CYA, short for Covering Your Anatomy, is the strategy of choosing one’s course of action in such a way that if it goes wrong, someone else gets the blame.  Dealing with the problem at hand may take second place.

We all know that CYA can affect governmental policy.  What’s not so often noticed is that it can also affect the Constitutional balance of power.

In view of the efforts to slow the spread of the coronavirus, I had thought of writing a post about how pastors, priests, and bishops should be imaginative instead of supine, finding ways to administer the sacraments without having to pack large numbers of people into small enclosed spaces.

One of my natural law students told me this week of a conversation with his six-year-old sister.

He had been learning that according to Thomas Aquinas, a command, in order to be a genuine law rather than an act of violence, must be reasonable, for the common good, made by competent public authority, and promulgated to all.

Though I disagreed with the late Justice Scalia about a variety of things, I have always liked his quip that he didn’t believe in a “living” Constitution, but in a dead one.

As its name suggests, progressivism wants to make progress.  This would seem to mean that it wants to achieve new things that are good, and leave behind old things that are bad.  Who wouldn’t be for that?

But to know whether you are making progress or not, you need an objective standard of what is good.  In short, you need the natural law.