Such principles promote the common good and make for a just and well-ordered society. Vermeule specified that common-good constitutionalism is "not tethered to particular written instruments of civil law or the will of the legislators who created them", so the stated purpose of the legislation is irrelevant to him. Yet he also says that "officials (including, but by no means limited to, judges)" will need "a candid willingness to 'legislate morality'" in order to create a "just and well-ordered society." The main aim of common-good constitutionalism:  is certainly not to maximize individual autonomy or to minimize the abuse of power (an incoherent goal in any event), but instead to ensure that the ruler has the power needed to rule well ... Just authority in rulers can be exercised for the good of subjects, if necessary even against the subjects’ own perceptions of what is best for them — perceptions that may change over time anyway, as the law teaches, habituates, and re-forms them. Subjects will come to thank the ruler whose legal strictures, possibly experienced at first as coercive, encourage subjects to form more authentic desires for the individual and common goods, better habits, and beliefs that better track and promote communal well-being. The values which Vermeule believes should be upheld for the good of the "subjects" of the "ruler" include traditional family values, traditional sexual and gender roles, and outlawing abortion. According to Eric Levitz, the values Vermeule promotes are those of Catholicism and the Christian right. Law professor Randy E. Barnett characterizes Vermeule's essay as "an argument for the temporal power "of the state" to be subordinated to the spiritual power "of the Church"." Constitutional law professor Garrett Epps characterizes Vermeule as "an authentic Christian nationalist to whom the Constitution is only an obstacle". Vermeule's common-good constitutionalism argument is, according to Epps, really "authoritarian extremism" which "has absolutely nothing to do with the actual United States Constitution, and in many ways flatly contradicts it. ... In fact, the Constitution as such is not a binding text to Vermeule" since it must be, in Vermeule's words, "read into" in order to arrive at the results he prefers. In the end, Epps criticizes Vermeule's concept as a "banal" anti-constitutional theory akin to Falangism. Levitz notes that Vermeule received little support from conservatives for his arguments, although some did object to characterizing him as "authoritarian".