(The following essay was first published as an opinion editorial in the Montgomery Advertiser on December 29, 1996, while I was still an active Circuit Judge. On the same editorial page was an Edwin Yoder editorial that decried conspiracy theories, and an editorial questioning the ongoing viability of Social Security. My title would have been, as here, Love and Order, but the newspaper titled it Ten Commandments Have Their Place in the Law, back in those Roy Moore days.)
A few years ago we heard a great deal about law and order. Law and order was the battle cry of politics. That battle cry has dwindled some in recent years, but has been replaced by the voice of a politically powerful religious right.
The advent of the religious right probably evidences a hunger for matters spit=ritual and a recognition of the necessary relationship between what we truly believe and what we do in the realm of government, law, morals and ethics. The religious right has moved into the vacuum created when the forces of political correctness attempted to push religion from the public square and make it a matter of purely individual belief.
I would like to propose an alternative to the law and order concept. I would like to propose love and order. I realize that love and order are seldom connected in the same sentence.
However, in a strange sort of way, love and order very likely combine to produce the very results that the law and order people wanted. When love is truly advanced and practiced in a group, ordiliness necessarily results. Normative force emerges.
If one loves his or her neighbor, one is likely to abide by the ancient concept of justice: to each his due. If one truly loves his or her neighbor, one is likely to abide by the Golden Rule: Do unto others as you would have them do unto you. If one truly loves his or her neighbors, one is likely to practice the habits of beatitude advanced in the New Testament and abide by the rules set forth in the Ten Commandments.
To violate the Ten Commandments—recognized standards of morality—seldom evidences love.
In a mysterious and paradoxical way, love demands moral conduct. It is this demand for moral conduct that gives both morality and law their ultimate authority. There is no other way.
This paradox of the attractive force of love is deeply embedded in the nature of our individual and social being. We readily understand that while the demands of a tyrannical father who does not love his children are likely to produce persons with criminal tendencies, fatherly discipline combined with love produces conscience and good behavior.
You can’t have discipline without love. Without love, the discipline will never by implanted into the human heard. It will never be written on the door posts and foreheads as commanded in the Old Testament. Discipline without love will not work.
The love that I am talking about is not soft, easy love. It is hard love. It is love that cares enough to impose expectations and experience disappointment for failures.
Someone may be curious as to how a system that is based on love can impose punishment. In the process of balancing the needs of the entire citizenry, punishment is necessary.
Obviously, lack of punishment shows little regard for victims. If we love the victims, who have don no wrong, obviously there must be compensation for the wrong done to them. But even while imposing punishment, we cannot cease to care about the wrongdoer.
The way to Christian perfection is not merely obedience to the law. The Bibl proclaims that Christ came that we might have life and have it more abundantly. A healthy person could probably lie in bed all day doing nothing and not offend the Ten Commandments.
Nevertheless, that person would not be serving the purpose for which he or she came into the world.
I believe that what I am describing here is the true meaning of the enigmatic verse of the New Testament in which Christ says that he did not come to destroy the law, but to fulfill it.
If law is to be meaningful, the meaning is to be found in the positive benefits to life—not int its negative prohibitions. There is no conflict between love and law.
Only the attractive force of love can energize the principles of law. Only when one recognizes that the Ten Commandments are simply the structure that surround a house built of love can one begin to comprehend the true nature and proper role of authority.
The same is true of all law. We, as a group must care about others before law can gather motive power for any just system of governance. Incidentally, I believe that this article displays truths that are part of the wisdom of our culture. But they would be almost impossible to explain without resort ot our religious heritage.
Even if I had made no reference to religion, the religious heritage would be present in the thoughts expressed.
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