Originally published at The Catholic Thing
How did we reach the awful situation in which our highest court refuses to take any stand on the meaning of life and instead celebrates the individual’s unlimited right to create his own reality? Had the American public square been naked all along, and the Supreme Court took more than a century to notice? A quasi-religious belief that all men are created equal appears in Thomas Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence, of course, and his phrasing unmistakably reflects the influence of John Locke. But the argument that all men are equal before the law had been powerfully defended about 150 years earlier by St. Robert Bellarmine.
