Google News, in addition to the preloaded topics such as “Top Stories,” “Science,” “Politics” and so forth, allows you to create and save your own topics, and then goes out to the web to retrieve stories fitting in with that topic. I have three saved searches: “Chicago Cubs,” “Law,” and “Theological Ethics.” The first, I have to admit, gives me the most pleasure these days.[1][2] However, it’s the last two that caught my eye this weekend. The Internet stories on law and ethics put the lie to the modern claim, notably made by Jeremy Bentham, John Austin, then by our own Oliver Wendell Holmes, and now by most appellate judges and law school professors, that law and morality have nothing to do with each other. In fact, one could easily confuse the results of the two searches. The “law” stories are dominated by topics that traditionally have been thought moral issues.

At the top of the list, of course, is abortion. The state of Alabama, in a direct challenge to Roe v. Wade, has passed a law that would essentially outlaw abortion. The state of Missouri has passed its own highly restrictive statute, intended (the governor says) to conform to the minimum requirements of Roe. The state of New York, on the other hand, passed its own statute that would essentially codify, and perhaps even expand, the Roe rights if the United States Supreme Court overrules Roe.

Abortion is not the only moral issue on the front page of the legal section. Issues of gender identity and sexual preference share the spotlight: same sex marriage legalized in Taiwan, anti-homosexuality laws in Brunei, and civil rights for gay and transgendered persons, a topic that the United States Supreme Court will take up.  Border issues and the rights of asylum seekers continue to get attention, as does the homelessness problem. The conflict between Israel and Hamas comes in for analysis under traditional “law of war” theories.

Everyone has his or her opinion of these topics, so that there is no need to add mine. The last thing the Internet needs is more gasoline poured on those fires. What I am concerned with is whether there is an underlying Christian response, in addition to the legal one, to all these issues. I believe there is. The law of love.

Charles Camosy makes the point, in the Washington Post earlier this week, that a truly pro-life ethos would express concern for both the unborn child and the mother. (Stanley Hauerwas made this same point a number of years ago.)[3] No matter what your moral or religious beliefs about abortion are, how can Christians justify forcing a young woman to bring a child to term and then bear the burden of that child alone? In other words, shouldn’t we examine our own collective response to the birth of that child – affordable day care, paid time off, accessible health care for mother and child – before we get on our high horses talking about the sanctity of life? What would it mean to be truly “pro-life?” My completely unresearched instinct is that there is a high degree of correlation between people that are stridently anti-abortion and people that talk about Obamacare and the social safety net as “creeping socialism” or some such nonsense.

Let’s take gender issues and sexual freedom. Now, let me start out by saying that I am NOT, repeat NOT, claiming that homosexual or bisexual behavior is sinful. However, I know people that do think that, and not all of them are mean-spirited hopeless bigoted flat-earthers. My question is this: Even if you, based on your reading of the Bible, do believe such behavior is sinful, what makes it such a special sin that it justifies excluding persons from full participation in the church, or in society in general? We don’t exclude alcoholics, misers, usurers, or adulterers from full social participation. (In fact, that would be a pretty good description of several corporate boards I’ve worked with.) Even convicted criminals get invited back into the fold. Google search “famous convicted felons” if you don’t believe me. What sort of person could believe that sexual preference is “worse” than those, some sort of “unpardonable sin”? On what basis does gender identity or sexual preference justify denying someone the same protections in employment that the rest of us enjoy? (Richard Hays talks about this at length in his 1996 book The Moral Vision of the New Testament.) William James said “(t)he first thing to learn in intercourse with others is non-interference with their own peculiar ways of being happy, provided those ways do not assume to interfere by violence with ours. No one has insight into all the ideals. No one should presume to judge them off-hand. The pretension to dogmatize about them in each other is the root of most human injustices and cruelties, and the trait in human character most likely to make the angels weep.” There must be much weeping in heaven these days.

We seem to be in danger of moving from the divorce of morality from law to the replacement of morality by law. What are essentially moral questions of how to treat our neighbors get answered by Congress and state legislators. It would be one thing if we retained a sense of what has been called legal equity. But we don’t. Equity was essentially a question of fairness, not bound by strict construction of statutory law. Now, we think that the legislature makes the rules, and courts only apply them.  If you want to see the absence of equity at work, look no farther than this story in the Los Angeles Times. Residents of tony neighborhoods in Venice and San Francisco have filed lawsuits under the California Environmental Quality Act, trying to stop the construction of homeless shelters in their neighborhoods. Yes, you read that right. The neighbors want to treat the homeless under the same legal protocols used to deal with PCBs, asbestos, and acid rain. The question, unfortunately, will be whether that is a fair reading of the statute, and not the real question of what bizarro legal universe would treat a human being like a pollutant. California, perhaps. Let’s hope not.

This is where the divorce of law and morality hits home. No less than John Calvin, not exactly a flower-in-his-hair kind of guy, thought that equity was the essential component of any social order, especially to protect the widows, the poor, and the unemployed. It is the jurisprudential equivalent of the law of love. Equity was based, according to Calvin, on what we now call the Golden Rule: do unto others as you would have them do unto you. To which I would add: do unto others as you would have them do unto you if you were them. (Calvin says “no act of kindness, except accompanied by sympathy, is pleasing to God”). What would you expect from society if you were 18, unmarried, and pregnant? How would you want to be treated if you were transgender and out of a job? Sympathy, from the Greek sumpatheia, “feel with” is precisely what Calvin calls for.

What all of us would want, I think, is to be treated as a child of God. This is our obligation from the time of baptism: to “strive for justice and peace among all people, and respect the dignity of every human being.” Perhaps this is where the law and the church diverge. The law can say “don’t discriminate on the basis of x, y, and z.” The church says, “treat everyone like your brother and sister.” We have room, even need, for both. We should just remember that the first tells us what we can and can’t do, the second what we ought to do.

[1] Sorry, Cardinal fans.

[2] Not really.

[3] Hauerwas, “Abortion, Theologically Understood,” in Lysaught, et al, On Moral Medicine. Hauerwas quotes extensively from a sermon by the Rev. Terry Hamilton – Poole on the same topic.