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The Guardian - UK
The Guardian - UK
Comment
Andrew Brown

Autre temps, autre moeurs

On behalf of the Campaign for Real Theocracy, I am reprinting some thoughts of Alexis de Tocqueville (a splitter and backslider who can't have been a real Catholic because he was in favour of democracy). Here he is describing the constitution drawn up for the state of Connecticut in 1650:

The legislators of Connecticut begin with the penal laws, and, strange to say, they borrow their provisions from the text of Holy Writ.

'Whosoever shall worship any other God than the Lord," says the preamble of the Code, "shall surely be put to death." This is followed by ten or twelve enactments of the same kind, copied verbatim from the books of Exodus, Leviticus, and Deuteronomy. Blasphemy, sorcery, adultery, and rape were punished with death; an outrage offered by a son to his parents was to be expiated by the same penalty. The legislation of a rude and half-civilized people was thus applied to an enlightened and moral community. The consequence was, that the punishment of death was never more frequently prescribed by statute, and never more rarely enforced.

The chief care of the legislators in this body of penal laws was the maintenance of orderly conduct and good morals in the community; thus they constantly invaded the domain of conscience, and there was scarcely a sin which was not subject to magisterial censure. The reader is aware of the rigour with which these laws punished rape and adultery; intercourse between unmarried persons was likewise severely repressed. The judge was empowered to inflict either a pecuniary penalty, a whipping, or marriage on the misdemeanants, and if the records of the old courts of New Haven may be believed, prosecutions of this kind were not infrequent.

Two thoughts come to mind. The first is that Tina Fey's joke, in her take-off of Sarah Palin, that "Marriage is meant to be a sacred institution between two unwilling teenagers" would not have seemed in the least bit odd to the puritan framers of Connecticut's constitution. The second, though you'll have to click to get the joke and possibly even pay to download the punchline, is that Connecticut has changed a bit since those days.

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