Political Authority and Morality

When a political authority assumes the power to enforce a particular view of morality as well, it obtains absolute power over its subjects. As the saying goes, absolute power corrupts absolutely. A government which dictates moral behavior to its public can not do so without oppressing and infuriating most of the population. It has happened in the past and it still happens today; when a political authority enforces a particular view of morality, the people suffer.

One notably gruesome example of the consequences of a political authority enforcing a specific set of morals is the Spanish Inquisition. The Spanish Inquisition was an effort by the Roman Catholic church, which was at that time the sole authority for law and order, to enforce its moral rule through making people suffer until they confessed their sins. People who opposed the church's dogma were known as heretics and were sought out, and tortured.

Often, people who had not committed a sin were tortured even though the torturers themselves knew they were innocent. They would also most often be killed regardless of whether they confessed or not, in effort to "save their souls". This extreme merger of political and moral authority existed in the Middle Ages during the Inquisition. The Catholic church today retains moral authority over its own church members, but is no longer a political authority.

Yet one religious group of Afghanistan has repeated this same merger in modern times. The Taliban, a group of fundamentalist Muslims in Afghanistan, took over Kabul, the Afghanistan capital, in September of 1996. Following the take-over, an Islamic militia enforced a fanatically strict moral rule over the citizens of Kabul. The Taliban movement started in 1994, and is based on a strict adherence to Islamic law. Amputations and executions are standard punishments for small crimes.

According to the fundamental Muslims, women are not allowed to work, and must wear a burqa, a heavy cloth garment that covers the entire body, in public. As a consequence of this, the Taliban closed all-girl schools and orphanages because women were working in them. Women seen in public without a burqa were severely beaten. 35,000 widows were trapped in their houses because under Taliban rule, women are not allowed in public without their husbands.

The Taliban rule has not only stolen away basic human rights from women, but the Journal of American Medical Association reported that Afghanistan women suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder, abuse by the Taliban militia, and a decline in physical health. The people of Afghanistan are suffering because the political authority began to enforce a particular moral view, that of the Taliban.

In the beginnings of America there was also an instance of political authority and moral authority combined, though much less extreme. A group of Puritans settled in New England in order to escape religious persecution of the church-ruled nation of England in 1629. Ironically, they themselves retained this idea of the combination of political and moral authority of the government. They soon unintentionally reenacted their plight from England but from the opposite perspective, within their own colony named the Massachusetts Bay Colony.

A brilliant woman named Anne Hutchinson, one of the first American feminists, lived in the Massachusetts Bay Colony. She expressed her ideas that a church was not needed to interpret the Bible, and that you could have a personal relationship with God. These ideas ran completely opposite to the Puritan doctrine, and in 1638 she was put to trial for heresy and eventually banished from the Massachusetts Bay Colony.

The banishment of Anne Hutchinson was an act of pure hypocrisy by the political leaders of the colony. They themselves, less than a decade prior, had experienced being persecuted for unorthodox religious views, and yet they had just committed that same act. They had also persecuted and banished the Quakers in the colony, and even hanged four Quakers who refused to leave. The same problem occurs repeatedly, a political authority that has moral authority as well. In this case it resulted in banishment of a woman who expressed her personal feelings about God as well as the deaths and banishment of many Quakers.

Today in our country we have a constitution which separates church and state. This provision prohibits having a political authority that assumes exclusive moral authority as well. When a political entity dictates a specific moral view to its people, to the exclusion of all others, it oppresses them and steals away the basic human right to choose their own moral code. However, in our country, the individual is guaranteed freedom of religion and thus a choice of moral code, a right which I hope none of us will take for granted.