.takimag.com/sniperstower/article/ny_times_not_ready_for_prime_time#24047 Post contents: "I don’t favor an attempt to read Natural Law into our founding." And yet the Founding Fathers appealed to inalienable rights. If your account isn't going to take into account the natural law, then why bother with law to begin with? If the best you can say is, "This is traditional/conventional," then you've evaded the question "But is it just?" Surely there's a way to make positive law conform to natural law without committing ourselves to some universalistic message. To say that natural law is the realm of neocons is simply to grant them the field of play. The men at the Vendee were defending a Church that defended the natural law against revolutionaries who betrayed, defied, and distorted it. The First Vatican Council condemned fideism, the belief that only through tradition and faith could people come to God. The Council Fathers approved of natural reason and natural law. Many paleocons seem to want to revert to a legal fideism -- "Don't appeal to natural law -- that just messes up our fine legal traditions!" Which is why so many of them defend such stupid things as racial segregation and anti-miscegenation laws. To progress toward justice in areas where our ancestors simply were unjust is, for some paleocons, anathema. "My ancestors, right or wrong!" is their cry. Rubbish. Far better, "My ancestors, where, when, and because they were right!" Sent at: 2008 09 06