Amerca is Planted Thick with Laws; Cut Them Down, Where Will You Stand?

If you don't have enough evidence to keep a person in jail, you follow the law and let them go. The State cannot deprive a man, or woman of their life, their liberty, or their pursuit of happiness without due process of law.

The State cannot deprive the FLDS 400 without evidence or due process of law - even if you think they are the devil.

In the play A Man For All Seasons, Sir Thomas More says he would "give the devil benefit of law for mine own safety sake." This country is planted thick with laws - like trees - to protect us all. And if we cut those laws down to get at the devil, where would we stand when the whirlwind blows, the trees being all cut down.

To my students who are active Communists, who have their Communist youth groups (Young Communists League), listen well to Sir Thomas' argument! Where will you stand when all the laws are cut down, by mindless angry teenagers with AK-47s?

In the recent film, Amazing Grace, about England's fight to abolish the slave trade, is a powerful scene between William Wilburforce and his revolutionary friend who wants to go to France to taste the wine of revolution.

His revolutionary friend tells him that what is true of the slave, is also true of the worker in the field, the miner, the butcher. And finally, it is true of women. Universal suffrage! Yet the dramatic irony, which we know but the characters do not, is that within a few years 40,000 people will be beheaded in an horrific bloodfest that shocked Thomas Jefferson, and made Edmund Burke lament: Where were the thousands of cavaliers who should have come to the aid of their King and Queen?

Radical revolutionaries would do well to contemplate the results of their violent overthrow. Every nation that has cut down the "old regime" to get at the Brave New World has created deadly chaos, poverty and misery. Vietnam and Cambodia lost a whole generation of doctors, jurists, engineers, and professionals who could have helped build their countries. Even that vast utopia of Stalinist Russia, which in the 1930s gave so many intellectuals and idealists in America such hope for the future, was a bloody, 45-million-dead nightmare.

Listen to Sir Thomas' argument!