The Worldview War Between Christians and the Secular Left for the High Court<?xml:namespace prefix = o ns = "urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:office" />
By Brannon S. Howse
 
 
This article is excerpted from Brannon's upcoming book One Nation Under Man: The Worldview War Between Christians and the Secular Left-in bookstores September 1st.You Can purchase Brannon's book and have it personally signed by going tho this website.  http://www.worldviewweekend.com/onum/
 

<?xml:namespace prefix = st1 ns = "urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:smarttags" />America is at a legal crossroads. With the appointment of Judge John Roberts and perhaps future appointments, President Bush has the opportunity to strike a serious blow to the tyrants we face in America. These tyrants do not come from across the ocean but from across town at the local federal courthouse and from the U. S. Supreme Court in Washington, D.C. The tyranny of which I speak has grown out of a justice system that no longer simply applies the law but usurps the power of our legislators by making laws from the court bench. "Judicial tyranny" describes what I believe is the unconstitutional, immoral, and deliberate actions of judges to reject the intentions of our nation's founding documents and the Founders' original purposes and, instead, to force on our nation their own political, philosophical, and theological worldviews.
 
If indeed Judge Roberts will "apply" the law and not "make law" then conservatives that voted for President Bush will have won a huge battle in the worldview war. The secular left understands that if they do not defeat any and all of the President's Supreme Court appointments that believe in fixed moral absolutes their agenda will be greatly set back and this is the main reason Christians voted for President Bush in record numbers in November of 2004.
 
After years of hard work, conservatives are preparing to undue the damage done by the secular left. For instance, Benjamin Cardozo, appointed to the U.S. Supreme Court in 1932, proudly proclaimed a belief in his right to usurp powers of the U.S. Congress and to violate the check-and-balance separations of the U.S. Constitution: "I take judge-made law as one of the existing realities of life."
 
Cardozo not only held the U.S. Constitution and U.S. Congress in contempt; he saw little purpose for people of faith-which includes most Americans-who want to apply a moral law as foundation for the legal process: "If there is any law which is back of the sovereignty of the state, and superior thereto, it is not law in such a sense as to concern the judge or lawyer, however much it concerns the statesman or the moralist."
 
Justice Cardozo was not the first to sound this theme. In 1907, Charles Evans Hughes, who would later become chief justice of the U.S. Supreme Court, declared, "We are under a Constitution, but the Constitution is what the judges say it is."
 
How can judges fulfill their sworn oath to defend and protect the U.S. Constitution while helping themselves to large portions of unconstitutional power and authority? How can they uphold the U.S. Constitution when they often don't even consider the Constitution when rendering decisions? Or how can federal judges claim to fulfill their sworn duty when the majority of federal judges have endeavored to replace the U.S. Constitution with a different judicial standard?
 
Secular humanism and its penchant for moral relativism, along with misapplied Darwinism, has now become the postmodern foundation on which America's courts and law schools are built. Constitutional and legal scholar John Eidsmoe observes: "Twentieth-century jurisprudence is based on a Darwinian worldview. Life evolves, men evolve, society evolves, and therefore laws and the constitution's meaning evolves and changes with time."
Another, simpler definition of legal positivism is: moral relativism applied to law. Moral relativism is the belief there is no such thing as moral absolutes-no standard of right or wrong for all people in all places at all times. At times, moral relativism is also called, simply, pragmatism. Moral relativism is closely tied to situational ethics, the belief that individuals are free to decide for themselves what is best for them to secure the most desirable outcome in any given situation.The philosophy of 'positivism' was introduced in the 1870s when Harvard Law School Dean Christopher Columbus Langdell (1826–1906) applied Darwin's worldview of evolution to jurisprudence.
Langdell's thought was advanced further by Dean Roscoe Pound and Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. Holmes argued there is no fixed moral foundation for law: "The felt necessities of the time, the prevalent moral and political theories . . . have a good deal more to do than the syllogism [legal reasoning process] in determining the rules by which men should be governed."
Although introduced in the nineteenth century, legal positivism began to make real headway in our system when Earl Warren became chief justice of the U.S. Supreme Court. In the 1958 case, Trop vs. Dulles, Chief Justice Warren declared the Eighth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution could not have the same meaning now as it did at the time written. (The amendment reads as follows: "Excessive bail shall not be required, nor excessive fines imposed, nor cruel and unusual punishment inflicted.") In Trop vs. Dulles, the U.S. State Department had attempted to strip a man of his U.S. citizenship because he deserted the armed forces during World War II. But Trop's attorneys argued it was "cruel and unusual punishment" to strip him of his citizenship. Chief Justice Warren agreed, stating "the Amendment must draw its meaning from the evolving standards of decency that mark the progress of a maturing society." Legal positivism has been racing through court decisions at an ever-increasing pace since the mid-1900s.
 
In the 1992 U.S. Supreme Court ruling in Planned Parenthood of Southeastern Pennsylvania vs. Casey, Governor of Pennsylvania, Justices Sandra Day O'Connor, Souter, and Kennedy stated in the majority opinion, "At the heart of liberty is the right to define one's own concept of existence, of meaning of the universe and the mystery of human life."
The seismic shift represented in the Casey decision is how the court's now define reality. The new definition flows from a postmodern philosophy that refuses to acknowledge any absolutes-nothing right, nothing wrong, nothing moral, nothing immoral. Truth does not exist, and there are no absolutes that transcend time or situation. Everything is subject to individual interpretation.
 
We must stop the free willing and illegal "Constitutional Conventions" the judges are holding with every decision that is based not on the founder's original intent but on their intent to apply legal positivism to the law. George Washington, in his Farewell Address, reminded the nation how critical it is to amend the Constitution only according to the process set forth in document itself: "If, in the opinion of the people, the distribution or the modification of the constitutional powers be in any particular wrong, let it be corrected by an amendment in the way which the Constitution designates. But let there be no change by usurpation; for though this, in one instance, may be the instrument of good, it is the customary weapon by which free governments are destroyed."