A statement by a political candidate who is in the news a lot currently: It's a misconception that you "can't legislate morality.
" People have been trying to legislate morality from long before even the ten commandments and the more than six-hundred laws of the Law of Moses were penned.
Way back to Hammurabi's ancient law code, from about 3790 years ago in ancient Babylon, people have been legislating morality.
It has never worked for long.
Why? Because the idea is fundamentally flawed.
In some countries today you can be stoned to death if you don't abide by the moral code the "authorities" have legislated for everybody else.
Yet people still flout the law, even at risk of execution.
This particular political candidate went on to say that "if you don't legislate one morality then you are legislating somebody else's morality.
So you can't get around legislating morality.
" But is this really true? Legislating that something has to be a certain way isn't at all the same as allowing something to be a certain way.
For instance if you legislate that no one can have sex outside of marriage, you are forcing a particular idea on people.
But if you simply allow, then a person is free to have sex outside of marriage or not to have sex outside of marriage.
When we allow, we give people a choice.
Individuals then decide their own morality according to their conscience, within the parameter that they cannot hurt anybody else by what they do.
This is fundamentally different from making you do what they do.
If someone is in a gay relationship, allowing this isn't at all the same as legislating that someone has to be in a gay relationship.
Allowing means there can be multiple moralities all at the same time.
We can only ever be uncomfortable with this if we are into controlling others, which is the opposite of love-and love is the very lynchpin of any morality.
So the real issue isn't morality, but control.
People who are insecure in themselves are threatened when others do things they themselves don't do.
In other words, such people aren't capable of loving others for who they really are, as free moral agents.
They can only "love" their neighbor if their neighbor conforms, which isn't love at all.
It's control.
Suppose you don't believe in sex outside of marriage, as is perhaps the case with this particular candidate.
Should you legislate what your neighbor can do? And who is to decide what the standard should be? Or perhaps you aren't gay and you oppose gay people forming intimate relationships.
Should you get to decide their morality? If we go back to ancient societies, whether Islam and the Koran, or the Israelites and what's widely referred to as the Old Testament, there is a track record of people legislating morality but utterly failing to get people to abide by their rules.
The whole reason for what's known as the New Testament, which seeks to awaken us to on our inner being grounded in divine consciousness, is because the old didn't work.
We don't have to go back that far.
Prohibition in the United States is a classic example of how you can't force people to abide by your idea of what's moral.
An even more current and poignant example is that of another political personage, also very much in the news, who was publicly a proponent of abstinence from sex before marriage.
Yet this politician's own teen couldn't live by such a standard and became pregnant.
What chance to legislate morality for a whole nation, let alone a world, if you can't make it work in your own home? Legislating morality has never worked.
Each time there's some kind of moral reformation, in no time at all things have drifted back to where they were.
Then a new moral reformation gets underway by a fresh set of zealots who somehow imagine they can make their version of morality work this time.
Whether we turn to Buddhism, the Hindu faith, Judaism, Islam, or Christianity, within each of these paths there are outstanding spiritual figures who have repeatedly emphasized for us that morality only ever works when it flows from the heart.
If the Thought Police ride their trucks through the streets of cities like Tehran, Iran, unsuccessfully trying to enforce laws against women wearing certain kinds of clothing or even makeup, what chance do we honestly have of legislating morality in the West? And again, who gets to decide what's moral? The compassionate approach is to allow instead of resisting.
Then, as spiritual giants like Jesus and the Buddha advocated, we need to get control of our own judgmentalism which sees us as better than others-and learn to love our neighbor just as if they were our very own selves, according them the freedom to choose that's our God-given right.