I've been writing for years about the depth of the culture war taking place in America. I've done so with trepidation, with knowledge that without resolution, culture wars can turn into physical wars.
It happened once in America. Can it happen again?
The first major violent confrontation between citizens came about as result of the question of slavery. The country's founders included the proposition in our founding that all men are created equal. We lived for many years untrue to this proposition, and that unfaithfulness in spirit lead to war.
Similarly today, we are deeply divided over the meaning and relevance of our founding proposition that we are endowed by our Creator with rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.
The core point of contention is abortion. The nation is divided right down the middle between those that believe the unborn must be protected like all life and those that relegate the unborn to some other category, giving women free license to destroy what others understand to be humanity.
Although there are as yet no armed battles, other kinds of violence are now disrupting our national life.
We see it in the confirmation process of Judge Brett Kavanaugh.
The efforts by liberals to derail Kavanaugh's nomination are driven by fear that he could be a threat to Roe v. Wade. It's all about abortion.
The battle cry we have heard and are hearing is that those who see it essential to move forward with Kavanaugh's confirmation "don't care about women."
No matter how many women step forward to attest to Kavanaugh's decency, liberals are convinced that he doesn't care about women. For them, anyone not supporting legal abortion on demand doesn't care about women. Conversely, for them, "caring" about women means unrestricted legal abortion.
Dr. Martin Luther King Jr wrote in his famous "Letter from a Birmingham Jail": "A just law is a man-made code that squares with the moral law, or the law of God. An unjust law is a law that is out of harmony with the moral law."
King, in this letter, justified civil disobedience and breaking laws that are unjust.
Those disrupting the process to confirm Kavanaugh, by any means possible, are similarly motivated. But the key and massive difference is that the law they see as unjust, one which would protect life in the womb, is exactly what King defined as a just law -- "one that squares with the moral law, or the law of God."
So any sense of morality in law, or the procedures to carry out the law, has no meaning for those driven by keeping abortion legal. For them, the law is not rooted in moral traditions. Rather, it's what they make up for their own convenience.
It's why the war against Judge Kavanaugh, his family and all those that support him, is so unprincipled and vicious. Those who feel they don't need any higher authority for truth, that they can make it all up based on personal predilections, have no moral code limiting what they'll do. They are capable of anything, which is what we are witnessing now.
If there is a vital takeaway from the horror we have witnessed in this confirmation process, it is to appreciate the depth of the culture war in which our nation finds itself.
There is no easy way out. We are going to have to decide who we are as Americans, what values define us, and what code characterizes the law under which we live.
Will it be the moral code of a nation under God or the synthetic, arbitrary standards of a nation of secular humanism?