MORALITY

Speech by John F. McManus

President, The John Birch Society

Boston Tea Party, Faneuil Hall

December 12, 2010

I have been asked upon occasion at a patriotic rally: “What’s morality got to do
with it?” My ready answer is, “Everything!”

I’m not a priest or a preacher. My assignment here is to give a short talk about
morality. I’ll do my best knowing full well that I can’t even begin to improve on Jesus
Christ’s Sermon on the Mount or the Ten Commandments given to Moses by God the
Father. It is these directives from on high that should guide men. If men do accept them
and strive to live by what God has prescribed, tyranny can be prevented.

The man for whom the state of Pennsylvania is named is the 17th Century’s
William Penn. He should be known for a very important message he gave to his people.
He told them, “You will either be ruled by God or by a tyrant.” He, of course, believed
there is a God and he further believed that God established rules for the human race.
Those rules can be termed Morality. Where does one go to learn what truly constitutes
morality? I suggest St. Thomas Aquinas, St. Augustine, and many other great saints.

If morality doesn’t guide mankind, explained Penn, tyranny will fill the vacuum.
That’s a lesson much in need of widespread dissemination today.

An entire century after William Penn, some brave and far-seeing men created our
nation. They, too, believed in the importance of morality.

James Madison, the Father of the U.S. Constitution, knew that limiting
government with the Constitution wasn’t enough. He said:

We have staked the whole future of American civilization, not upon the
power of government, far from it. We have staked the future of all our political
institutions upon the capacity of mankind for self-government; upon the capacity
of each and all of us to govern ourselves according to the Ten Commandments of
God.

John Adams concurred with Madison’s view and added the following wise
assessment:

Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is
wholly inadequate to the government of any other.”
 George Washington agreed with Madison and Adams and proceeded to take a
step further. He said:

And let us with caution indulge the supposition that morality can be
maintained without religion. Whatever may be conceded to the influence of
refined education on minds of peculiar structure, reason and experience both
forbid us to expect that national morality can prevail in exclusion of religious
principle.

Washington was saying that no one should create his own type of morality and
that all should turn to religion for guidance.

350 years before Christ, a Greek philosopher named Isocrates expounded on the
need for Morality when he stated:

Virtue in not advanced by written laws but by the habits of everyday life.
Where there is a multitude of specific laws, it is a sign that the state is badly
governed. It is not by legislation, but by morals, that states are well directed,
since men who are badly reared will venture to transgress even laws which are
drawn with exactness, whereas those who are well brought up will be willing to
respect even a simple code.

First Century Roman historian Tacitus warned that a people “can be vanquished
by their vices as easily as by force of arms.” There’s a good lesson in his statement.

And the prophet Isaias told the people of his day, “Woe to you that call evil good,
and good evil: that put darkness for light and light for darkness; that put bitter for sweet
and sweet for bitter.”

All of which is to say that a standard has been established for all to live by. It is
called morality. And the consequences of not adhering to that standard are immense –
both in time and in eternity.

Engraved on the hearts of all men is something called natural law. It can be
summarized as “Do good and avoid evil.” Those who will violate the natural law will
violate any law. We live at a time when many skirt the natural law, seeking instead what
is evil rather than what is good, choosing darkness rather than light, seeking self-pleasure
and inordinate self-aggrandizement, rather than living a just and decent life.

But even more, there are some who work diligently to corrupt their fellow human
beings - knowing full well that a person who violates objective morality is a person who
can be dominated. As William Penn said, “You will either be ruled by God or you will
be ruled by a tyrant.” Those who are lured to wallow in evil are, in the main, incapable
of the kind of self-rule that characterizes true freedom – both personally and nationally.
 Looking around our country today, we should ask: Why is there so much
pornography? Why are those who violate their nature given respectability? Why do
movies and television programs feature so much smut and violence? Why is there so
much drug use, crime and broken families? The answer is simple: These departures from
the standard established by God are being promoted, even glorified. Those who corrupt
their fellow men know that people immersed in filth and violence become unruly. The
unruliness creates a need for the multiplicity of laws pointed to by Isocrates. A
multiplicity of laws leads to tyrannical government.

We live at a time when standards have been lowered, when evil is portrayed as
good, when darkness is portrayed as light. In 1933, a group calling themselves humanists
created a Humanist Manifesto that denied the existence of God, challenged the worth of
religion, trashed the idea of creation, and called for a socialized economic order. One of
its signers was John Dewey, the educator whose ideas have deeply infected our nation’s
schools.

Forty years later in 1973, a larger group of humanists issued Humanist Manifesto
II that expanded on the fallacies of its predecessor. Still denying God’s existence, the
newer version insisted that religion does a disservice to man, that ethics is situational, and
that national sovereignty should be scrapped in favor of a world community.

One of the signers of the 1973 Humanist Manifesto II was the Reverend Joseph
Fletcher whose book entitled Situation Ethics has led so many to believe that there are no
absolute rights and wrongs, that all in the arena of ethics depends on the situation.
Wherever situation ethics prevails, there are no ethics; there is no absolute Morality.
Humanist Manifesto II won praise from the New York Times that called it “A philosophy
for Survival.”

Another signer of Humanist Manifesto II was Alan Guttmacher of Planned

Parenthood infamy. His organization murders the unborn and does so with federal
funding, meaning that each of us is forced to subsidize the murder of the innocent. If
morality reigned in our nation, that would never be tolerated and everyone responsible for
it would be repudiated.

Another signer of Humanist Manifesto II is Betty Friedan, the originator of

women’s liberation and its attack on family life and the exalted place of women as
mothers and homemakers. Humanists are the equivalent of a deadly virus that is
destroying the soul of America.

The moral sense of too many Americans has been dulled. Unless it is
reenergized, tyranny will be the ultimate result. Morality must be restored. There are, in
our country, many who point to the need for biblical morality, as do I. But I am also a
Roman Catholic and it is the Catholic interpretation of the Bible that I recommend.

There is a God and He gave us our rights, not government. The taking of
innocent life via abortion can never be justified and must be stopped. Thievery –
especially the sophisticated version called inflation – must be condemned. Lying has to
be shunned. And politicians who swear a solemn oath and then refuse to abide by it must
be replaced. If we are to remain a free people living in an independent nation, a huge
turnaround must be accomplished. Let it begin with each of us. By our personal example
and through our willingness to tell others the consequences of immorality, we will see
our nation and its people reverse course.

Perhaps you’ve heard of 19th Century poet James Russell Lowell. In one of his
works entitled The Present Crisis, he wrote:

Once to every man and nation comes the moment to decide,

In the strife of truth with falsehood, for the good or evil side.

Note that he referred to every nation, not only to every man. In this same poem,
Lowell went on to lament the situation as he saw it, and then told of hope. His lament
was:

Truth forever on the scaffold, Wrong forever on the throne.

It sometimes seems as though truth will always be on the scaffold and error
always on the throne. But there was hope in Lowell’s day, just as there is hope in ours.
Lowell expressed hope as follows:

Yet that scaffold sways the future, and behind the dim unknown,
Standeth God within the shadow, keeping watch above his own.

The “his own” referred to by Lowell are those who follow God’s moral principles
and belong to His religion. Truth doesn’t have to be on the scaffold! And isn’t it time to
get Wrong off the throne? If our country is being taken into a moral swamp, it can with
God’s help be rescued. Not by God alone, but by a rising tide of morally based people
who know how to get out of a swamp, and who are determined to repudiate all those who
want America bogged down in the muck of a swamp.

The John Birch Society that I represent is anti-Communist, anti-Big Government,

anti-Federal Reserve, anti-federal income tax, and anti- almost everything federal. But it
is also an organization that promotes morality, even issuing in 1970 what was labeled
“The John Birch Resolutions.”

The John Birch Society motto says it all: “Less government, more responsibility,
and … with God’s help … a better world.” Less government under the U.S. Constitution.
More responsibility under the Ten Commandments. And that combination, with God’s
help only because we have earned it with our own efforts, will indeed lead to a better
world.

Thank you very much.