To do - or not to do - whatever we want to do

Shame is nothing new.

In the Bible, it is present in man from the beginning, from Genesis, from the time when Adam and Eve discover their nakedness in the Garden of Eden and are ashamed and cover themselves.

We need not debate the veracity of the Bible to understand the psychological legitimacy of this story, which illustrates how self-consciousness has a built-in censor which guides our conduct and shapes our behavior.

It is that internal, essentially human, self-consciousness which is the seed of what the philosophers call "natural law," and thus we can say that individual self-consciousness has an elemental role in mankind's continuing urge to legislate and to regulate human behavior. In a very real sense, the legal system is society's way of imposing shame on those who lack an adequate amount of it on their own.

To the libertarian, of course, this is a challenge.

There are always people who believe they should be free to engage in any behavior they choose, as long as it does no harm to anyone else. For Adam and Eve, they see no shame in being naked, and for the rest of us, they see no shame in living as though there were no natural law. Libertarians have made the case, at one time or another, for freedom to use recreational drugs, engage in public nudity, drive without a license, and enjoy their sexuality in any form it takes. These days, of course, they also wish to safeguard their ability to be as vulgar as they want.

One of the tactics which such libertarians employ to advance their agenda is to appropriate shame as their badge of honor. Instead of leading to humility or repentance, such expectation of shame instead leads to defiance and recklessness. You only need to read the latest "Britney Spears enters/exits rehab" story to understand this.

This also illustrates the fundamental danger of libertarianism. It believes that the behavior of the individual has no effect on the collective known as society. But that is patently false. Instead, every time society allows vulgar, selfish behavior to go unpunished - unshamed if you will - then it sends a message to everyone that such behavior is acceptable. Yes, we all have the freedom to switch the channel if something we don't like is on TV, but switching the channel as an individual will not save the society we all inhabit together.

The American Civil Liberties Union exemplifies this libertarian instinct more than any other institution in our country. It routinely defends behavior which society finds offensive, and condemns the traditional values which nurtured our freedom in the first place. Thus, it opposes traditional marriage, supports pornography, opposes religion in the town square, supports terrorists, opposes the Boy Scouts, supports the North American Man-Boy Love Association, and so on.

An average American who studied the legal briefs filed by the ACLU would be shocked and appalled, yet this radical group has slowly but surely chipped away at our ability to define ourselves as people "endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights," and we seem unable to do anything to stop them. Indeed, so far as the ACLU is concerned, the Creator doesn't exist - and mustn't exist - within the United States. I am confident that if the Declaration of Independence were written today as an official government document, the ACLU would be in court before the end of the week to demand an injunction against it.

This is so absurd that it is scary, but it is the plain truth.

The First Amendment has been so twisted by legal interpretation and misinterpretation that it now barely resembles the intent of the Founding Fathers. When they wrote that "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof," the Founding Fathers had something specific in mind. First of all, note that the law specifically addresses only what Congress shall do. But the courts quickly broadened this to include the entire federal government, and eventually the state governments, and now to include pretty much any municipality or township as well.

Secondly, note that the amendment prohibits Congress from establishing a religion, and also prevents Congress from prohibiting the people from exercising their own religious beliefs. Anyone who knows anything about American history knows that this was not meant to prohibit government from acknowledging God and not meant to prohibit the Christian tradition which cradled our democracy from being honored. But that is what the courts, largely at the goading of the ACLU, have concluded. Indeed, these days, the First Amendment ought to more accurately read that "Congress shall make no law prohibiting the free exercise of religion, but the Supreme Court shall do so on a regular basis."

But it is not just the "establishment clause" which the ACLU has used to do battle with America's traditional Christian heritage; it is also in the clause of the First Amendment which prohibits Congress from "abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press." These words in the First Amendment were intended as guarantors of our political liberty, and were meant to ensure our rights to speak out against the government, not as cudgels to force the nation to submit to vile and vulgar discourse as the lingua franca of the realm.

It is quite apparent that the First Amendment was never intended as an unqualified permit for any and all speech, and as early as 1798 Congress adopted the Alien and Sedition Acts, which expressly forbade the publication of "false, scandalous, and malicious writings against the government of the United States… with intent to defame … or to bring them … into contempt or disrepute." Several of those members of Congress who voted for this act had also voted to ratify the First Amendment, so they clearly did not see them to be in conflict.

Moreover, there is absolutely no one who supports freedom of the press who can claim that at the time the First Amendment was adopted, it was intended to protect vulgar or indecent speech since there were numerous laws in our early history which prohibited such behavior. Even today, the First Amendment's freedom of the press clause, which appears to be an absolute protection, does not in fact apply to such things as child pornography, commercial speech such as advertising, campaign finance, hate speech or slander. But in the 215 years since the First Amendment came into effect, the urge of the court (largely at the urging of the ACLU) has been to increase protection for vulgarity and decrease protection for society's traditional values and standards.

In essence, the court has taken away the right of society to consider certain kinds of behavior and speech to be shameful, and by removing such restrictions, it has left us vulnerable to the acidic corrupting influences of teen-centered popular culture, Internet pornography and filthy lucre.

Meanwhile, a huge swath of our society celebrates this decline as a healthy enjoyment of liberty, but in the long run the apotheosis of the individual and the vilification of society will have two unavoidable consequences which only a fool could anticipate gladly - moral decay and social collapse.

Now that would be a shame.