Living Not by Lies
If Utah politicians want to call themselves conservatives, they should care about Truth.
In a nihilistic age, some of us still believe there exists such a thing as objective truth.
Social conservatives have been acutely aware for decades, and rightly so, of what holding to objective truth means for public policy. The objective reality of a fetus’s personhood stands, regardless of the subjective will of those with the power to kill her. The objective reality of a person’s biological sex persists, independent of the subjective feelings of the one who desires to change it. While subjective experiences call for empathy and understanding, objective realities call for belief and assent.
Social conservatives also tend to honor, rightly, the rule of law. Without law there is only the violent will to power. The rule of law establishes the parameters of a safe and orderly society and, in our republican form of government, it upholds a system of checks and balances in which various notions of justice may peacefully contend. Ballots are our alternatives to bullets, and so is our judicial system. The rule of law rests entirely on trust in our courts to determine fact from falsehood, and trust is only possible with a common understanding of what is true.
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The truth, then, isn’t just a guidepost for policy preferences, it’s the very foundation of any functioning social framework worth conserving. Truth is the one thing, ultimately, that keeps a free society from descent into chaos and bloodshed. Without truth, there is no society, and therefore no freedom. It’s no wonder we’re told that the truth is what sets us free.
January 6 was the outburst of a mob enslaved by lies. They disbelieved the truth about the November 3 election. They distrusted the Republican officials who counted the votes. They ignored the Trump-appointed judges who found that the rumors of widespread voter fraud swirling on the Internet were factually baseless. Under the guise of disingenuous legal arguments, they demanded that the vice president and Congress illegally disenfranchise the states whose electors voted a way they didn’t like. Failing to persuade, they then took the advice of the president of the United States: “We fight like hell and if you don’t fight like hell, you’re not going to have a country anymore.”
They hung a noose outside the United States Capitol, broke in, and roamed the halls looking for Vice President Mike Pence. They did this because they believed the lie that if they didn’t fight like hell, they wouldn’t have a country anymore. Lies by themselves contain the entropy of social decay. Liars are decadent, and no less so because their lies are seemingly inconsequential, pronounced within the vacuous arena of political theater. No, every lie is destructive, and every liar about the election is responsible for January 6.
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Utah Attorney General Sean Reyes participated in the lie by joining a desperate and legally frivolous lawsuit that was unanimously slapped down by the Supreme Court. Representative Chris Stewart and Representative Burgess Owens also joined in with the lie, both before January 6 and after seeing the violence the lie had wrought. By voting on January 7 not to certify Pennsylvania’s electors they not only defied the law as plainly written, they also contradicted their earlier decisions not to object to the validity of those same election results. Lies don’t bother with logical consistency.
Solidarian voter Rod Dreher published an important book last year on why uttering untruth, for any reason, has an inevitably corrosive effect on society. Dreher has been correct to link the thesis of Live Not by Lies to the cowardice of these Republican lawmakers.
Many conservatives of principle are standing up for Truth, even now. And in future elections, with years of hindsight in which these ploys will be known to have been all the more egregious, we shouldn't forget the actions of Attorney General Reyes and Reps. Stewart and Owens at the hour of our Republic's greatest need.
Kevin Mauer is the State Committee Secretary and Constituency Director