As many of our readers know I am a political neophyte. I didn’t really concern myself with the world of politics beyond my dining room table or outside the operating room until I retired from the practice of surgery and medicine—Socrates told us there is politics in everything we do.
Over the years I have had some surprises. Some online debates with a former Idaho Attorney General not named David LeRoy, showed me that even those practicing at the highest levels of the legal profession can lack common sense. I learned during a debate on the BSU Campus with a young professional lady (she might have not even known that she was a lady) that if Obama Care didn’t give her access to birth control, she wouldn’t have the money needed to board her horse! I learned that people apparently have different priorities. A tough choice for her was different than the choices I have to make. One of my best friends did struggle for weeks about the decision for birth control for his own horse—in his case this required a surgical procedure.
I believe the most surprising lesson I have learned over the past twelve years is that politics is not only always local—it is always personal. We make political judgments too often based on our own life experiences and our emotions—both are very poor predicates for making decisions because neither is necessarily tied to an underlying moral predicate which should serve as a basis for our moral legal and political philosophies. We oftentimes use political stands as a means to justify our actions, We should justify our actions, and our political stands based on a more solid scaffolding of Biblical and Natural Law Principles. I mean the wisdom of thousands of prophets, philosophers, Saints, statesmen and even our Savior by any stretch of logic is a more encompassing standard upon which to decide, than the small history of our own lives. I very much like the words used to classically define THE NATURAL LAW, “A Law made known in the hearts of all men by the faculties of reason and revelation”. We don’t have to be theologians or law professors to know the difference between right and wrong, but on the tough cases consulting all sources is not a bad idea, and putting the wrong source above the most relevant source can be devasting.
Many of these tough issues fall into the category of “political values”. I think about such diverse issues as abortion and the right to life. I think about the issues central to the topics of “woke” and DEQI. What about the legalization of drugs? The Catholic Church has struggled for centuries about “just war theory”.
Our Founding Fathers argued about very basic Natural Law Rights. The idea of property, of contract and covenant, had their bases in Natural and Biblical Law. These aren’t easy questions and men and women in Black Robes make decisions daily in our Courts about what is meant by “contract” or what is “self-defense” and a thousand other things. If they only look to their own life experiences and emotions to inform themselves about their decisions, there will be a thousand different decisions.
I chuckle when I watch an athletic event with informed parties of one team over another. Pass interference, traveling in basketball, called strike three on the outside corner, all have very definite rules that should guide the referees and umpires as to how they should make the call. Yet when the call is made the opinions almost all the time come down to who the partisan is rooting for. Thank God we have rules—predicates, that can justify the decisions of those asked to interpret the rules.
In our Plantation Garden City neighborhood, we have an issue that has divided neighbors. As homeowners, we have all signed a contract with the Homeowners Association Board (HOA) that we will all abide by the rules of the CC&Rs—the Covenants that define the Rights of each party to each other under the umbrella of the Master Declaration Contract (MDC). The contract is between the (HOA) and each individual homeowner. It was written in 1977 by a man who was my next-door neighbor for 20 years and who was my personal attorney. It has been reviewed by well over 700 homeowners and their attorneys as property has changed hands over the decades. The property includes the golf course, yet the agent acting for the new owner of the golf course wants to be made exempt from the terms of the (MDC). The agent makes the claim that only he can save the golf course from further development, yet he has already created land use changes and requested zoning changes that signal other motives on his part.
At least one HOA Board member seems to be aligned with the agent acting on behalf of ownership of the golf course. The words sycophantic and obsequious come to mind but they may be too harsh. They are asking The Plantation Homeowners owners to vote on whether they should fulfill their fiduciary duty of enforcing the terms of the (MDC). We simply want to know, does the (MDC) apply to the golf course(?). We will go to a judge to find out. This strategy of dodging responsibility is well known to those familiar with the Easter Narrative in St. Luke. I like to call it the “Pontius Pilate dodge”. In the military we called it “who do you do”. It basically is a strategy for creating cover for a person or those in leadership positions from taking a tough moral position, that may be unpopular but also carries with it the responsibility of “fiduciary”.
Grown up responsible people understand that unpopular decisions may be difficult to make no matter the moral or legal predicates that underlie those decisions. WE want people in those positions who will respect the rules of the game—the law.
WE don’t want partisans to root for an outcome. Calling balls and strikes, applying existing rules and laws to a complex situation requires grown-up leadership. It is not like having to decide if you want birth control for yourself or if you want to board your horse. Or maybe it is as simple as that!
Happy New Year
