Speaking at the Democratic Convention in Chicago on 19 August 2024, Hillary Clinton triumphantly boasted that through the many “cracks” that the Democrats managed to put “in the highest, hardest glass ceiling”, she saw “the freedom to make our own decisions about our health, our lives, our loves, our families, the freedom to work with dignity and prosper, to worship as we choose or not, to speak our minds freely and honestly.” Assuming that Mrs Clinton spoke her mind freely and honestly when she described what she saw through the cracks she helped put in that glass ceiling, and, assuming that freedom means what it means and not something else, the former Secretary of State’s words must be interpreted as meaning that “health”, “life”, “loves”, “families”, “work”, “worship” and “speaking” shall all be protected against interference by the Government. By implication, neither she, nor her political party or the State has any business in providing or guaranteeing “health”, “dignity” and “prosperity”, since that would violate our God-given freedom to exercise our unalienable right to “pursue happiness” in ways we deem fit. However, given the fact that Mrs. Clinton and her fellow “Democrats” want nothing other than systematically interfering with and controlling practically every detail of Americans’ health, lives, loves, families, work, worship, and, most of all, their freedom to speak their minds, the “freedom” that she has in mind is most likely not the unalienable Liberty right endowed to us by the Creator of Man, but a freedom that is handed out as an entitlement or license by the Government, Court or Authority of her preference to those who “deserve” it and withheld from those who don’t.
Freedom and Society’s “moral Substance”
One might wonder how it is that people like Mrs Clinton can freely and honestly combine their intense hatred of your freedoms with their great affinity for it without contradicting themselves and being diagnosed as stark-staring mad and pathologically dishonest. Apparently, there’s more to this than just answering the question whether our fundamental freedoms come from God or from Government. The answer to this puzzle is actually quite simple and obvious. In the hands of Clinton-type people, freedom can be used as a very effective weapon to undermine, debase and destroy what they hate most of all: the “moral substance” of society. When the moral substance of a society can be molded, adulterated and obliterated, practices such as euthanasia, enforced sterilization, elective abortion and gender-affirming surgery and medication can be introduced into law as rights or interests by embedding them in the person’s fundamental freedoms and right to privacy. When taken to their extremes, in a morally debased society that lacks ethical standards, these permissive “rights” will invite, if not stimulate, a person to abolish all morality and perform immoral/unethical acts without any strings attached, i.e. without running the risk of being punished. When a crime is no longer a crime, anything goes.
Conscience is our “most sacred of all property”
How this works was explained by one of the United States’ prominent Founders, James Madison. On 29 March 1792, Madison declared that a Man’s “conscience”, which undoubtedly forms the lynchpin of a society’s moral substance, “is the most sacred of all property; other property depending in part on positive law, the exercise of that, being a natural and unalienable right. To guard a manʼs house as his castle, to pay public and enforce private debts with the most exact faith, can give no title to invade a manʼs conscience which is more sacred than his castle, or to withhold from it that debt of protection, for which the public faith is pledged, by the very nature and original conditions of the social pact.”
An Excess of Liberty
Madison firmly acknowledged that “government is instituted to protect property of every sort; as well that which lies in the various rights of individuals, as that which the term particularly expresses. This being the end of government, that alone is a just government, which impartially secures to every man, whatever is his own.” Property is “that dominion which one man claims and exercises over the external things of the world, in exclusion of every other individual.” Madison not only warned that “no man is safe in his opinions, his person, his faculties, or his possessions” when and where “an excess of power prevails” and “property of no sort is duly respected.” He also stressed that “where there is an excess of liberty, the effect is the same, tho’ from an opposite cause.” ([i]) In other words, a society can be effectively destroyed by simultaneously exposing its people to an excess of power and an excess of liberty. The effect, “tho’ from opposite causes”, will be a “double whammy”.
The “heart of liberty”
What “excess of liberty” actually means in this day and age became manifest when, on 29 June 1992, in its Opinion rendered in Planned Parenthood of Southeastern Pennsylvania v. Casey, the U.S. Supreme Court constitutionalized such an excess of liberty by stating that “[a]t the heart of liberty is the right to define oneʼs own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life. Beliefs about these matters could not define the attributes of personhood were they formed under compulsion of the State.” ([ii]) In this case, the Court specifically affirmed a woman’s “freedom” to end her pregnancy as a “right” that can be found in this “heart of liberty”. In order to avoid having to define “abortion” as the cruel ending of the life of a new human being, the Court rephrased the act as the ending of a pregnancy. By implication, the Court showed to be in full agreement with the notion that an unborn child plays no role in the “mystery of life” since it lacks any attributes of personhood. Had it not deprived the unborn child of a place in the “mystery of life“, the Court might very well have been accused of granting pregnant women and their physicians a plain license to kill. To circumvent having to address these moral and existential issues, the Court conjured the “heart of liberty” and infused it with what Madison described as an excess of liberty. However, this sleight of hand does not efface the fact that per the American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, “being pregnant” is still synonymous with “being with child“,
“Libertad liberal”
What this means in terms of “moral substance”, was very well explained by Professor of Cultural and Political Science Danilo Castellano in his essay “Qué es el Liberalismo”, where he described excessive liberty as “the liberty exercised with liberty as its sole criterion.” This “libertad liberal” is, so Castellano, “essentially a vindication of independence from the order of things, that is, from the ontological ‘datum’ of creation and, in the final analysis, independence from itself. It, therefore, claims consistently, although absurdly, the sovereignty of the will, whether that relates to the individual, society or the State. It always seeks to affirm freedom from God and liberation from His law with the intention of affirming the will and power without criteria and, as fully as possible, admitting those criteria and only those that they derive from it, and that ‒ when depending on it ‒ are not properly criteria. This leads to a vindication of the so-called ‘concrete’ freedoms: freedom from thinking as opposed to freedom of thought, freedom from religion as opposed to freedom of religion, freedom from our conscience as opposed to freedom of conscience, etc.” ([iii]) (emphasis added) And, as we know since Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche published “Der Wille zur Macht” (The Will to Power), the unconditional veneration of the Sovereignty of the Will will inevitably energize the Will to Power, the Libido dominandi.
Deconstructing society’s moral substance
In the end, promoting liberal liberty as a Constitutionally protected human right boils down to empowering unlimited liberty and the sovereignty of the will. It is a Luciferian trick aimed at seducing women, and men for that matter, to accept that in what the Court defined as their “zone of conscience and belief” there lives a heart of untrammeled liberty. The effect being that, when that heart is given unlimited power, it will disrupt and eventually destroy the very “zone” in which it beats. This is the zone in which the moral substance of society is rooted. Once detached from the natural order of things and the ontological “datum” of creation, that “zone” will become arid ground and, as a result, a society’s moral substance will wither and die. In the Casey case, the Court supported its attack on morality by disqualifying pregnancy as a burdensome period of suffering, of anxieties, physical constraints and sacrifice. And so, the unique bond between a mother and her infant may be destroyed at the drop of a hat because “the liberty of the woman is at stake in a sense unique to the human condition.” To grant a woman the liberty to abort her unborn child when that liberty is alledgedly “at stake”, the Court unmoored liberty from its anchors in the woman’s zone of conscience and belief and so affirmed and gave free rein to an excess of liberty.
The excess of liberty is returned to the people
Admittedly, in June 2022, in the case of Dobbs v Jackson, the Court decided that “[t]he Constitution does not confer a right to abortion” and “returned” the authority to regulate abortion “to the people and their elected representatives”. However, the Dobbs Court carefully refrained from assessing the strength of the “heart of liberty” argument on which its Casey decision was based. And so, the Court returned to the people the right to freely exercise the excess of liberty that Madison defined as having the same maleficiant effect as an excess of power, “tho’ from an opposite cause”, and that Danilo Castellano defined as the absolute “sovereignty of the will”.
The prohibition of judgment
Eventually, in this world of unbridled self-assertion, any concept that is selfishly and egocentrically developed as “one’s own” is now as good as anyone else’s “own” concept. What’s more, because the excessive freedom to define one’s own concepts of existence, meaning, the universe, the mystery of life and, ultimately, of reality, is a legally enforceable right that was inserted into the “heart of the American Constitution”, the excess of liberty must inevitably lead to the concomitant excess of power that is required to validate and uphold such self-conceived concepts as “real” and worthy of respect. This is not accomplished by evaluating the concepts on the basis of their intrinsic accuracy, truthfulness, consistency and merits (if any), but by forcefully restraining anyone from exposing them to inspection, debate, scrutiny, rational assessment and/or moral judgment. In fact, it provides legal protection to any concept formed in the “heart of liberty” against any kind of judgment. In the end, the enforced prohibition of free and honest judgment signals the death of a society’s moral substance.
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[i] The Papers of James Madison. Edited by William T. Hutchinson et al. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1962–77 (vols. 1–10); Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1977–(vols. 11–).
[ii] Planned Parenthood of Southeastern Pennsylvania v. Casey (Nos. 91-744, 91-902); decided 29 June 1992; Opinion of the Court delivered by Justices OʼConnor, Kennedy and Souter.
[iii] Qué es el Liberalismo; Danilo Castellano; Verbo, núm. 489-490 (2010), 729-740.
