The Constitution has nothing to do with compromise. It has everything to do with order.
The United States Constitution created endless opportunities for interpretations and legal opinions. But what is not open for debate is the history of America immediately preceding the Constitution and culminating first in the Declaration of Independence. That history is clear.
The establishment of the United States and the crafting of its founding documents was about creating a familiar order and nothing else. A new America required a familiar order of government – built upon many of the ideas of the old order the colonists left behind.
The colonists separating from England were Englishmen, by and large. The colonies were British colonies, especially the north colonies, and were governed under British laws. Increasingly angry colonists were not fighting against English rule generally and the land of their forefathers. They were angry about the arbitrary overstepping of bounds by King George III treating them as second-class citizens.
This point is important: The War of Independence was not a revolution made, but a revolution prevented.
There were dramatic and fundamental differences between our War of Independence and the French Revolution. The French Revolution was a revolution made, not prevented. The French Revolution was a real revolution. The French Jacobins destroyed every evidence of their old order and slaughtered tens of thousands French nobles who represented every social and cultural institution of the old order. The Jacobins sought an entirely different order. They sought revolution.
By contrast, the American colonists sought not to destroy the old order. They used the experiences and wisdoms of the old order. Our founding fathers read the same books as did the English dating back to the Magna Carta and even further back to the ancient philosophers and the gospels of Jesus Christ. The American colonists objected to a broken order as King George III began to treat the American colonists different than Britains under homeland rule. These circumstances were the basis of and justification for the Declaration of Independence.
The godfather of modern conservatism, Russell Kirk, carefully studied the nature of revolutions from America’s founding to the French Revolution. His friend, the late Mel Bradford, professor and historian, Kirk writes,
“called the Revolution a conservative revolution. The colonists wanted home rule. They tried to keep the rights they already had as Englishmen. They did not want to remake human nature. They did not sign up for endless social perfectibility. Edmund Burke understood their fight. He defended them in Parliament for the same reason he had defended the Glorious Revolution of 1688. Both were acts of preservation, not innovation.
Bradford’s reading of the Declaration would find a surprising ally across the Atlantic today in the English historian David Starkey. Starkey repeatedly insists that 1776 was not the birth of a new revolutionary ideology. It was the last great flowering of the ancient English constitution. The Declaration, properly read, is a restatement of the rights of Englishmen. It echoes Magna Carta, the Petition of Right, and the Bill of Rights of 1689. Its grievances are the same grievances that Englishmen had leveled against James II and that Whigs had leveled against George III. The language of natural rights is secondary. The real thrust is corporate and historical: Freeborn Englishmen living in chartered colonies possess the same liberties as freeborn Englishmen living in Kent or Yorkshire. Parliament had violated those liberties. Therefore, the colonies, like any English community, had the right to resist.” (Russell Kirk, “A Revolution Not Made, But Prevented,” Modern Age, June 16, 2026)
The American colonists fought a war they did not seek, only a war inevitable. Our founding fathers did not throw the baby out with the bathwater. They sought a new order of the ages absent the arbitrary rule of royalty. Our Founders respected the necessary institutions of a peaceful, civil and independent society. They understood the importance of family, religion, private property, voluntary associations and the proper role of government. They sought peace with England but King George III upset the order for the colonists. Absent a just order, they created one.
A just order. That was the goal.
Kirk continues,
Not until the French radicals utterly overturned the old political and social order in their country did the word “revolution” acquire its present general meaning of a truly radical change in social and governmental institutions, a tremendous convulsion in society, producing huge alterations that might never be undone. Thus, when the eighteenth-century Whigs praised the “Glorious Revolution” of 1688, which established their party’s domination, they did not mean that William and Mary, the Act of Settlement, and the Declaration of Rights had produced a radically new English political and social order. On the contrary, they argued that the English Revolution has restored tried and true constitutional practices, preservative of immemorial ways. It was James II, they contended, who had been perverting the English constitution; his overthrow had been a return, a rolling back, to old constitutional order; the Revolution of 1688, in short, had been a healthy reaction, not a bold innovation.
The great father of modern conservatism, Edmund Burke, lived through the American War of Independence as a member of British Parliament and repeatedly wrote about how England’s “Glorious Revolution” and America’s War of Independence were formed from the same basis of restoring order, not creating a new order,
The [Glorious] Revolution was made to preserve our antient indisputable laws and liberties, and that antient constitution of government which is our only security for law and liberty … The very idea of the fabrication of a new government, is enough to fill us with disgust and horror. We wished at the period of the Revolution, and do now wish, to derive all we possess as an inheritance from our forefathers. (J. C. D. Clark, English Society, 1660–1832: Religion, Ideology, and Politics during the Ancien Regime. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pgs. 181-183.)
If we must (I loathe him), read carefully Thomas Paine from his argument for independence in his Common Sense noting that even this radical advocate for revolution understood the relationship between American colonists and their English roots,
No man was a warmer wisher for a reconciliation than myself, before the fatal nineteenth of April, 1775 [the day of the battles of Lexington and Concord], but the moment the event of that day was made known, I rejected the hardened, sullen-tempered Pharaoh of England forever; and disdain the wretch, that with the pretended title of FATHER OF HIS PEOPLE can unfeelingly hear of their slaughter, blood upon his soul…. Where, say some, is the king of America? I’ll tell you, Friend, he reigns above, and doth not make havoc of mankind like the royal brute of Great Britain…. So far as we approve of monarchy…in America the law is king…. A government of our own is our natural right…. Ye that oppose independence now, ye know not what ye do: ye are opening the door to eternal tyranny…. There are thousands and tens of thousands, who would think it glorious to expel from the Continent, that barbarous and hellish power, which hath stirred up the Indians and the Negroes to destroy us…. O! ye that love mankind! Ye that dare oppose not only the tyranny but the tyrant, stand forth! Every spot of the old world is overrun with oppression. Freedom hath been hunted round the Globe. Asia and Africa have long expelled her. Europe regards her like a stranger, and England hath given her warning to depart. O! receive the fugitive, and prepare in time an asylum for mankind. (Jon Meacham, American Struggle: Democracy, Dissent, and the Pursuit of a More Perfect Union: An Anthology (pp. 13-14).
Popular historian and author Jon Meacham knows the deep roots of the colonists’ attachment as Englishmen,
To encounter the Declaration of Independence is to be plunged back into a complex political world. By the 1770s, the English Civil War, the Restoration, and the Glorious Revolution had shaped the American view of power. In Britain in the seventeenth century, the people, including many aristocrats, had rebelled against the absolutism of the Stuart kings, leading to chaos. There was the execution of Charles I, the commonwealth under Oliver Cromwell, the Restoration of the Stuarts (which led to more political and religious strife), and finally the Glorious Revolution of 1688–89, when William of Orange and his wife, Mary, were crowned to preside over a constitutional ethos based on a Declaration of Rights that limited the monarchy’s power. The Parliament, “full and free,” would be supreme, with guaranteed elections and limitations on the state’s power to encroach on individual rights. Which was essentially what the American colonists wanted: the full benefits of Englishmen, including representation in Parliament. And the denial of these rights drove much of the Declaration, which included twenty-seven grievances. These sections made up the largest portion of a document intended to convince particular audiences—wavering colonists, soldiers, potential foreign allies—of the rightness of the American cause. (Jon Meacham, The Declaration of Independence and the Constitution of the United States, pp. xi-xii.)
Order. That is what our Founders sought. They were Englishmen whose order was shaken by King George III. The War of Independence was born of anger, not theory. The colonists were angry that one Englishman would treat another Englishman with such disdain and disregard. Our founding fathers were setting things right, not creating new things. This is the important point.
I am sharing all of that to tell you this: Prominent Latter-day Saints are attempting to rewrite the history of our founding. Their rewrite is stilted, inelegant and deceptive as applied. I’ll explain.
There is a renewed push within The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints to be kind to one another and to become “peacemakers.” Jesus stressed peacemaking and loving our enemies precisely because this virtue is unnatural in a fallen world. To maintain a broken heart and contrite spirit – the only sacrifice He requires – we must overcome the natural man and become a new creature. Becoming a peacemaker is a natural part of that personal journey.
And yet, some pretty influential names in LDS circles believe peacemaking is a public mandate, not a personal journey. Put in the correct perspective: Peacemaking really is a personal journey, and really not a public mandate. When Jesus preached peacemaking to His disciples He was not asking them to persuade King Herod. Jesus was addressing our hearts, individually and personally without exception.
This influential LDS cabal overreaches so many obvious individual virtuous attributes in a civil society: Being nice or kind, cooperation and working together through difficult issues of public policy that occur day in and day out in state and federal legislatures, becoming your best self, your better angel and your personal growth to obtain a broken heart and contrite spirit. Nothing to see there.
What is to see is the cabal at work – the “peace hypocrites.” These Latter-day Saints who believe peacemaking is a public mandate – while passively “citizen shaming” – believe every public interaction should conclude with compromise. In fact, some of our best known LDS influencers actually argue that the United States Constitution is an instrument for peaceful compromise. They point to the constitutional convention in 1787 wherein disparate and parochial political leaders gathered to create the Constitution – men who set aside differences and gave the new world a document for the ages. But the constitutional convention was hardly a peaceful compromise. More of these men disliked, even hated, each other, more so than we can identify expressions of brotherly love. Every man in that hot summer room got a piece of something they cared about, even slavery. But the only person who got everything they wanted was the one in the room who made the final decision to cut debate.
Finding preemptive compromise in the structure and architecture of the U.S. Constitution is a legal penumbra – and many in the cabal know it.
Before I explain their ulterior motive, I first want to address their mischaracterizations of the U.S. Constitution. It cannot be said enough: the Constitution has nothing to do with compromise. It has everything to do with order. The genius of James Madison’s crafting of this founding document – besides sending the Jacobin-leaning Thomas Jefferson to Paris at the time – is his awareness of human nature and how he leaned on that understanding to construct a process of checks and balances and separations of power to up-play progress and downplay unsolvable disagreements. He cared nothing about some legislator’s temperament. Did he and a few others of his enlightened colleagues appreciate rational and calm deliberation? Of course! But such an atmosphere is hardly the essence of the Constitution. It’s the essence of personal rational reflection – very normal behavior in any serious corporate or legal setting among great minds and studied professionals.
Thomas Griffith is one of these Latter-day Saints attempting to rewrite the history of the U.S. Constitution. Judge Griffith (ret.) is a fellow at the BYU Wheatley Institute and a lecturer on law at Harvard who formerly served as a judge of the US Court of Appeals for the DC Circuit, general counsel of BYU, and the chief legal officer of the US Senate. His resume is very impressive. Surely a legal mind such as Judge Griffith’s wouldn’t lead anyone astray?
In the Summer 2026 issue of Y Magazine, Judge Griffith quotes President Oaks from a familiar political theme by first introducing the 2015 “Utah Compromise” over gay rights. “In a democratic government,” President Oaks emphasized, “we should seek fairness for all.” Fairness for All has been the drumbeat of President Oaks since 2015 leading to a congressional bill described as “Fairness for All,” onto a 2022 piece of legislation titled the “Respect for Marriage Act” wherein the church endorsed same-sex marriage in the name of protecting religious freedom. The theme of fairness for all is nothing more than a clever expression to justify compromising over gay rights.
Judge Griffith invokes the weighted name of President Dallin H. Oaks as if all of this strange constitutional narrative is unto scripture – as if all of this emanates from Jesus Christ Himself.
Judge Griffith writes about the “spirit of amity” that saved the Constitutional Convention. He writes,
So how best to celebrate America’s 250th? Not, I think, by retreating from the gravity of the moment. The storm clouds are real. But neither should we succumb to despair. The tradition of civic charity is as American as the Declaration itself. The spirit of amity saved the Constitutional Convention. It has surfaced at critical junctures throughout our history: in Jefferson’s conciliation after a bitterly contested election, in Lincoln’s call for “malice toward none,” in the civil rights movement’s redemptive moral vision, in the Utah Compromise of 2015. (p. 29)
Put those events side-by-side: saving the Constitutional Convention, Jefferson’s handing over power to the next president, the Civil War, the American civil rights movement led by Dr. King and the 2015 “Utah Compromise.” Which event feels out of place? Which event is not like the others? Which event lacks a “redemptive moral vision”? Yes, the 2015 “Utah Compromise.” Hold that thought because Judge Griffth will explain.
Elsewhere in that same article, Judge Griffith writes that in a speech delivered at the University of Virginia, President Dallin H. Oaks,
… spoke of a deepening empathy he experiences for those who feel that others invoke constitutional rights to deny or diminish their own. “We need to work for a better way—a way to resolve differences without compromising core values.”
What does that look like in practice? President Oaks pointed to the Utah Compromise of 2015 as a model. In a historic piece of legislation, enacted with the full support and active engagement of the Church, Utah’s legislature crafted significant protections both for religious freedom and against discrimination based on sexual orientation. Leaders of the LGBT community hailed the statute a landmark. What made it possible was not legal cleverness alone. The compromise was worked out not only around conference room tables or lawyers’ offices but around dining room tables, among people who developed real relationships despite their differing views. As friendship formed, ideas emerged about how each side could accommodate the needs of the other while maintaining its core values.
Judge Griffith digs deeper into this narrative,
Elder Alexander Dushku, then representing the Church’s interests in the negotiations and now a general authority Seventy serving as the Church’s general counsel, described the process as transformative: “The effort taught us to be more practical and less ideological. It taught us to listen carefully and understand opposing views. It taught us to respect and trust each other in new ways. . . . It taught us . . . that we actually agree on most truths, not all but most.” Troy Williams, then head of Equality Utah, echoed this: “Neither side compromised our values, but rather, we discovered new ways forward that respected each other and forged areas of common ground.”
And before Judge Griffith hit “send,” he doubled down on the moral nature of his argument,
According to President Oaks, this is what it looks like to seek to moderate and unify on contested issues. But President Oaks insists on something more demanding still. We must not allow our fears about losing our own freedoms make us “insensitive to others’ claims for theirs.” The freedom and protection we seek must be “not for ourselves alone.” President Oaks elaborated on this in the Judicature interview. What we should seek is not total victory but what he called “principled accommodation”— a mutual respect that looks not to what is surrendered but to what is gained. In his Rome address, the apostle insisted, “We should not expect or seek total dominance for our own positions, but in the exercise of mutual respect should seek fairness for all.” The journalist Jonathan Rauch—a self-described liberal, atheist, Jewish homosexual—observed that what President Oaks has been teaching is “conspicuously countercultural in the conservative religious world” and may offer the best path, perhaps the only path, out of our current constitutional peril. Countercultural, yes. But following Jesus’s charge to be peacemakers has always been countercultural.
Judge Griffith’s essay builds an indisputable cast of characters called to service to make his case that the entire purpose of the U.S. Constitution is political compromise – President Oaks, the legislative leaders of the 2015 “Utah Compromise,” Elder Alexander Dushku, the former head of Equality Utah, “liberal, atheist, Jewish homosexual” Jonathan Rauch, Elder Matthew S. Holland, conservative intellectual Yuval Levin, New York Times columnist David French, journalist Michael Gerson, psychologist Jonathan Haidt, and by association the Wheatley Institute at BYU – not to mention George Washington, Benjamin Franklin, George Mason, Abraham Lincoln, and even Jesus Christ.
The worst crime in this whole narrative is how Judge Griffith wraps himself in the trusted hands of President Oaks,
I’ll read the Declaration of Independence itself—that takes only a few minutes. I’ll read the Constitution. That takes a little longer. But then—realizing how remarkable it is that one of the nation’s most respected constitutional scholars has been called to preside over The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints at this critical moment—I’ll spend time studying five extraordinary recent contributions from President Oaks: his April 2021 general conference address; his November 2021 Joseph Smith Lecture at the University of Virginia; his December 2021 address at Rome’s Sapienza University; a 2023 interview in Judicature, the leading publication for American judges, in which he elaborated on the Constitution’s inspired principles and the imperative of principled accommodation; and his Easter Sunday address at the last general conference. Together they form a coherent and urgent message for our moment.
Who can argue with the authority of President Oaks, the prophet of God, and that esteemed cast of characters? Not many people. But I can. I lived this. As insiders might say, I know where the bodies are buried, including mine.
I do not want to talk past that cast of characters whose names Judge Griffith invokes. I agree that the structure or the architecture of the U.S. Constitution with its checks and balances forces political leaders to talk to one another. I agree. Where we differ is over the purpose of the Constitution. Judge Griffith thinks the purpose of the Constitution is compromise and peacemaking. I believe the purpose of the Constitution is establishing order.
In other words, Judge Griffith and I are telling you why the Constitution was created. The judge, invoking Elder Matthew Holland’s insights, writes about “civic charity,” and argues that “it was central to the creation of the United States and is indispensable to the functioning of the Constitution’s structural architecture: federalism, separated powers, enumerated rights.”
I, on the other hand, do not believe in “civic charity.” A sense of charity did not drive the American founding – necessity did. And the same holds true today. Today there is a movement of sorts to promote something more than dialogue, something more than the obvious necessity that political leaders needs to talk with each other.
When President Oaks urges everyone to “moderate and unify,” some folks now champion breaking bread together, getting to know one another, learning that your opponents are not evil over the actual ends of public policy. They pretend that the former leads to the latter – and it can, but not with the authenticity suggested and not among policymakers who actually have to make final decisions.
That’s weird to me. I have spoken with many political or policy opponents. I have sat down with them and broken bread with them. I have gotten to know many of them personally. I know there are evils in the world and people who promote those evils. But most of my opponents are not evil. They simply and deeply believe in something I do not. Did it help my cause to meet with them? Yes, it did in most opportunities – the exception is dialogue about gay rights and same-sex marriage. And there is the rub for me with all of this “moderate and unify” talk.
Every example from President Oaks on down the ladder of prestige to Judge Griffith and those eminent cast of characters he cites who invoke a better way, compromise and accommodate direct their arguments on a two-in-one public policy: gay rights and same-sex marriage.
I will never moderate or unify any approach to gay rights and same-sex marriage. I will never moderate or unify anything that has to do with the Family Proclamation. Never. In fact, I invoke President Oaks when he spoke at the 2013 General Conference, just days before our celebrated October 8 event at the Joseph Smith Memorial Building, in an address he titled, “No Other Gods Before Me,”
A teaching of President Thomas S. Monson applies to this circumstance. At this conference 27 years ago, he boldly declared: “Let us have the courage to defy the consensus, the courage to stand for principle. Courage, not compromise, brings the smile of God’s approval. Courage becomes a living and an attractive virtue when it is regarded not only as a willingness to die manfully, but as the determination to live decently. A moral coward is one who is afraid to do what he thinks is right because others will disapprove or laugh. Remember that all men have their fears, but those who face their fears with dignity have courage as well.”
Let’s put a bow on this argument and summarize three key points,
First. The purpose of the United States Constitution was to establish order and the War of Independence was not a revolution made, it was a revolution prevented.
In the book, Russell Kirk on America: How to understand the legacy of 1776, edited by Michael Lucchese, he writes in its Introduction,
Kirk did not believe the American founding turned the world upside down. Rather, he famously claimed it was a “revolution not made, but prevented.” He argued that the Founders aimed at a “recovery of what was being lost,” not a “Jacobin revolution that meant destruction of the fabric of society.” In other words, revolution, for the Founding generation, meant a return to the traditions of self-government and the particular rights that had developed in the colonies, and among Englishmen more broadly, over centuries — rights that the imperial Parliament of the 1770s had violated.
In the seventeenth and the eighteenth centuries, London adopted a policy of what Edmund Burke described as “salutary neglect” toward its American colonies. Instead of imposing order through centralized power, Britain had more or less permitted the colonists to govern themselves according to those traditions which had organically emerged over time. In the wake of the French and Indian War, though, the Parliament of the 1760s and ’70 took a different tack and sought to govern the Americans themselves. …
The motivating force of the U.S. Constitution is the same moral critique of tyranny that fires the Declaration. The Founders held that absolute power, in and of itself, constituted a terrible violation of natural law. The genius of the Constitution, according to Kirk, is that it grants the federal government enough power to vigorously secure order while also establishing a complex series of checks and balances to preserve freedom.
As an authentic conservative, I choose the words of Edmund Burke, Russell Kirk and my own experiences over Judge Griffith and his supportive cast of characters whose names he invokes.
Second. Peacemaking is a personal journey, not a public mandate.
When Jesus preached peacemaking to His disciples He was not asking them to persuade King Herod. Jesus was addressing our hearts, individually and personally without exception. Being a peacemaker – or as one Latter-day Saint leader recently posited, “don’t be a jerk” – is a personal virtue, not a public one. If peacemaking is a personal journey to become your better angel, that new you will manifest itself naturally in any public setting. But if you make peacemaking a public mandate, being social, compromising and accommodating destroy the very foundations of the structure and architecture of the Constitution. It denigrates every check and balance in the Constitution because those checks and balances were designed for collisions of opinions, not preemptive ground-giving.
Third. The expressions “moderate and unify,” “fairness for all,” “civic charity” and a “civic theology” are words used solely to justify Latter-day Saints endorsing gay rights and same-sex marriage.
There is no other way to take all of this compromise and accommodation talk. Beyond references to the Constitution, every attempt to explain and justify preemptive compromise leads to gay rights and same-sex marriage. It doesn’t matter who is saying it or where it is said, every example concludes with the 2015 “Utah Compromise” wherein gay rights were given, institutional church rights were protected (i.e., exempted from compromise) and Utah Latter-day Saints, with no say, became the victims of gay rights.
Lastly, I’ve decided that there will be a Part 3. Call it “Where the Bodies are Buried.” President Oaks’ emphasis on peacemaking and others using peacemaking for their own political purposes creates a subtext that needs to be addressed. I understand what I’ve said and it’s only fair of me to share a subtext that helps you know why I am at such peace about what I’ve said.
The Ugly Underbelly of “Peacemaking”: Part 2
The Constitution has nothing to do with compromise. It has everything to do with order.
The United States Constitution created endless opportunities for interpretations and legal opinions. But what is not open for debate is the history of America immediately preceding the Constitution and culminating first in the Declaration of Independence. That history is clear.
The establishment of the United States and the crafting of its founding documents was about creating a familiar order and nothing else. A new America required a familiar order of government – built upon many of the ideas of the old order the colonists left behind.
The colonists separating from England were Englishmen, by and large. The colonies were British colonies, especially the north colonies, and were governed under British laws. Increasingly angry colonists were not fighting against English rule generally and the land of their forefathers. They were angry about the arbitrary overstepping of bounds by King George III treating them as second-class citizens.
This point is important: The War of Independence was not a revolution made, but a revolution prevented.
There were dramatic and fundamental differences between our War of Independence and the French Revolution. The French Revolution was a revolution made, not prevented. The French Revolution was a real revolution. The French Jacobins destroyed every evidence of their old order and slaughtered tens of thousands French nobles who represented every social and cultural institution of the old order. The Jacobins sought an entirely different order. They sought revolution.
By contrast, the American colonists sought not to destroy the old order. They used the experiences and wisdoms of the old order. Our founding fathers read the same books as did the English dating back to the Magna Carta and even further back to the ancient philosophers and the gospels of Jesus Christ. The American colonists objected to a broken order as King George III began to treat the American colonists different than Britains under homeland rule. These circumstances were the basis of and justification for the Declaration of Independence.
The godfather of modern conservatism, Russell Kirk, carefully studied the nature of revolutions from America’s founding to the French Revolution. His friend, the late Mel Bradford, professor and historian, Kirk writes,
“called the Revolution a conservative revolution. The colonists wanted home rule. They tried to keep the rights they already had as Englishmen. They did not want to remake human nature. They did not sign up for endless social perfectibility. Edmund Burke understood their fight. He defended them in Parliament for the same reason he had defended the Glorious Revolution of 1688. Both were acts of preservation, not innovation.
Bradford’s reading of the Declaration would find a surprising ally across the Atlantic today in the English historian David Starkey. Starkey repeatedly insists that 1776 was not the birth of a new revolutionary ideology. It was the last great flowering of the ancient English constitution. The Declaration, properly read, is a restatement of the rights of Englishmen. It echoes Magna Carta, the Petition of Right, and the Bill of Rights of 1689. Its grievances are the same grievances that Englishmen had leveled against James II and that Whigs had leveled against George III. The language of natural rights is secondary. The real thrust is corporate and historical: Freeborn Englishmen living in chartered colonies possess the same liberties as freeborn Englishmen living in Kent or Yorkshire. Parliament had violated those liberties. Therefore, the colonies, like any English community, had the right to resist.” (Russell Kirk, “A Revolution Not Made, But Prevented,” Modern Age, June 16, 2026)
The American colonists fought a war they did not seek, only a war inevitable. Our founding fathers did not throw the baby out with the bathwater. They sought a new order of the ages absent the arbitrary rule of royalty. Our Founders respected the necessary institutions of a peaceful, civil and independent society. They understood the importance of family, religion, private property, voluntary associations and the proper role of government. They sought peace with England but King George III upset the order for the colonists. Absent a just order, they created one.
A just order. That was the goal.
Kirk continues,
Not until the French radicals utterly overturned the old political and social order in their country did the word “revolution” acquire its present general meaning of a truly radical change in social and governmental institutions, a tremendous convulsion in society, producing huge alterations that might never be undone. Thus, when the eighteenth-century Whigs praised the “Glorious Revolution” of 1688, which established their party’s domination, they did not mean that William and Mary, the Act of Settlement, and the Declaration of Rights had produced a radically new English political and social order. On the contrary, they argued that the English Revolution has restored tried and true constitutional practices, preservative of immemorial ways. It was James II, they contended, who had been perverting the English constitution; his overthrow had been a return, a rolling back, to old constitutional order; the Revolution of 1688, in short, had been a healthy reaction, not a bold innovation.
The great father of modern conservatism, Edmund Burke, lived through the American War of Independence as a member of British Parliament and repeatedly wrote about how England’s “Glorious Revolution” and America’s War of Independence were formed from the same basis of restoring order, not creating a new order,
The [Glorious] Revolution was made to preserve our antient indisputable laws and liberties, and that antient constitution of government which is our only security for law and liberty … The very idea of the fabrication of a new government, is enough to fill us with disgust and horror. We wished at the period of the Revolution, and do now wish, to derive all we possess as an inheritance from our forefathers. (J. C. D. Clark, English Society, 1660–1832: Religion, Ideology, and Politics during the Ancien Regime. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pgs. 181-183.)
If we must (I loathe him), read carefully Thomas Paine from his argument for independence in his Common Sense noting that even this radical advocate for revolution understood the relationship between American colonists and their English roots,
No man was a warmer wisher for a reconciliation than myself, before the fatal nineteenth of April, 1775 [the day of the battles of Lexington and Concord], but the moment the event of that day was made known, I rejected the hardened, sullen-tempered Pharaoh of England forever; and disdain the wretch, that with the pretended title of FATHER OF HIS PEOPLE can unfeelingly hear of their slaughter, blood upon his soul…. Where, say some, is the king of America? I’ll tell you, Friend, he reigns above, and doth not make havoc of mankind like the royal brute of Great Britain…. So far as we approve of monarchy…in America the law is king…. A government of our own is our natural right…. Ye that oppose independence now, ye know not what ye do: ye are opening the door to eternal tyranny…. There are thousands and tens of thousands, who would think it glorious to expel from the Continent, that barbarous and hellish power, which hath stirred up the Indians and the Negroes to destroy us…. O! ye that love mankind! Ye that dare oppose not only the tyranny but the tyrant, stand forth! Every spot of the old world is overrun with oppression. Freedom hath been hunted round the Globe. Asia and Africa have long expelled her. Europe regards her like a stranger, and England hath given her warning to depart. O! receive the fugitive, and prepare in time an asylum for mankind. (Jon Meacham, American Struggle: Democracy, Dissent, and the Pursuit of a More Perfect Union: An Anthology (pp. 13-14).
Popular historian and author Jon Meacham knows the deep roots of the colonists’ attachment as Englishmen,
To encounter the Declaration of Independence is to be plunged back into a complex political world. By the 1770s, the English Civil War, the Restoration, and the Glorious Revolution had shaped the American view of power. In Britain in the seventeenth century, the people, including many aristocrats, had rebelled against the absolutism of the Stuart kings, leading to chaos. There was the execution of Charles I, the commonwealth under Oliver Cromwell, the Restoration of the Stuarts (which led to more political and religious strife), and finally the Glorious Revolution of 1688–89, when William of Orange and his wife, Mary, were crowned to preside over a constitutional ethos based on a Declaration of Rights that limited the monarchy’s power. The Parliament, “full and free,” would be supreme, with guaranteed elections and limitations on the state’s power to encroach on individual rights. Which was essentially what the American colonists wanted: the full benefits of Englishmen, including representation in Parliament. And the denial of these rights drove much of the Declaration, which included twenty-seven grievances. These sections made up the largest portion of a document intended to convince particular audiences—wavering colonists, soldiers, potential foreign allies—of the rightness of the American cause. (Jon Meacham, The Declaration of Independence and the Constitution of the United States, pp. xi-xii.)
Order. That is what our Founders sought. They were Englishmen whose order was shaken by King George III. The War of Independence was born of anger, not theory. The colonists were angry that one Englishman would treat another Englishman with such disdain and disregard. Our founding fathers were setting things right, not creating new things. This is the important point.
I am sharing all of that to tell you this: Prominent Latter-day Saints are attempting to rewrite the history of our founding. Their rewrite is stilted, inelegant and deceptive as applied. I’ll explain.
There is a renewed push within The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints to be kind to one another and to become “peacemakers.” Jesus stressed peacemaking and loving our enemies precisely because this virtue is unnatural in a fallen world. To maintain a broken heart and contrite spirit – the only sacrifice He requires – we must overcome the natural man and become a new creature. Becoming a peacemaker is a natural part of that personal journey.
And yet, some pretty influential names in LDS circles believe peacemaking is a public mandate, not a personal journey. Put in the correct perspective: Peacemaking really is a personal journey, and really not a public mandate. When Jesus preached peacemaking to His disciples He was not asking them to persuade King Herod. Jesus was addressing our hearts, individually and personally without exception.
This influential LDS cabal overreaches so many obvious individual virtuous attributes in a civil society: Being nice or kind, cooperation and working together through difficult issues of public policy that occur day in and day out in state and federal legislatures, becoming your best self, your better angel and your personal growth to obtain a broken heart and contrite spirit. Nothing to see there.
What is to see is the cabal at work – the “peace hypocrites.” These Latter-day Saints who believe peacemaking is a public mandate – while passively “citizen shaming” – believe every public interaction should conclude with compromise. In fact, some of our best known LDS influencers actually argue that the United States Constitution is an instrument for peaceful compromise. They point to the constitutional convention in 1787 wherein disparate and parochial political leaders gathered to create the Constitution – men who set aside differences and gave the new world a document for the ages. But the constitutional convention was hardly a peaceful compromise. More of these men disliked, even hated, each other, more so than we can identify expressions of brotherly love. Every man in that hot summer room got a piece of something they cared about, even slavery. But the only person who got everything they wanted was the one in the room who made the final decision to cut debate.
Finding preemptive compromise in the structure and architecture of the U.S. Constitution is a legal penumbra – and many in the cabal know it.
Before I explain their ulterior motive, I first want to address their mischaracterizations of the U.S. Constitution. It cannot be said enough: the Constitution has nothing to do with compromise. It has everything to do with order. The genius of James Madison’s crafting of this founding document – besides sending the Jacobin-leaning Thomas Jefferson to Paris at the time – is his awareness of human nature and how he leaned on that understanding to construct a process of checks and balances and separations of power to up-play progress and downplay unsolvable disagreements. He cared nothing about some legislator’s temperament. Did he and a few others of his enlightened colleagues appreciate rational and calm deliberation? Of course! But such an atmosphere is hardly the essence of the Constitution. It’s the essence of personal rational reflection – very normal behavior in any serious corporate or legal setting among great minds and studied professionals.
Thomas Griffith is one of these Latter-day Saints attempting to rewrite the history of the U.S. Constitution. Judge Griffith (ret.) is a fellow at the BYU Wheatley Institute and a lecturer on law at Harvard who formerly served as a judge of the US Court of Appeals for the DC Circuit, general counsel of BYU, and the chief legal officer of the US Senate. His resume is very impressive. Surely a legal mind such as Judge Griffith’s wouldn’t lead anyone astray?
In the Summer 2026 issue of Y Magazine, Judge Griffith quotes President Oaks from a familiar political theme by first introducing the 2015 “Utah Compromise” over gay rights. “In a democratic government,” President Oaks emphasized, “we should seek fairness for all.” Fairness for All has been the drumbeat of President Oaks since 2015 leading to a congressional bill described as “Fairness for All,” onto a 2022 piece of legislation titled the “Respect for Marriage Act” wherein the church endorsed same-sex marriage in the name of protecting religious freedom. The theme of fairness for all is nothing more than a clever expression to justify compromising over gay rights.
Judge Griffith invokes the weighted name of President Dallin H. Oaks as if all of this strange constitutional narrative is unto scripture – as if all of this emanates from Jesus Christ Himself.
Judge Griffith writes about the “spirit of amity” that saved the Constitutional Convention. He writes,
So how best to celebrate America’s 250th? Not, I think, by retreating from the gravity of the moment. The storm clouds are real. But neither should we succumb to despair. The tradition of civic charity is as American as the Declaration itself. The spirit of amity saved the Constitutional Convention. It has surfaced at critical junctures throughout our history: in Jefferson’s conciliation after a bitterly contested election, in Lincoln’s call for “malice toward none,” in the civil rights movement’s redemptive moral vision, in the Utah Compromise of 2015. (p. 29)
Put those events side-by-side: saving the Constitutional Convention, Jefferson’s handing over power to the next president, the Civil War, the American civil rights movement led by Dr. King and the 2015 “Utah Compromise.” Which event feels out of place? Which event is not like the others? Which event lacks a “redemptive moral vision”? Yes, the 2015 “Utah Compromise.” Hold that thought because Judge Griffth will explain.
Elsewhere in that same article, Judge Griffith writes that in a speech delivered at the University of Virginia, President Dallin H. Oaks,
… spoke of a deepening empathy he experiences for those who feel that others invoke constitutional rights to deny or diminish their own. “We need to work for a better way—a way to resolve differences without compromising core values.”
What does that look like in practice? President Oaks pointed to the Utah Compromise of 2015 as a model. In a historic piece of legislation, enacted with the full support and active engagement of the Church, Utah’s legislature crafted significant protections both for religious freedom and against discrimination based on sexual orientation. Leaders of the LGBT community hailed the statute a landmark. What made it possible was not legal cleverness alone. The compromise was worked out not only around conference room tables or lawyers’ offices but around dining room tables, among people who developed real relationships despite their differing views. As friendship formed, ideas emerged about how each side could accommodate the needs of the other while maintaining its core values.
Judge Griffith digs deeper into this narrative,
Elder Alexander Dushku, then representing the Church’s interests in the negotiations and now a general authority Seventy serving as the Church’s general counsel, described the process as transformative: “The effort taught us to be more practical and less ideological. It taught us to listen carefully and understand opposing views. It taught us to respect and trust each other in new ways. . . . It taught us . . . that we actually agree on most truths, not all but most.” Troy Williams, then head of Equality Utah, echoed this: “Neither side compromised our values, but rather, we discovered new ways forward that respected each other and forged areas of common ground.”
And before Judge Griffith hit “send,” he doubled down on the moral nature of his argument,
According to President Oaks, this is what it looks like to seek to moderate and unify on contested issues. But President Oaks insists on something more demanding still. We must not allow our fears about losing our own freedoms make us “insensitive to others’ claims for theirs.” The freedom and protection we seek must be “not for ourselves alone.” President Oaks elaborated on this in the Judicature interview. What we should seek is not total victory but what he called “principled accommodation”— a mutual respect that looks not to what is surrendered but to what is gained. In his Rome address, the apostle insisted, “We should not expect or seek total dominance for our own positions, but in the exercise of mutual respect should seek fairness for all.” The journalist Jonathan Rauch—a self-described liberal, atheist, Jewish homosexual—observed that what President Oaks has been teaching is “conspicuously countercultural in the conservative religious world” and may offer the best path, perhaps the only path, out of our current constitutional peril. Countercultural, yes. But following Jesus’s charge to be peacemakers has always been countercultural.
Judge Griffith’s essay builds an indisputable cast of characters called to service to make his case that the entire purpose of the U.S. Constitution is political compromise – President Oaks, the legislative leaders of the 2015 “Utah Compromise,” Elder Alexander Dushku, the former head of Equality Utah, “liberal, atheist, Jewish homosexual” Jonathan Rauch, Elder Matthew S. Holland, conservative intellectual Yuval Levin, New York Times columnist David French, journalist Michael Gerson, psychologist Jonathan Haidt, and by association the Wheatley Institute at BYU – not to mention George Washington, Benjamin Franklin, George Mason, Abraham Lincoln, and even Jesus Christ.
The worst crime in this whole narrative is how Judge Griffith wraps himself in the trusted hands of President Oaks,
I’ll read the Declaration of Independence itself—that takes only a few minutes. I’ll read the Constitution. That takes a little longer. But then—realizing how remarkable it is that one of the nation’s most respected constitutional scholars has been called to preside over The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints at this critical moment—I’ll spend time studying five extraordinary recent contributions from President Oaks: his April 2021 general conference address; his November 2021 Joseph Smith Lecture at the University of Virginia; his December 2021 address at Rome’s Sapienza University; a 2023 interview in Judicature, the leading publication for American judges, in which he elaborated on the Constitution’s inspired principles and the imperative of principled accommodation; and his Easter Sunday address at the last general conference. Together they form a coherent and urgent message for our moment.
Who can argue with the authority of President Oaks, the prophet of God, and that esteemed cast of characters? Not many people. But I can. I lived this. As insiders might say, I know where the bodies are buried, including mine.
I do not want to talk past that cast of characters whose names Judge Griffith invokes. I agree that the structure or the architecture of the U.S. Constitution with its checks and balances forces political leaders to talk to one another. I agree. Where we differ is over the purpose of the Constitution. Judge Griffith thinks the purpose of the Constitution is compromise and peacemaking. I believe the purpose of the Constitution is establishing order.
In other words, Judge Griffith and I are telling you why the Constitution was created. The judge, invoking Elder Matthew Holland’s insights, writes about “civic charity,” and argues that “it was central to the creation of the United States and is indispensable to the functioning of the Constitution’s structural architecture: federalism, separated powers, enumerated rights.”
I, on the other hand, do not believe in “civic charity.” A sense of charity did not drive the American founding – necessity did. And the same holds true today. Today there is a movement of sorts to promote something more than dialogue, something more than the obvious necessity that political leaders needs to talk with each other.
When President Oaks urges everyone to “moderate and unify,” some folks now champion breaking bread together, getting to know one another, learning that your opponents are not evil over the actual ends of public policy. They pretend that the former leads to the latter – and it can, but not with the authenticity suggested and not among policymakers who actually have to make final decisions.
That’s weird to me. I have spoken with many political or policy opponents. I have sat down with them and broken bread with them. I have gotten to know many of them personally. I know there are evils in the world and people who promote those evils. But most of my opponents are not evil. They simply and deeply believe in something I do not. Did it help my cause to meet with them? Yes, it did in most opportunities – the exception is dialogue about gay rights and same-sex marriage. And there is the rub for me with all of this “moderate and unify” talk.
Every example from President Oaks on down the ladder of prestige to Judge Griffith and those eminent cast of characters he cites who invoke a better way, compromise and accommodate direct their arguments on a two-in-one public policy: gay rights and same-sex marriage.
I will never moderate or unify any approach to gay rights and same-sex marriage. I will never moderate or unify anything that has to do with the Family Proclamation. Never. In fact, I invoke President Oaks when he spoke at the 2013 General Conference, just days before our celebrated October 8 event at the Joseph Smith Memorial Building, in an address he titled, “No Other Gods Before Me,”
A teaching of President Thomas S. Monson applies to this circumstance. At this conference 27 years ago, he boldly declared: “Let us have the courage to defy the consensus, the courage to stand for principle. Courage, not compromise, brings the smile of God’s approval. Courage becomes a living and an attractive virtue when it is regarded not only as a willingness to die manfully, but as the determination to live decently. A moral coward is one who is afraid to do what he thinks is right because others will disapprove or laugh. Remember that all men have their fears, but those who face their fears with dignity have courage as well.”
Let’s put a bow on this argument and summarize three key points,
First. The purpose of the United States Constitution was to establish order and the War of Independence was not a revolution made, it was a revolution prevented.
In the book, Russell Kirk on America: How to understand the legacy of 1776, edited by Michael Lucchese, he writes in its Introduction,
Kirk did not believe the American founding turned the world upside down. Rather, he famously claimed it was a “revolution not made, but prevented.” He argued that the Founders aimed at a “recovery of what was being lost,” not a “Jacobin revolution that meant destruction of the fabric of society.” In other words, revolution, for the Founding generation, meant a return to the traditions of self-government and the particular rights that had developed in the colonies, and among Englishmen more broadly, over centuries — rights that the imperial Parliament of the 1770s had violated.
In the seventeenth and the eighteenth centuries, London adopted a policy of what Edmund Burke described as “salutary neglect” toward its American colonies. Instead of imposing order through centralized power, Britain had more or less permitted the colonists to govern themselves according to those traditions which had organically emerged over time. In the wake of the French and Indian War, though, the Parliament of the 1760s and ’70 took a different tack and sought to govern the Americans themselves. …
The motivating force of the U.S. Constitution is the same moral critique of tyranny that fires the Declaration. The Founders held that absolute power, in and of itself, constituted a terrible violation of natural law. The genius of the Constitution, according to Kirk, is that it grants the federal government enough power to vigorously secure order while also establishing a complex series of checks and balances to preserve freedom.
As an authentic conservative, I choose the words of Edmund Burke, Russell Kirk and my own experiences over Judge Griffith and his supportive cast of characters whose names he invokes.
Second. Peacemaking is a personal journey, not a public mandate.
When Jesus preached peacemaking to His disciples He was not asking them to persuade King Herod. Jesus was addressing our hearts, individually and personally without exception. Being a peacemaker – or as one Latter-day Saint leader recently posited, “don’t be a jerk” – is a personal virtue, not a public one. If peacemaking is a personal journey to become your better angel, that new you will manifest itself naturally in any public setting. But if you make peacemaking a public mandate, being social, compromising and accommodating destroy the very foundations of the structure and architecture of the Constitution. It denigrates every check and balance in the Constitution because those checks and balances were designed for collisions of opinions, not preemptive ground-giving.
Third. The expressions “moderate and unify,” “fairness for all,” “civic charity” and a “civic theology” are words used solely to justify Latter-day Saints endorsing gay rights and same-sex marriage.
There is no other way to take all of this compromise and accommodation talk. Beyond references to the Constitution, every attempt to explain and justify preemptive compromise leads to gay rights and same-sex marriage. It doesn’t matter who is saying it or where it is said, every example concludes with the 2015 “Utah Compromise” wherein gay rights were given, institutional church rights were protected (i.e., exempted from compromise) and Utah Latter-day Saints, with no say, became the victims of gay rights.
Lastly, I’ve decided that there will be a Part 3. Call it “Where the Bodies are Buried.” President Oaks’ emphasis on peacemaking and others using peacemaking for their own political purposes creates a subtext that needs to be addressed. I understand what I’ve said and it’s only fair of me to share a subtext that helps you know why I am at such peace about what I’ve said.