License: Liberty’s Friend or Foe?
by Steve Farrell
Liberty and license are not synonymous. Parents know better.
Too many of them have had the unfortunate dilemma of dealing with the “I am free to do as I please” child who routinely, or upon occasion, exercises that egocentric proclamation to reckless extremes. These parents stand as witnesses that a widely accepted notion – that freedom and moral responsibility are not connected – is at best a delusion instilled by mis-education, not experience, and is at worst a diabolical lie.
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The pain they feel, the shipwrecked lives they labor to pick up and reassemble, the incessant pleadings to stubborn, short-sighted children, and the endless nights spent sobbing upon their knees, all testify to them that unrestrained freedom is not freedom at all, but quite often a terrible, miserable slavery.
Every act has a consequence. Experience, that cruel schoolmaster, teaches us that. But it’s not as if the idea is lacking in proponents.
The voice of Christianity warns, “Be not deceived, God is not mocked, for whatsoever a man soweth, that he shall also reap.”
The voice of the sciences seconds, “Every action has an equal and opposite reaction.”
And even the man-on-the-street echoes, “What goes around comes around.”
Experience, God, the scientist and the streetwise understand this common-sense law. Call it the Law of the Harvest, the Law of Physics, the law of the street or the boomerang effect; it is dreadfully real that actions for good or evil will bring results which either enlarge or limit one’s freedom.
Sexual “freedom,” when thought through, provides a clear-cut confirmation of this truth. For instance, the modern doctors of humanism, socialism and new age-ism proclaim to our youth that premarital sex is a healthy, happy and satisfying activity.
No doubt, it seems satisfying for the few moments it lasts.
But the choice to be sexually active as a teen-ager is not the liberating, isn’t-that-sweet lifestyle that the social engineers and social scientists say that it is.
Premarital sex reaps natural consequences: Loss of virginity, damaged or lost church affiliation, guilt, limitations on spousal selection (men exploit sexually active women but are reticent to marry them), social disease, pregnancy, adoption, abortion (with the even greater moral dilemma of considering killing one’s own), early marriage or single motherhood, increased risk for poverty, divorce (with its unpleasant, sometimes unrelenting custody and parenting battles), abuse, and possible enslavement to government welfare programs.
This is especially so for the female. The male experiences some of the same, but worse yet, he often runs to the next victim, and the cycle begins again.
For a young lady abandoned to motherhood, even when she is a tough, resilient female who takes her lumps, transforms her life, bravely bears her child and wisely goes to college to improve her lot – the question must be asked: “Are you now free?”
Her answer, most likely, will be a resounding “No!” For when the school day is over, and the social and dating ritual begins, she is, rightly so, home with the baby, loving, feeding, cuddling, lullabying and diaper changing. She may be working a job, too.
Her social life is nonexistent; her chance of finding a worthy young man diminished; her study time, if she hasn’t the luxury of affording a sitter (few do) is checkered and challenged; her life terribly lonely and stress-filled.
There are exceptions, but few.
Unrestrained freedom bears a heavy cost.
Others suffer too. Parents in a variety of ways, younger brothers and sisters for example, friends who naively believe that single parenthood looks like fun, and unrelated citizens who are forcibly taxed to pay for an assortment of social repair programs.
Beyond this, the precedent of extending a “safety-net” catches on and every other mistake-ridden person on the block joins in with the plea: “If the government can take care of him or her, then why not me?”
But there is at least one other cost, it is the cost of those whose exercise in “liberty” leads them to become bitter rather than better.
There is a little-known but documented story of a boy – who became well known – and his family who converted to Christianity. Of that conversion, the changed young man wrote a precious and powerful testimony to the world concerning his newfound faith. It had transformed him and his parents, bringing him great joy and purpose in life.
Then something happened. He went to college! Isn’t that often the case? It was there that he, like so many others, decided it was time to spread his wings and assert his newfound freedom. He could have done so in a positive manner, but he did not. His choice was to commit adultery with a married woman.
At that point, rather than express regret and redress the mistake, he exulted in his liberty!
He decided his previous religious liberation was a form of physical and emotional bondage. He began to pursue a course to denounce the religion of his parents, his former faith of Judaism and every other religious faith.
He set his hand against God, denounced Him as a hoax – and, as an addendum – promised to abolish all “eternal truths,” to erase “Freedom, Justice … religion … [and] morality,” and to eradicate those twin trouble makers, the family and private property from off the face of the earth. Men, he said, and only a few select men at that, were the only true gods, henceforth and forever. Truth would now be relative.
He put this all down on paper. He founded a revolution based on these principles. This revolution, first spawned by the self-justification of the “liberty” he had found by violating the law of chastity with a married woman, was the starting point of the most horrific adventure in mass murder, slavery and poverty in the history of the world.
Perhaps you’ve guessed it, though “historians” have hidden the lesson. The boy’s name was Karl Marx. The philosophy he founded was Communism. You see, freedom without moral responsibility never really is an exercise in liberty at all.
2002 Meridian Magazine. All Rights Reserved.
