Today’s Times contained a bitter and, quite frankly, evil editorial by Carol Sarler on the issue of consent within the democratic system.  The issue is a challenging one for libertarians - split between legalists and activists - but I hardly think anyone that supports the cause of liberty can claim to be a Sarlerist.

It must have been mightily crowded last week: standing room only, up there on the higher moral ground, crammed with the bristling self-righteous who prefer, as they always put it, to “opt out” rather than to compromise a “principle”.

The fact that she puts the word ‘principle’ in quotation marks is a damning indictment of her lack of principle.  If she considers principle to be to illusion, maybe she should shut her mouth rather than preach her own principles to those that realise the value of morality.  But onwards to find out what principles she lacks…

Now, jostling for position, comes the JP who is fighting for the right to opt out of family cases that might involve same-sex adoption, the conscience-smitten family doctors who wish to opt out of the entire “process” of abortion – including even referring a patient to a doctor of different stripe – and the sanctimonious couple who have fostered 28 children but are opting out because they have been told they are legally bound to let children think that homosexuals are OK people too.

Snarling Sarler gives us more rhetoric claptrap that belies her complete lack of interest in moral activity or consistency.  I would wager that most doctors are doctors exactly because they are ‘conscience-smitten’, and consider caring to be a vocation.  Certainly, no doctor would work in this country, with its NHS-depressed wage structure, for the paycheque alone.  The same is true of the foster parents; it’s caring that makes them do anything.

I disagree fundamentally with these opt-outs (I think that, to quote a female friend, abortion is the best thing since sliced bread).  However, it is perfectly right for the individual to have opinions, right or wrong, that differ from the majority, and it’s the individual’s right to act upon his or her opinions.  When it is those opinions that make any opt-in possible, like the doctor or foster parents, to criticise compassion is to prove the sanctimony and stupidity that underline Sarler’s bile.

The whole trend is, frankly, social sense stood on its head. Such is our growing timidity of causing offence in the face of the doctrines of minorities that all anybody has to do is to invoke “morality”, “deity” or “principle” for it to appear that it is they who are pristine of spirit and the rest of us who occupy a lower dimension.

I don’t quite think these people are doing it for sanctimony’s sake.  They’re doing it for principle’s sake.  They have a belief that you don’t have - like the well-formed opinion that Carol Sarler is a f***wit - and they don’t want to give it up.  The only way you could be in a lower dimension than them is if you don’t believe in morality or principle.  Oh, wait, the quotation marks again?  Taxi to the seventh circle of hell for Ms Sarler.

The higher moral ground, in a democracy, belongs to consensus drawn from the values of the majority and implemented by the flawed beast that is the law. Those who would exempt themselves from it, no matter how enjoyable the fleeting fame of their martyrdom, deserve no more endorsement or admiration than any other petty delinquent.

As its name might suggest, the moral high ground belongs to those that act morally, not those that follow the word of the immoral man.  By opting out of others’ actions, they don’t necessarily act morally or immorally.  However, to coerce others, regardless of principle or belief, to follow the unprincipled and unbelieved word of the immoral man, is immorality defined.

That is the supposed ‘high ground’ that the majoritarian absolutist occupies.  That ground commands no heights.  It provides no defence from the superior arms of the individualist.  It does, however, pose a threat only by its prevalence as a belief, and by the fact that it is backed by the literal guns of the immoral man.

In the fact of that, these people are made martyrs against their wishes, when all they want to do is exercise a small opt-out that allows society to benefit from their large opt-in.  They don’t do it to become martyrs.  They do it for principle: the very thing that Sarler derides, and the very thing that Sarler lacks.