by Robert D. Twitchell

Created on: March 08, 2007   Last Updated: April 19, 2007

When the founding fathers of this great country of ours envisioned a new government they were attempting to escape the greedy and oppressive regimes of their native countries because they found those regimes morally objectionable. They wrote a constitution that supported the values that were important to them; a constitution that was totally unique at the time. The most important aspect of this constitution was a moral decision to grant an unprecedented amount of freedom to the people.

In theory the idea of government and morality being separate and distinct is a wonderful idea but the fact is they will always intertwined. The politicians and bureaucrats in the government are human beings with their own values which impacts their decision making when constructing and implementing laws. These politicians are elected by other human beings with their own moral compasses and they vote for people who for the most part support these values. To believe that morality will be kept out of the government is totally unreasonable idea and should not be expected.

To this end it is the responsibility of the public to make informed decisions when electing their representatives in the government. Knowing that morality will be a part of the law making process it is important for the people to support those representatives who best uphold their beliefs. It is also important for the public to hold those who are elected accountable for their decisions and when they do not continue to support the values important to their constituency then those representatives need to be taken to task.

To expect the government and morality to be totally separate and to draft laws that support this notion would inevitably lead to chaos. To write laws that appeal to every special interest group would be a bureaucratic nightmare and impossible to implement considering the amount of money that would be needed to enforce those laws. On the other hand to cater to only certain groups would end up being too oppressive and totally against what the founding fathers envisioned.

Politicians need a moral compass to pass laws that will be fair but as somebody once said, "You can make some people happy all the time, but you can't make all the people happy all the time." Considering this it is usually the unhappy people who insist that government and morally should be independent of each other. Because of those unhappy people the country is changing in an unfortunate way and that is the issue that needs to be addressed.

Morality is as important to government as the government is to protecting morality.

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