Boonstra: Founders Wouldn't Think Much of Two-Tiered Justice

A two-tiered system of justice.

Many think that’s what we have today.

One for the elites; another for the rest of us.

One for one political party; another for the other.

One for the powerful; another for those who oppose them.

Our Founding Fathers would be aghast that we could tolerate such a thing — just as they must be rolling over in their graves about much of modern-day America.

The nation they bequeathed to us, although imperfect even then, was one that recognized that "all men are created equal" and are "endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights."

Those are the words of Thomas Jefferson in the Declaration of Independence, and they unveiled the Founding of a nation based on equal justice for all.

A one-tiered system, not a two-tiered one.

Jefferson’s words were premised on the guiding principle of our Founding — that our rights and freedoms came from God, and that civil society depended on what George Washington described as the "indispensable supports" of religion and morality.

It was those supports enabling the Founding of a new and different American society — one that recognized "the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle them."

It's no coincidence that our Constitution begins by linking two of our Founding goals: to "establish Justice" and to "secure the Blessings of Liberty."

It embodied the universally-accepted truth among our Founding Fathers that equal justice flowed from our God-given liberties.

How far we have fallen as a nation. Modern-day America banishes God from every aspect of our society. Is it any surprise that our one-tiered system of justice has fallen with it?

Indeed, our Founders predicted as much.

It was John Adams, for example, who declared that "religion and virtue are the only foundations" of government and human society, and who sought the direction of the Giver of our natural rights while declaring that "all men are born free and equal, and have certain natural, essential, and unalienable rights," and that all “shall be equally under the protection of the law."

Adams’s cousin, the firebrand Samuel Adams, declared that religion and liberty were "intimately connected," "interwoven," "cannot subsist separately," and "rise and fall together," and observed that "those who are combined to destroy the people’s liberties practice every art to poison their morals."

Again, this Adams knew that equal justice under the law flowed from the "equal and impartial liberty" that "all men are clearly entitled to, by the eternal and immutable laws of God and nature."

Put another way, 'all men are equally bound by the laws of nature, or, to speak more properly, the laws of the Creator. They are imprinted by the finger of God on the heart of man."

Alexander Hamilton, in his "The Farmer Refuted" essay, similarly spoke of the "natural rights of mankind" as "dictated by God himself, and as investing all men with an "inviolable right to personal liberty."

Quoting the inestimable legal scholar, Sir William Blackstone, author of the "Commentaries on the Laws of England," Hamilton declared that "the first and primary end of human laws" is "to maintain and regulate these absolute rights of individuals" that are "vested in them by the immutable laws of nature."

Hamilton declared that because "civil liberty" is founded in "natural liberty," which is "a gift of the beneficent Creator," it "cannot be wrested from any people, without the most manifest violation of justice."

Hamilton summed up the inextricable link between justice under the law and our God-given liberties, this way:

"The sacred rights of mankind are not to be rummaged for, among old parchments, or musty records. They are written, as with a sun beam, in the whole volume of human nature, by the hand of the divinity itself; and can never be erased or obscured by mortal power."

In his essay, "A Defence of the Use of the Bible as a School Book," Benjamin Rush, a signer of the Declaration of Independence from Pennsylvania, said:

"We neglect the only means of establishing and perpetuating our republican forms of government, that is, the universal education of our youth in the principles of Christianity, by means of the Bible; for this divine book, above all others, favours that equality among mankind, that respect for just laws, and all those sober and frugal virtues, which constitute the soul of republicanism."

Fellow-Declaration-signer George Wythe of Virginia, the first law professor in America and Jefferson’s legal mentor, declared that "justice is appointed of God, the golden rule of all order throughout the universe," and that he who "knowingly acts against justice, is a rebel against God, and a premeditated murderer of mankind."

James Wilson, a future Justice of the United States Supreme Court and a signer of both the Declaration of Independence and the United States Constitution, wrote in his "Lectures on Law" that "the law of nature is universal. For it is true, not only that all men are equally subject to the command of their Maker; but it is true also, that the law of nature, having its foundation in the constitution and state of man, has an essential fitness for all mankind, and binds them without distinction."

Hamilton could have been speaking to modern-day American society when he said:

"The fundamental source of all your errors, sophisms and false reasonings is a total ignorance of the natural rights of mankind. Were you once to become acquainted with these, you could never entertain a thought, that all men are not, by nature, entitled to a parity of privileges."

Americans today would do well to take Hamilton’s advice.

Rid yourself of ignorance about the source of our natural rights — our Creator.

Demand that our society re-instill in itself the indispensable supports of religion and morality. Equal justice under the law, and a one-tiered system of justice, surely will follow.

Mark Boonstra is a judge on the Michigan Court of Appeals. He is the author of a three-volume series, "In Their Own Words: Today’s God-less America . . . What Would Our Founding Fathers Think?" His appearances include Newsmax’s "The Chris Salcedo Show" and "The Dennis Prager Show."