The Problem With Procedural Votes

The Problem with Procedural Votes:

Anti-Abortion Attempts in Various States

We have heard about the defeat of the Republican initiative in Ohio to erect a 60 percent threshold vote for any pro-abortion constitutional vote in that state’s congress. “Voters in Ohio soundly rejected Republican-backed attempt to raise the threshold for changing the state’s Constitution to 60 percent in a ballot initiative. A follow-up election will take place in November, in which Ohio voters will decide whether to establish a right to abortion in the state’s Constitution. A simple majority will decide the outcome.” (New York Times, August 9, 2023) Each state can now make its own laws about abortion, or so it seems, after the Supreme Court’s decision against Roe. Such anti-abortion procedural referendums and laws are either being struck down by the courts or defeated at the voting places. Perhaps I am wrong, but procedures do not change hearts and minds.

The problem is our definition of personal freedom in America. We have unfortunately gotten so used to personal freedom, no matter the issue, that we will vote down any restrictive procedure to that freedom, no matter the subject at hand. Except in extreme cases, and even that is up for grabs today, personal freedom to do whatever and whenever we want trumps stated rules and regulations. This is especially true about morally laced issues like abortion. People want the right to choose and will uniformly vote against any procedure or rule set against that so-called right.

This tends toward freedom without any restraints, freedom without any boundaries, freedom without license. Such unrestricted freedom has never worked in any society or nation for a protracted period. This is freedom without accountability, and as such, will not last. Os Guinness in his perceptive study, Last Call for Liberty: How America’s Genius for Freedom Has Become Its Greatest Threat, notes that “freedom is never a greater enemy to freedom than when it becomes freedom as power or freedom without principle.” (272) He goes on to historically point out that “Americans should ponder Nietzsche’s assertion, Burke’s comment, and Lord Acton’s summary of the conclusion of the ancients: ‘They understood that for liberty, justice, and equal laws, it is as necessary that Democracy should restrain itself as it had been that it should restrain the Oligarchy.’ This point cannot be stressed too strongly, yet it is blithely ignored in much of America today when accountability is slighted or has collapsed.” (273-4)

The rejection of the moral standards set by both the Jewish and Christian faiths end up with a return to paganism on the one hand, or the rise of a new Gnosticism — “the Internet-of-All-Things may become sacred in its own right,” the Tower of Babel in its advanced modern form. (277) And so, “All who love and admire America should ponder the ancient maxim: The worst is the corruption of the best.” (279)

Guinness then ends with a challenge — “Choose, then, America, whether you wish to stay true to the better angels of your founding promise and shoulder the burden of being the world’s beacon of responsible and enduring freedom. Choose whether you desire life or death, blessings or curses, freedom and flourishing or chaos and decline. Choose as the Jews chose before you and your early American ancestors chose in their turn whether you will again be ‘a city on a hill’ or become ‘a story and byword throughout the world.’” (284)