Judges, Judges Everywhere

 

 In the famous poem, Rime of the Ancient Mariner, Samuel Taylor Coleridge wrote, “Water, water, everywhere, nor any drop to drink.”  I often feel that same kind of ironic frustration in my own heart these days. 

            As I observe the now pervasive and long unchallenged Marxist turmoil and darkness which has touched this once so bright and hopeful land, an involuntarily question rises to the foreground.  “How can this possibly be?”

            And, then my anger flairs and forms itself into this little copycat axiom. “Judges, judges everywhere, and no fine mind betwixt.”

            Obviously, America has now been deeply darkened by Satan’s Marxist onslaught.  And, our most substantial defenses against that evil attack are two:  God’s close friendship and the graceful laws that he gave us to defend against such treacherous internal enemies. 

            But, the reality is this.  First, as a nation, sometime back we began to break faith with that divine friendship.  Our generations began to freshly fall again for The Great Lie of the ages - this lie. “Then the serpent said to the woman, ‘You will not surely die. For God knows that in the day you eat of it [the desire for self-determination] your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.’” [Brackets added]

            And so, in previous years, we have again started to widely trade God’s truth and graceful daily guidance in our personal lives and, ultimately, in our nation for our own arrogant thoughts and directions.  And thus, day by day, we have increasingly drawn away from his love and blessing in favor of our own confused and competing personal druthers.

            And now, our second substantial national defense has also been deeply compromised.  As that relational distance between God and the nation has widened over time, the slithering darkness of Satan's Marxism has found opportunity to dumb down our ever more God-estranged national mind.  And now, we truly struggle to be able to employ our laws to effectively defend and protect the quality of our national life against the onslaught of our Marxist enemies. 

                Indeed, it has become so self-evident.  Our just laws are still very much up to that task but our judges and other legal minds still seem stuck deep in the mental mire of those more ancient and inflexible interpretations of those laws.  

            And, this judicial ineptitude often renders our good and capable laws, nevertheless, feckless in the face of criminal elements.  And, the very same is true for the Marxist usurpers who would overthrow our noble way of life by the newly unique and often existential issues they have brought upon us.

            It is as if our judges no longer understand this most indispensable necessity for securing true justice: Legal and Right must always be made to agree.  When Legal and Right are allowed to stand in disagreement, you do not have justice – you have a travesty of justice.

             For example, if a drug dealer goes free because he was not Mirandized and informed of his rights while being handcuffed,  Legal is satisfied but Right is certainly not. A criminal has gone free to strike again. 

         Or, if a leftist DA simply doesn't want to prosecute a violent mugger - it may be Legal, by some errant stretch, for the prosecutor to abstain from his duty. But to let a violent criminal go free while his victims suffer will never satisfy Right.  

            And, it may be Legal to immerse an image of Jesus in urine and call it art.  And it may be legal to burn an American flag whose red stripes represent the blood of patriots spilled in noble service under that flag. But it can certainly never be Right to callously demean sacredness.  

        And today, the only thing that makes such obscene things legal, is not the constitution, but the inarticulate jurists who interpret the constitution without factoring in that indispensable necessity for securing true justice: Legal and Right must always be made to agree.

            Indeed, the standard of our justice system must ever be this absolute agreement of Legal and a Right which is based in the larger moral reality.  And, if one of those elements, Legal or Right,  has to be reinterpreted in order to make it so, it must always be Legal that is adjusted. Judicious interpretation is, in fact, the actual  role and prerogative of the conscientious human jurist.

            If instead, however, we disappoint Right to satisfy Legal, we have actually altered and diminished the larger moral reality.  And, that reality is far more sacrosanct than Legal realities.  That larger moral reality is the very foundation on which the scales of justice and the integrity and sanity of society actually rest. 

            Indeed, it is when these two elements, Legal and Right, are deceptively wrenched apart by dark and/or inarticulate minds that justice miscarries.  That should never be allowed to stand.  

            We should never have to say, "Well, it wasn't right, but it was legal."  At that point we need to be fixing what we're calling legal to match what we know to be truly right.

            But, in today’s American judiciary, all too often, that discord is, indeed, merely allowed to stand.  And, it is in those unnecessarily frustrating times that my own mind and temperament does that recoil thing. And, invariably, it is then that the poet’s framing of my little axiom again pops to mind, “Judges, judges everywhere and no fine mind betwixt.”

Oh Lord, please give us mentally nimble judges, whose interpretations of our laws can wisely face down the enemies of our nation – all while absolutely maintaining a happy and faithful marriage between Legal and Right.