Last week Singapore hung a convicted drug smuggler from Australia. Leading up to the execution, there was a lot of attention in the news to the pleas by various Australian officials for leniency in his case.
Today the front page of a local Singapore paper ran a different story - an editorial by an Australian bemoaning the tragic effects of lenient sentencing in their country and asking if that really protrays a higher view of the sanctity of life than does a society that takes justice more seriously.
Western liberal societies have to seriously grapple with these questions of values. Whether or not their civil liberties are worth the cost of high crime and other social costs. And whether they can really sustain the freedom of those civil liberties, when the undergirding system of moral values based on Judeo-Christian teaching (which resulted in moral restraint from personal religious convictions and group religious pressure) have been largely stripped away.
Wouldn't it be ironic if the liberal civil liberty movements that wanted to bring freedom from religion and its strict moral codes to modern society, ended up being responsible for the move toward more severe authoritarian governments out of a need to provide more protection to citizens from the runaway expression of immoral behavior?
"The results of our moral relativism and revolving-door justice can be seen everywhere — bars on windows, security doors, a general loss of trust, an often demoralised police force, an entrenched heroin sub-culture dominated at the bottom by glassy-eyed cretins and at the top by double-talking ideologues."
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