This morning, CNN’s Chris Cuomo interviewed/grilled Alabama Chief Justice Roy Moore for 25 minutes about the same-sex marriage controversy. Based on Alabama’s definition of marriage, Moore had forbidden probate judges from issuing marriage licenses to people of the same sex. As a result, probate judges “are caught between a federal ruling that lifts the state ban on same-sex marriage and an order from the State Supreme Court chief justice to ignore the ruling,” as The New York Times puts it. The US Supreme Court has declined to consider the lower federal court ruling, so it’s likely that Alabama, too, will succumb to the marriage-mangling juggernaut sweeping the nation.

The leftwing media sphere is, of course, declaring the interview a rousing victory for Cuomo who insisted, contrary to Moore, that “times have changed.” He also said: “Our rights do not come from God, your honor, and you know that. They come from man . . . That’s your faith, that’s my faith, but that’s not our country. Our laws come from collective agreement and compromise.”

Moore countered by pointing to the Dred Scott decision as a universally recognized example of how even the nation’s highest court can get things monstrously wrong. Moore’s point, I take it, was that something beyond the “collective agreement” of those men in black tells us that their ruling was unjust. That something is nature’s law, which whispers to any heart that will listen that all men are created equal.

We can debate the relative debating skills of Cuomo and Moore, but that would be to fixate on ephemera rather than fundamentals. Both lacked nuance, but Moore has the fundamentals right. Despite Cuomo’s cocksuredness, he’s the one who needs remedial lessons in American history and legal philosophy.

Dred Scott is only one of many examples that show why Cuomo’s “laws come from man not from God” dictum is not just hollow but frightening. And in a different context, Cuomo would be the first person to reject the notion.

The question is not, “Who wrote the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act?” We know it was written by congressional staffers, policy wonks and probably a few lobbyists who have mastered the impenetrable prose of modern legislation. The question is, “What are our human laws ultimately based on?” If they are grounded merely in the opinions of legislators, parliaments and kings, then we have no rational basis, no moral basis, to distinguish the Civil Rights Act from Dred Scott, or the Universal Declaration on Human Rights from the various “legal” atrocities committed by the Nazis. If Cuomo’s clever phrase is correct, then laws merely reflect the opinions of those with the power to write and enforce them.

Contra Cuomo, we all know at some level that if a law is just, it is because it reflects a transcendent standard of justice by which we judge it.  Dred Scott was unjust because it contradicted the standard that Jefferson immortalized in the Declaration of Independence, “that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights. . . .” The key word is “Creator.” Human equality before the law is a legal principle rooted in nature, and nature’s God.

Try as they might, legal philosophers have been unable to find another foundation for the counterintuitive truth that all human beings, whatever their status in a society — rich or poor, slave or free — are equally creatures made in the image of God, and so should be accorded the rights and dignity befitting that status. Sever the idea of rights and equality from its foundation, and all we have left is bare opinion, and raw power.

Even if you deny God’s existence, you have some grasp of moral truth because of the natural law, of “Nature and Nature’s God,” as Jefferson put it. This universal natural law must ultimately be the foundation for the “positive laws” written by men. It is this natural law to which the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. appealed in his American classic, Letter from Birmingham Jail. Without it, King would have had no basis for judging man-made laws as unjust.

As fallen creatures, we often fail to recognize the moral truths of the natural law. And even when we agree about it in the abstract, we may disagree about which policy or policies best promote it. This is why we are now having a debate about marriage, just as earlier generations had debates about slavery and the legal status of those of African descent. Is marriage merely a social convention, like a contract, or is it something more fundamental? Is it — as its sheer universality suggests — inherently an institution grounded in the complementary nature of man and woman, with a special connection to the bearing of children?

The debate about marriage playing out in Alabama, the federal courts and the court of public opinion is, in its own way, as profound as the questions at stake in the Dred Scott decision. Justice Roy Moore understands that. Chris Cuomo apparently does not.

Jay Richards, PhD, is the Executive Editor of The Stream.