moral neutrality i.e. circumstantial morality i.e. nonsense

Just saw a response to a posted blog that read "keep morality out of government." In order to keep morality out of schools the state of Massachusetts put this idea into action by institutionalizing moral relativism through various values-neutral instruction techniques. The most well-known, values clarification, developed by social scientist Sidney Simon et al "…does not teach a particular set of values. There is no sermonizing or moralizing. The goal is to involve the students in practical experiences, making them aware of their own feelings, their own ideas, their own beliefs, so that the choices and decisions they make are conscious and deliberate, based on their own value systems." A concerned parent, opposed to a teacher's neutral stance in encouraging students to formulate their own moral conclusions to ethical dilemmas (which included euthanasia) asserted "you're telling my children that when they face the hard questions of right or wrong, when they're confronted with the most difficult problems of morality, there are no guidelines. There are no absolutes. There are no rules. You're teaching my kids that when they must decide critical issues of right and wrong, it's simply up to them." The teacher's response: "we're careful to let the students know that it's up to them to decide what to do. This is values free instruction. We're neutral." Problematic in theory, this was proved when a class announced that they valued cheating and wanted to be free to engage in it on tests. The teacher stated cheating was prohibited since it was her class and she was opposed to cheating. She continued "in my class you must be honest, for I value honesty. In other areas of your life you may be free to cheat." When affected by the consequences of relativism, the teacher imposes her morality on her students thus contradicting herself. In the words of Gregory Koukl: "at worst, the teacher's lesson is that power is the ultimate element in morality, that might makes right. Technically, this is called the fallacy of argumentum ad baculum or to paraphrase Mao Tse Tung: persuasion from the barrel of a gun."
Moral neutralization reduces the law to an exercise of power. When laws are not governed by morality, justice becomes whatever a judge says it is. And when teachers make ad hoc statements that cannot be generalized or applied in all arenas and they arbitrarily retract their statements when students choose to cheat, this means moral relativism is a problem.
Moral relativism is reminiscent of an 1857 Supreme Court decision in which Chief Justice Taney declared that Dred Scott was restricted of rights because of his color as "all blacks—slaves as well as free—were not and could never become citizens of the United States. Taney believed the framers of the Constitution supported his statement that blacks "had no rights which the white man was bound to respect and that the negro might justly and lawfully be reduced to slavery for his benefit." The Declaration of Independence was drafted because it was realized that "it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God entitle them." There is an appeal to a higher law here and that is an appeal to natural law or, some might say, God's law. When governments revert to despotism humans can appeal to a transcendent source of rights. Human laws are subordinate to the inalienable rights every man possesses. If one is against slavery and slavery is a moral position then one would have to agree that legislating that particular moral position is appropriate.
God gave government for one reason: justice, "for the punishment of evildoers and the praise of those who do right" (1 Peter 2:13-14). According to God, the law necessitates that there is a foundation of morality. Governments are called to rule justly, not despotically. Essentially, morality is the only thing that can be legislated as an action is unethical when it violates a moral rule. An implication of this is that the moral principle making car theft wrong also makes plagiarism wrong. If one objects to car theft but condones his own theft of another's ideas, his commitment to the broader issue (stealing is wrong) is questionable. By the same token, if one condones stealing under certain circumstances (outside the classroom) but prohibits it in certain other circumstances (in the classroom) then I'd be inclined to discredit all statements this person makes because their nonsensical statements! The law must rest on a necessary foundation of morality. In a democracy where majority rules, if the majority is not compelled by morality but driven by economics or some other force, terrifying scenarios can be realized. But if moral relativists are fine with morality being thrown out the window and they are fine with the existence of judges who rule by what is legal, rather than what is right…so be it