Deneen on "Chimera" of "Natural Law Liberalism" | National Catholic Reporter by MSW. MGB: The founders of the American public read Locke, Montesque and Rousseau, with heavy doses of Calvin by others. You can clearly see these influences in what they wrote and what they did or were defeated in doing. None of it has anything to do with anything Catholic, which was entirely a Divine Right Monarchy (or worse, Papist), polity. Even now, the Church likes to have its cake and eat it to on natural law - building in an authoritarian check that has no business in a discussion decided wholly by reason (which is how the secular world understands natural law).
Of all the Enlightenment thinkers, it is Rousseau who has the most bearing on liberalism - particularly the kind that seeks a zone of privacy from the state on all matters consensual - to wit - unless everyone agrees on a moral limit, some police power is necessary to enforce the will of the majority on the majority. In some cases, majority restrictions are intolerable and cannot be allowed to impinge on the individual in his private or public exercise of other rights. This is especially the case in the area of marriage (both in terms of race and sexuality). Interestingly, this is what Nino Scalia does not seem to understand either in his questioning of why sodomy laws should not be enacted.
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