Thanks to Right Wing Watch for bringing this to my attention.
Rena M. Lindevaldsen is the interim dean of the Liberty University School of Law. She is also the Associate Dean for Academic Affairs, Professor of Law, and Associate Director of the Liberty Center for Law and Policy, and she is admitted to practice law in Florida, New York, and Virginia state courts, several United States Courts of Appeal, and the United States Supreme Court.
The university recently posted to YouTube an address that she delivered to students as part of the university’s 2015 Law Speaker Series; the title was Do Government Officials Have Authority to Impose Their Morals on Others? You can watch and listen here:
I’ve pulled a few of the choicest bits to show how utterly unfit she is for her position; you’ll find them below the orange paraph.
God didn’t create government, he created people, and we delegate that authority. And then Romans 13 sets out some specific purposes for civil government. First of all, government only has the authority that which God has established. So civil government, if it’s acting rightfully within its authority, just like individuals, should be acting consistent with Scripture
Then she hijacks Martin Luther King, Jr.:
Martin Luther King, Jr., in A Letter from a Birmingham Jail talked about this, this idea that if you ... anything consistent with Scripture is a just law; if it’s inconsistent with Scripture, or causes you to take action inconsistent with Scripture, it’s an unjust law.
And here’s her answer to the question posed in her title:
So to wrap it all up, to answer the question we started with, yes, because government is naturally going to impose some one set of values, as a nation founded on biblical truth we get government’s only just authority being derived from God, and its purpose is to protect those unalienable rights we’ve been given, not to infringe them as we’re seeing take place a lot in society today. So when people ask about laws that are being posed, whether it’s zoning, or taxes, or marriage, or abortion, in those issues government doesn’t have authority to say that these things are appropriate, because they’re contrary to Scripture.
Evidently that
yes is highly qualified: it applies only to those government officials who share her morals.
I could say a lot more, but there’s really no point: her own words are more than sufficiently damning. Sadly, I suspect that here she’s mostly preaching to the choir.