Liberty, Donohue, Hebdo, and Hewitt

For several years I listened to the Hewitt show.  It was that or the nearly equivalent mindless rock'n'roll, and at least Hewitt had some news worth knowing from D.C. and some informed guests from the legal biz.   But when my commuting days ended, so, thankfully, did my days of hearing Hewitt.

Why such faint praise?  Hewitt was--and remains--a pompous hypocrite, yammering about Christianity while not really exploring what Christianity means.

And he proves it once again.  Here are a few excerpts from an essay on Hewitt's 'interview' of Bill Donohue (who was also reviled, in scatological terms, by Levin.  But then, Levin is not a Christian.)

...Seeing the “whole” of the Charlie Hebdo issue requires Donohue’s message. Commenting on the ostensible goals of James Madison, the Father of our Constitution, poet Robert Frost once wrote: “Now I know—I think I know—what Madison’s dream was. It was just a dream of a new land to fulfill with people in self-control. That is all through his thinking … to fulfill this land—a new land—with people in self-control.”...

... Natural law is (and should be, if that matters) much more expansive than the positive, or human-made legislative, law. Thomas Aquinas wrote that “human laws do not by strict command prohibit every vicious action, just as they do not command every virtuous action.”

This means that we enjoy many more legal rights than moral rights—which itself means that true liberty requires non-legislated self-restraint.
Yup.  While abortion is legal, it is certainly not moral.

...In brief, liberty—as understood by the scholastic tradition—describes a moral freedom oriented to the good; license or false freedom is an abuse of true liberty because it employs freedom for its own sake. And license’s false teleology renders it both amoral and indefensible, even while legal in certain cases. In the case of rightfully legal, yet licentious exercises of free speech—like Charlie Hebdo sodomy cartoons, according to Donohue—moral defensibility collapses, even as legal defensibility stands....

But Donohue's perfectly licit point was something Hewitt would not countenance.  Back to "hypocritical":  Hewitt knows full-well the 'natural'/'legal' distinction because he crusades a bit about abortion.

But I suppose Hewitt needed advertising dollars, or The Right Sort of Friends, or something.  What's more important, anyway?