There Ought To Be a Law
I’ve never gone into much detail about what I do at my day job. Simply put: I attempt to enforce morality. Somewhere in the human moral code is the presumption that parents are responsible for their offspring. This is one of those common sense presumptions that is, at first glance, so obvious that it defies closer scrutiny until it is challenged or violated. And both challenged and violated it is in today’s society. Divorce and single-parent households are so commonplace in America as to actually now be the norm, to the extent that the issue is no longer even considered newsworthy.
Capitalism has a way of assigning a monetary value to things, including morals. In my world this means a mathematical formula for calculating the amount that an absent parent is supposed to pay the parent who still has custody of the child(ren) as compensation for his or her absence from the home. I have been told that one of the problems encountered in the development of Nevada’s multi-million dollar child support computer program was the inability of the Pakistanis assigned to the project to understand such a concept. As absurd as it is, however, it was employed to collect nearly $70 million dollars by just our office last year.
It may have occurred to you by now that not every absent (we call them non-custodial) parent is going to agree with the sum determined to be adequate financial compensation for the child(ren) for whom he or she has a shared responsibility. In this nation of ours that prides itself on being a government of laws it should really come as no surprise that the supposed solution to such a predicament is legalistic. So, as has become commonplace in our culture, legislators, lawyers and judges set about the business of legalizing morality, of passing laws that are supposed to make people behave responsibly.
That’s where my job comes in. All according to law, offices such as mine across the nation establish paternity if it isn’t known, establish legal orders where once there were none, and then execute those orders through the powers of local, state and federal government to force, if necessary, persons to assume financial responsibility for the children they have brought into the world. For forty hours each and every week I deal with the frustration, unhappiness and anger that is the direct result of people either not knowing or ignoring the moral responsibilities that accompany parenthood, thereby making necessary the insane practice of trying to legally enforce them.
There are times when I consider my religious education to be a liability. For example, consider this passage from the book of Jeremiah:
“The days are surely coming, says the LORD, when I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel and the house of Judah. It will not be like the covenant that I made with their ancestors when I took them by the hand to bring them out of the land of Egypt—a covenant that they broke, though I was their husband, says the LORD. But this is the covenant that I will make with the house of Israel after those days, says the LORD: I will put my law within them, and I will write it on their hearts; and I will be their God, and they shall be my people. No longer shall they teach one another, or say to each other, “Know the LORD,” for they shall all know me, from the least of them to the greatest, says the LORD; for I will forgive their iniquity, and remember their sin no more.” (Jeremiah 31:31-34 NRSV)
If ever there was a succinct explanation of why it doesn’t work to attempt to legislate morality, this is it! It will never be possible to write enough laws to counter human indifference and apathy. It will never be possible to write enough laws to force a parent to feel lovingly responsible for a new life it has shared in creating. There will never be enough gun control laws to remove murderous intentions. There will never be enough corporate laws to overcome selfish greed. There will never be enough traffic cops to stop the reckless slaughter on our highways. And on it goes…
The tragic irony of my original example lies in the fact that the place where the instilling of moral values – the home – is the very institution under siege in our litigious society. The lessons to be learned at the mother’s breast and upon the father’s knee are being irrevocably lost to a worldview whose faith is mistakenly in the law of the land rather than the law within us, the law to be perceived by our hearts instead of the courts. It didn’t take me long to learn that a life insurance sale is virtually impossible to someone who genuinely doesn’t care what happens to her or his survivors. And you will never be able to effectively force such a person care by legislation alone.
That this is the year of a presidential election has prompted me to address this issue. We are going to be immersed in a plethora of promises for legislative cures for anything and everything that ails us. I am not really so naive as to believe that we can rid ourselves of all laws and ordinances, but I am increasingly convinced that legislation must be a reflection – not the source – of our morality. It will be the responsibility of the larger community of faith to provide the loving and nurturing environment in which the nuclear family may be nursed back to its critical role of transmitting the values that translate into new and abundant life for all.
“The days are surely coming, says the LORD,” when our hope for the future will no longer be dependent upon our legalistic prowess, but will instead be firmly grounded in the relationship we have with our Creator who promises to reside in the hearts and minds of “the least of them to the greatest.” God grant us the wisdom and the courage to seek moral inspiration rather than empty promises for more laws. Amen.
