But we must not look to government to do what it is intrinsically, necessarily incapable of doing. We all know that every human person has a conscience, yet the modern state increasingly shows itself institutionally ignorant of this. Within the welfare debate, appeals are regularly made to the conscience of all who are to give, with no respect at all for the conscience of those who are to receive. If people are poor, it is assumed they have no dignity - no pride for which a handout would be unpleasant. Yet the meanest result of viewing needy people as without the capacity for change is that it offers them no hope that they may, by their own acts, improve their circumstances.
Modern government can make no distinction among acts, except as legal or illegal.
Indeed, its courts and administrators are so driven by secularity and relativism that virtues maintained throughout the whole of human history are one after the other now being revealed as unsustainable in law. Despite its morally neutral pretense, modern government is not functionally secular or acultural. The aspirations of our nation's founders to protect the right of the minority to values not shared by the majority have been transmogrified into a system in which only the minority has standing. The state, for example, will not only defend, but will actually fund with taxpayer dollars, the public display of a crucifix immersed in urine, claiming it is a work of art. But if a publicly supported institution were to remove that crucifix from urine, it would invite a lawsuit by someone whose First Amendment rights are ostensibly assaulted by the public presence of a cross.