Free The Revolution by Ron Paul Page A

1960s against the law. The courts came along and conformed to the social and moral changes that were taking place in society. Law reflects the morality of the people. Ultimately, law or no law, it is going to be up to us as parents, as clergy, and as citizens—in the way we raise our children, how we interact and talk with our friends and neighbors, and the good example we give—to bring about changes to our culture toward greater respect for life.
    To those who argue that we cannot allow the states to make decisions on abortion since some will make the wrong ones, I reply that that is an excellent argument for world government—for how can we allow individual
countries
to decide on abortion or other moral issues, if some may make the wrong decisions? Yet the dangers of a world government surely speak for themselves.
    Let us therefore adopt the constitutional position, one that is achievable and can yield good results but that shuns the utopian idea that all evil can be eradicated. The Founding Fathers’ approach will not solve all problems, and it will not be perfect. But anyone expecting perfection in this world is going to be consistently disappointed.
    The same holds true for issues like prayer in schools. Such issues were never meant to be decided by federal judges. The whole point of the American Revolution was to vindicate the principle of local self-government. The British had denied that the colonial legislatures were exclusively endowed with the power to make political decisions for their peoples. The colonists, on the other hand, insisted that they would be governed only by their elected representatives. That remained the operative principle in the Articles of Confederation as well as the Constitution: local legislatures are presumed to hold authority except in areas in which they have expressly given up that authority.
    We have come to consider it normal for nine judges in Washington to decide on social policies that affect every neighborhood, family, and individual in America. One side of the debate hopes the nine will impose one set of values, and the other side favors a different set. The underlying premise—that this kind of monolith is desirable, or that no alternative is possible—is never examined, or at least not nearly as often as it should be. The Founding Fathers did not intend for every American neighborhood to be exactly the same—a totalitarian impulse if there ever was one—or that disputes over competing values should be decided by federal judges. This is the constitutional approach to deciding all issues that are not spelled out explicitly in our founding document: let neighbors and localities govern themselves.
    The Founding Fathers would be astonished to observe how politicized our society has become, with every matter on which people differ becoming a federal issue to be resolved in Washington. Jefferson warned, “When all government, domestic and foreign, in little as in great things, shall be drawn to Washington as the center of all power, it will render powerless the checks provided of one government on another, and will become as venal and oppressive as the government from which we separated.” Are we listening?
    In short, just as we should reject empire abroad, we should also reject it at home. One-size-fits-all social policy, dictated by unelected judges from an imperial capital, is not the system Americans signed on for when they ratified the Constitution, and they have never formally sanctioned such a thing.
    Some people claim that the doctrine of states’ rights, one of Thomas Jefferson’s central principles, has been responsible for racism. But racism, a disorder of the heart, can become entrenched in any political environment, whether highly centralized like Hitler’s Germany or highly decentralized like our own country. In
Mein Kampf
, Hitler spoke with delight of the process by which governments around the world were becoming more centralized, with states and local