CONSTITUIONAL REQUIREMENT TO VOTE PRO-LIFE

We should learn and understand the fact that the harm done in legalizing abortion is not merely the harm to the unborn, and not merely the harm done to the conscience of those who believe in Christian morality, and other right thinking persons who are wrongfully limited in their actions as citizens. Looking at the problem from the standpoint of the common good, abortion rights destroy the rights "…for ourselves and our posterity" in the Preamble of the United States Constitution, and undermine the first purpose and the first act of civil government. By transferring the power over life and death to private choice, the state violates the civil contract. In effect, the power originally invested in civil government is relinquished. This is returning to a pre-civil condition, or the law of the jungle, in which each individual is a judge and executor of the law. If a person has a private franchise to kill other human beings on the basis of his or her own estimation of the human status or worthiness of those whom he or she kills, then why shouldn’t other persons have a private franchise to kill that individual who, in their estimation, unjustifiably committed this homicidal act?

This license to kill is stated more clearly by the U.S. Supreme Court in Casey v. Pa. 1989, where the court said: "At the heart of liberty is the right to define one’s own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life." Of course, from the seed of this notion follows the dissolution of civil government. This calls attention to the specifically political wrong of abortion rights. The power of lethal force does not belong to the individual citizen, except in the case of self defense, or in Texas in the defense of a third person, which is obviously not at issue in the so called abortion right. A state that juridically recognizes a transfer of this power to individual citizens is a state that dissolves its own authority; a citizen who takes that power, is no longer a citizen, but someone who declares himself to stand outside or above the civil order.

Abortion rights represent "political heresy" for two reasons. First the alleged right to do this moral wrong cannot be regarded as a merely private act, for the logic of rights requires that other citizens are bound to recognize this right, and accordingly to limit their activities as citizens. This is a morally wrongful limit upon citizenship. No right minded citizen can accept that limit as a condition for exercising his citizenship. Secondly, the alleged right to abortion subverts the first act of government, which is to reserve the power of lethal force to itself. Since this power can only be used rightfully for the sake of the common good, the state has no authority to transfer it to private parties; and private parties have no right to take it.

Because abortion represents not just moral wrong, but a political heresy, it is not confineable like other private immoralities. Abortion has poisoned the political culture at nearly every level. It encouraged the Supreme Court to act in violation of its Constitutionally allocated powers; it has led government to permit private parties to arbitrarily define in and out of existence "persons" who are within the jurisdiction of the state; it has inclined all the courts of the legal system to recognize a right to do wrong, not just in abortion, but also in others---euthanasia, which is another case of an allegedly private franchise to kill human beings; it has corrupted the quasi-public professional organizations; it has grafted itself into the health-care system and insurance carriers; it has been funded by public monies in some of the states; and one of the two great political parties, which is unequivocally committed not just to the protection of the alleged right of abortion, but to its extension worldwide.

The abortion issue is destroying the consensus upon which citizenship can be exercised—both the formal and explicit consensus upon first things held in the habits of the people.

Thus, there is an analogy to the slavery issue. James Madison, a slaveholder, argued at the Constitutional convention that it would be "wrong to admit in the Constitution of the idea that there could be property in men". Madison saw that this principle could not be admitted without poisoning the fundamental law. It was not until many years after the Constitution was accepted, specifically in Justice Taney’s opinion in Dred Scott, that the Constitutional order was interpreted to protect slavery as a fundamental right. At that point, the principles of civil amity and unity were destroyed. For those citizens who believed slavery to be a moral wrong were compelled, as citizens, to recognize an unconstitutional right on the part of the slaveholder, and an unconstitutional limitation on their power as citizens in the democratic process. The court would not correct the evil of slavery, and the issue was resolved by the Civil War.

Thirty four years after Roe v. Wade the class of unborn humans are denied their constitutional right to life, and citizens are unconstitutionally prevented from protecting innocent helpless humans from government protected murder.

Our judges once denied the constitutional right of liberty to slaves, holding they were not persons, and for the past 35 years judges have denied the constitutional right of life to unborn humans, holding they are not persons, and Congress has failed its responsibility to protect all innocent human life which is required in the 5^th article of the 14^th amendment.

Unless the people of this country resolve to elect Congressmen and a President who will uphold the oath of the office they serve to protect the lives of all innocent humans, this country will not endure any more than it could with legal slavery.

The first and qualifying issue for judges and legislative candidates should be:

Candidates Pro-Life Positions