For those who wonder what the modernist elite whisper in private, Dershowitz's performance at the Franklin and Marshall college debate was most instructive.
“I don't know what is right,” he declared in defense of his radical skepticism. “You don't know what is right,” he said, jeering at the crowd. Then he proceeded to pronounce dogmatically on everything under the sun.
“George Washington was wrong,” he said with provocative relish. Religion and morality, contrary to Washington's words, are not closely linked, he said. Agnostics and atheists, in fact, surpass believers in morality because they do the “right thing” because it is the “right thing,” not out of holy fear. The open contradiction with his previously stated relativism didn't seem to trouble him.
Non serviam was Dershowitz's defiant cry during the evening. “What kind of God would condemn you for not believing?” he said. “That kind of religion sounds like petty tyranny.” Wallowing in his impiety, he even suggested he would rather enter eternal damnation, having lived life on his own terms, than serve a tyrannical God.
God hasn't condemned Dershowitz. But Dershowitz has condemned himself. People say that he is a public nuisance. He's actually more useful than that: He is a public heretic, revealing with his honest dishonesty the folly of heterodoxy and the wisdom of orthodoxy.
The value of heresy, according to the Catholic Church, is that it forces us to defend orthodoxy with heightened lucidity. Alan Keyes, a peerless exponent of the Natural Law, yields to no one in this sacred task. He crushed Dershowitz's arguments, drawing out their poisonous implications.
“There needs to be a principle for justice,” Keyes said. “It cannot be because ‘Alan Dershowitz feels like it today.’ All Mr. Dershowitz refers to (for morality) is his own infallible judgment.”
Keyes argued that no rights are permanent or protected if man's judgment and power are the basis of justice. What man gives with one hand he can take away with the other. “Might makes right” is the only principle left once God's will is rejected.
The point was lost on Dershowitz, who consistently portrayed religion, not atheistic or agnostic humanism, as the greatest threat to rights and progress. It didn't occur to Dershowitz that the bloodiest century in history was also the most godless.
The triumph of modernism has been the triumph of human willfulness at the expense of weaker humans. Man-made ideologies, devised in the moral and religious vacuum of the twentieth century, led to the murder of millions and millions of humans.
Dershowitz said that Alan Keyes's speech “could have been made by the Ayatollah Khomeini.” Keyes might have replied with much more justice, “And yours could have been given by Joseph Stalin.”
Stalin and other madmen who declared God dead — Pol Pot and Adolph Hitler come to mind — also argued against fixed morality. They, too, viewed organized religion as a menace and progress as the province of man.
Dershowitz's idea of “progress” is defending a double murderer, junking the Declaration of Independence (mere “rhetoric,” he said in the debate), and protecting a woman's right to kill her own child.
Dershowitz did acknowledge one sin during the debate: not respecting homosexuals' right to “sodomy” — his word — is “bigotry.” He got quite exercised about the right of homosexuals to engage in whatever form of “gratification” they want. He asked Keyes to join him in this enthusiasm.
Keyes declined and noted that Dershowitz's browbeating illustrated why leaving one's rights in the hands of elitists like him is a dubious proposition.
According to Dershowitz's thinking, the mortal sin is not to commit sodomy, but to condemn it. In Dershowitz's Brave New World, the homosexuals come out of the closet, even as he forces believing Jews, Muslims and Christians into it.
