(Part 3) The Collapse of Duty: Reclaiming the Moral Order Between Men and Women

Every law is a teacher. It tells a people what their society values. It rewards some behavior and punishes others. It shapes the moral direction of the nation, whether its authors admit it or not. When the law rewards righteousness, virtue flourishes. When it rewards corruption, virtue dies.

Today, we live in a world where the law rewards immorality. It protects irresponsibility, subsidizes vice, and punishes discipline. The system has become a reflection of our spiritual confusion, enforcing equality where there should be accountability, and indulgence where there should be repentance. We have built a machine that incentivizes sin and punishes duty, then we wonder why virtue is disappearing.

The Divorce of Law and Morality

The law was never meant to be morally neutral. Justice was meant to reflect truth. But in the modern world, morality has been replaced by emotion. We no longer ask what is right, only what feels fair. This confusion began when we detached law from its moral foundation. We replaced the Ten Commandments with the language of convenience.

Marriage was once the cornerstone of civil order. Now, the law treats it as a temporary partnership with exit benefits. “No-fault” divorce means you can destroy a family for any reason at all and still be rewarded for it. Courts do not ask who broke the vow, only who earns more. The guilty and the innocent are treated the same.

Imagine applying that same principle to every other area of life. If two business partners dissolve a company, and one stole money from the other, would we divide the profits evenly and call it justice? Of course not. Yet that is exactly what family courts do every day. They call it fairness, but it is the opposite. When the law refuses to distinguish between betrayal and faithfulness, it destroys the meaning of both.

Child Support and the Economics of Incentive

Child support was meant to ensure that children would not suffer when parents separate. In theory, it sounds noble. In practice, it has become a moral hazard. The system rewards the parent who leaves. It pays no regard to fault, motive, or manipulation. It assumes that money can replace presence, and that the state can replace the family.

Worse yet, support payments are often tied to a man’s income rather than the actual needs of the child. That means the more a man works, the more he is penalized. Success becomes a liability. It teaches men that the fruit of their labor can be confiscated through someone else’s irresponsibility. It tells them to work just hard enough to survive, but not hard enough to be robbed.

No system that punishes effort and rewards desertion can claim to be just.

A truly moral law would do the opposite. It would recognize fault, incentivize reconciliation, and protect those who uphold their duty. It would reward self-control, not selfishness. It would encourage families to heal, not to split. The goal of law should never be comfort. It should be order grounded in truth.

Abortion and the Illusion of Autonomy

Nowhere is this moral confusion clearer than in the issue of abortion. The same society that tells men they are responsible for every consequence of conception tells women they are responsible for none. The same system that grants a woman total control over whether a child is born demands that the man pay for a choice he was never allowed to make.

This is not justice. It is tyranny disguised as compassion. It declares that freedom belongs to one sex and obligation to the other. It teaches women that they can create life without accountability, and it teaches men that their role in creation is meaningless.

Both lessons are lies. Life does not begin with permission. It begins with God. And the moment human law pretends to hold the authority to end it, it ceases to be law at all. It becomes rebellion against the very order it was created to uphold.

When the state permits the destruction of life, it destroys its own moral legitimacy. It cannot call itself protector of the weak while sanctioning the killing of the weakest. It cannot claim to defend human rights while denying humanity itself.

The Welfare of Dependency

The same moral rot runs through the veins of our welfare systems. Government programs that were once designed to protect the vulnerable now trap entire generations in dependency. Instead of lifting people out of poverty, they pay them to stay there. They punish marriage, reward single motherhood, and perpetuate cycles of fatherlessness that breed despair.

If you pay people to fail, you will never run out of failure. If you pay them to stay broken, they will never heal.

A moral system lifts the willing, disciplines the idle, and protects the innocent. A corrupt system subsidizes the opposite. Our policies claim to be compassionate, but true compassion never separates mercy from consequence. It never rewards sin at the expense of those who live rightly.

The Law as a Mirror of the Soul

A nation’s laws reflect its soul. When our laws were rooted in truth, we prospered. When we began to legislate comfort, we began to decay. The founders of free nations understood that liberty without virtue is impossible. John Adams said that the Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate for any other.

He was right. Freedom requires self-governance. Self-governance requires moral discipline. And moral discipline requires a belief in absolute truth. Without that foundation, freedom turns into chaos, and compassion turns into corruption.

The proof is all around us. The family has collapsed. Crime rises. Birthrates fall. Depression climbs. And yet the system continues to preach that the solution is more control, more funding, more legislation. But no law can fix what law itself destroyed.

Rewarding Virtue Instead of Vice

If we truly cared about justice, we would start by aligning law with morality again. We would not write legislation to make bad choices comfortable. We would write it to make good choices possible.

Marriage should be protected, not penalized. Divorce should be discouraged, not rewarded. Abortion should be unthinkable, not subsidized. Welfare should uplift the responsible, not enable the reckless.

The law cannot make people good, but it can make it harder to do evil. And that is its duty. A society that refuses to judge moral failure will eventually collapse under it. A society that honors virtue will thrive even in poverty.

The Spiritual Root of Injustice

The problem is not bureaucracy. It is belief. Evil’s goal is always the same: to separate man from his responsibility. It convinces people that freedom means no consequence, that mercy means no justice, and that law means no truth.

This deception begins in the human heart. The law is only its reflection. We created systems that justify sin because we wanted to sin without guilt. We call it progress, but it is the oldest rebellion in history. It is humanity’s attempt to dethrone God and sit in His judgment seat.

Until we recognize that law without morality is lawlessness, we will continue to descend into disorder. Justice begins where truth is honored. Truth begins where God is feared. And fear of God begins where man stops pretending he is his own authority.

The Path to Renewal

The game will remain rigged until righteousness is restored to the rule of law. That begins not with politicians but with people of conscience. It begins in households that teach duty over desire, reverence over rebellion, and truth over comfort.

A nation cannot be legislated into virtue, but it can be inspired into it. The family that honors God teaches the child that justice matters. The man who keeps his vows teaches his son that integrity is strength. The woman who respects her husband teaches her daughter that trust is security.

When moral law is written on the heart, civil law becomes its reflection. But when hearts grow cold, the law will always follow.

Our courts, our schools, our politics, and our culture are mirrors of the soul of the people. If the mirror looks corrupt, it is not the reflection that must change. It is the face looking into it.

Conclusion

The system is not just broken. It is inverted. It rewards what should be punished and punishes what should be praised. But systems are built by people, and people can repent. The way back is simple but not easy. We must stop writing laws to make bad choices feel right and start rebuilding laws that make right choices worth living for.

The law must once again teach what God designed: that justice begins with truth, and that the wages of sin cannot be legislated away.