"I will speak of Thomas Aquinas instead. I will tell you my dim memories of what he said about the hierarchy of laws on this planet, which was flat at the time. The highest law, he said, was divine law, God's law. Beneath that was natural law, which I suppose would include thunderstorms, and our right to shield our children from poisonous ideas, and so on.
"And the lowest law was human law.
"Let me clarify this scheme by comparing its parts to play to playing cards. Enemies of the Bill of Rights do the same sort of thing all the time, so why shouldn't we? Divine law, then, is an ace. Natural law is a king. The Bill of Rights is a lousy queen.
"The Thomist hierarchy of laws is so far from being ridiculous that I have never met anybody who did not believe in it right down to the marrow of his or her bones. Everybody knows that there are laws with more grandeur than those which are printed in our statute books. The big trouble is that there is so little agreement as to how those grander laws are worded. Theologians can give us hints of the wording, but it takes a dictator to set them down just right - to dot the i's and cross the t's. A man who had been a mere corporal in the army did that for Germany and then for all of Europe, you may remember, not long ago. There was nothing he did not know about divine and natural law. He had fistfuls of aces and kings to play."
That is what the American author Kurt Vonnegut wrote in the 1980s, when his book, Slaughterhouse-Five, was burnt by a school for containing a few expletives.
And when we have the law spell expletives against those who express themselves differently, most of us quickly bite into our stuffed parathas or Subways and munch away, lest our thoughts become words. Perhaps, we would all do well to express ourselves now, when lawmakers exercise the right of the statute over the sovereign right of the individual. We must announce our stand, lest those expletives become ours to take.
We choose our food, our education, what we read, or write, and with the great medical advancements of this age, even our gender. But when those with sight lead us daringly into the future blindfolded, we must question, else be willing to give up our sight as well as our right.
"And the lowest law was human law.
"Let me clarify this scheme by comparing its parts to play to playing cards. Enemies of the Bill of Rights do the same sort of thing all the time, so why shouldn't we? Divine law, then, is an ace. Natural law is a king. The Bill of Rights is a lousy queen.
That is what the American author Kurt Vonnegut wrote in the 1980s, when his book, Slaughterhouse-Five, was burnt by a school for containing a few expletives.
And when we have the law spell expletives against those who express themselves differently, most of us quickly bite into our stuffed parathas or Subways and munch away, lest our thoughts become words. Perhaps, we would all do well to express ourselves now, when lawmakers exercise the right of the statute over the sovereign right of the individual. We must announce our stand, lest those expletives become ours to take.
We choose our food, our education, what we read, or write, and with the great medical advancements of this age, even our gender. But when those with sight lead us daringly into the future blindfolded, we must question, else be willing to give up our sight as well as our right.
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