By DEXTER DUGGAN
PHOENIX — Shortly before the U.S. Supreme Court invented the alleged constitutional right of homosexual “marriage,” a speaker warned a gathering of international Christian law-school students that ideas from Darwinian theory “have impacted nearly every area of our culture — from the sciences to the humanities to politics to our churches.”
John G. West, Ph.D., vice president of the Seattle-based Discovery Institute think tank, said those ideas “have helped reshape our view of ethics, of the family, of the value of human life, of faith in God, and of law.”
His talk was entitled, “Darwinism, Progressivism, and the ‘New’ Jurisprudence.”
According to the Darwinian redefinition of morality, West said in his prepared text, “Morality is forever in a process of evolution. Perhaps nowhere has this Darwinian view of ethics had more impact than in family life and human sexuality.”
The Discovery Institute’s website says the organization “has a special concern for the role that science and technology play in our culture and how they can advance free markets, illuminate public policy, and support the theistic foundations of the West.”
By a narrow 5-4 majority on June 26, the Supreme Court overthrew constitutional legal precedent and virtually all of human ethics, history, and tradition in order to declare astoundingly that the Constitution decrees same-sex “marriage” to be a fundamental right.
West spoke here on June 18 to the Blackstone Legal Fellowship of Christian law-school students, a ministry of the Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF). The next day, Blackstone’s 158 participants this year dispersed around the globe to serve during the summer at organizations including public-interest law firms, think tanks and public-policy organizations.
The legal interns are students at 62 leading law schools, including 10 outside the United States.
ADF is an Arizona-based, internationally active organization whose attorneys defend religious liberty, conscience, life, family, and traditional values.
Charles Darwin was a 19th-century English naturalist and geologist who devised a theory of evolutionary development of species that has been given a wider application in society as decades passed.
West told the Blackstone law interns that Darwin’s theory proposed: “All things in life are in the process of change. Nothing is permanent, nothing is transcendent — including our moral and religious beliefs. . . .
“In the words of late Harvard paleontologist George Gaylord Simpson,” West added, “‘Man is the result of a purposeless and natural process that did not have him in mind’.”
Every year on the anniversary of Darwin’s February 12 birthday, West said, people gather to celebrate “Darwin Day.”
“The original ‘honorary president’ of Darwin Day is biologist Richard Dawkins, author of The God Delusion,” West said. “Dawkins is perhaps best known for such pearls of wisdom as ‘faith is one of the world’s great evils, comparable to the smallpox virus, but harder to eradicate’.”
Darwin’s book The Descent of Man “encouraged a relativistic understanding of sexual morality,” West said, with other thinkers following in his footsteps.
“It’s not an accident that the thinker most responsible for the breakdown of traditional sexual ethics in our culture was a Harvard-trained evolutionary zoologist. His name was Alfred Kinsey,” West said.
“Adopting a thoroughly Darwinian approach to sexual morality, Kinsey argued that any sexual practice that could be found somewhere among mammals could be regarded as ‘normal mammalian behavior’ and thus be regarded as OK.”
West traced how relativist views of morality and ethics led to eugenics movements to guide the putatively desired improvement of humanity.
“While Darwin thought there was no fundamental difference between humans and the higher mammals, he certainly thought there were vast differences between fellow human beings of different races, classes, and genders,” West said.
“For example, he argued that blacks were the closest humans on the evolutionary ladder to apes,” he said. “Most importantly, Darwin invoked his theory of natural selection to argue that civilized societies were destroying themselves by preserving weak and defective humans that natural selection used to kill off.”
An 18th-century English clergyman and population pessimist, Thomas Malthus, provided inspiration for Darwin, West said.
“It can’t be emphasized enough that Darwin, inspired by Thomas Malthus, enshrined death and the struggle for existence as the great engines of progress in nature,” West said.
“. . . Ever since Darwin, thinkers influenced by him have been preoccupied with death and population elimination as ways to usher in their utopias,” he said.
“Children, who used to be cherished as gifts from a loving God, became increasingly viewed by intellectual elites as deadweights, either because they were produced by races supposedly lower on the evolutionary scale, or because of an effort to apply the Darwinian-Malthusian understanding of nature to human society,” West said.
“The Darwinian worldview had a significant impact on Western colonial policy, especially in Germany,” he said.
Eugenicist Cousin
Darwin’s ideas inspired his cousin, the “progressive” Francis Galton, to establish the eugenics movement, he said — “the science of human breeding.”
Eugenics, West noted, “was the consensus view of the American and European scientific community for decades. . . .
“Much of the modern population-control movement has Darwinian roots,” West said. “So does much of the radical environmentalist movement.”
From the thought of Margaret Sanger, founder of Planned Parenthood in the U.S., to National Socialist theories of “racial improvement,” eugenics was a powerful force in 20th-century progressivism until the consequences of Nazi programs of mass extermination finally gave pause to this dangerous enthusiasm.
In 1933, Ernst Rudin, a leading German eugenicist and National Socialist, wrote in the U.S. Birth Control Review, edited by Sanger, that the goal of eugenicists is “to prevent the multiplication of bad stocks.”
Astounding Theories
Noting that the idea of a “living” or “evolving” Constitution arose during the “Progressive Era,” West quoted “progressive” Democrat president Woodrow Wilson saying in 1913, “Living political constitutions must be Darwinian in structure and in practice….All that progressives ask or desire is permission — in an era when ‘development,’ ‘evolution’ is the scientific word — to interpret the Constitution according to the Darwinian principle.”
West observed: “As important as the evolving Constitution is, today in the constitutional sphere perhaps the most pronounced influence of Darwinian theory is its use as a powerful excuse for restricting the religious freedom and freedom of speech of people of faith in the sciences.”
People “who continue to believe in God as Creator are regarded as irrational persons who should be censored, harassed, or even fired,” West said, giving examples of scientists who were harassed and discriminated against for their openness to “intelligent design,” considered to be in opposition to Darwinism.
“This abuse of science as a justification for discrimination against people of faith goes far beyond Darwinian biology,” West said. “Increasingly, ‘science,’ so-called, is becoming the excuse of choice in efforts to silence people of faith in the public square or to force them to violate their consciences.”
Then, on June 26, the narrow Supreme Court majority applied its own astounding theories on marriage to the Constitution. This blind leap of liberal faith quickly promises a legal campaign of prejudice and punishment against anyone who still believes the truths of marriage throughout history remain as valid as they were as of dawn on June 26.
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