For Gregory, usury is wrong pure and simple, since it breaks the rule of equality in exchanges.
After World War II nearly all rules contravening the principle of equality of men and women were repealed.
However, it's the underlying assumptions of such a model, namely, the rejection of rule-of-law equality and freedom for all citizens, as well as violence as the preferred mode for achieving the goal, that should preclude convenient and contemptuous dismissal of the caliphate conversation.
The Supreme Court ruled that it contradicted the principle of equality.
To agree on the rule of law, equality and democratic transparency is surely not enough.
We desperately need liberty, rule of law, equality to all citizens, freedom of speech and freedom of press.
Similarly, allowing private discrimination against gay couples is not an exemption from a new rule of full equality; it is a compromise that allows inequality to persist.
Ironically, in "The Emancipation of Women in Ancient Rome," Roger Vigneron and Jean-François Gerkens explain how the Italians of antiquity forged a polity where "the rule of juridical equality was the duty to be pursued".
But in the 1770s the Thirteen Colonies, using the precedent and records of the 1640s, had to fight a comparable battle to apply the rule of law and equality under it on the western side of the Atlantic and so secure independence in the face of an oppressive Big Government in London.
