We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. That to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.
Okay, boys and girls, time to put on your thinking cap and explore this portion of the Declaration of Independence. Thomas Jefferson penned some of the most beautiful words in the history of government when he wrote this section of the Declaration of Independence. Actually, the whole document is beautifully written and deserves intense study, which is sadly lacking in most schools and universities these days. So, I'm going to take a few minutes to give a little civics lesson here in my teeny, tiny corner of the internet.
Notice TJ prefaced it all that what he was about to say was truth, and not only that, but it should be self-evident. In other words, it should be pretty obvious. By virtue of being human, we have some God-given rights - Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness.
The word "unalienable" is the key in the sentence. During the age this document was written, philosophers and thinkers had categorized rights into two types - Natural and Legal. Here's a brief description of the two
as taken from Wikipedia:
Natural rights (also called moral rights or inalienable rights) are rights which are not contingent upon the laws, customs, or beliefs of a particular society or polity. In contrast, legal rights (sometimes also called civil rights or statutory rights) are rights conveyed by a particular polity, codified into legal statutes by some form of legislature, and as such are contingent upon local laws, customs, or beliefs. Natural rights are thus necessarily universal, whereas legal rights are culturally and politically relative.
So, one of our founding documents, the Declaration of Independence, lays it out plainly for all to see that by the basis of being human, people have a right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
What I'd like to focus on here is the first one - Life. We have a right to live.
I could go into a very strong Anti-Abortion stance here, but I'm not going to. That's not the gist of this blog entry. If you read my blog, you know how strongly pro-life I am and how much I abhor abortion.
Our right to live could soon be replaced with a duty to die. It's like I'm living in Opposite World now. Our government, if this Healthcare boondoggle passes, will be promoting "end of life" counseling sessions for Seniors, including information on how to refuse treatment and sustenance in order to not prolong the dying process. If you think I'm crazy, just read pages 425-446 of the bill currently being pushed by the White House. There is an
excellent Op-Ed in the Wall Street Journal about this issue, by the way, by someone who has read the ENTIRE bill (and LIVED to tell about it!).
Think I'm crazy that a duty to die initiative is not being foisted upon us should Government Healthcare pass into law? The White House has tapped Ezekiel J. Emanuel (Chief of Staff Rahm's brother) as a Health Care policy advisor. He is bio ethicist at the National Institutes of Health, a right to die advocate, and a proponent of state-assisted suicide.
Here are some of Emanuel's best writings, published just this year in the British medical journal Lancet (1/31/2009)
Published Jan. 31, 2009 in the British medical journal Lancet, Emanuel's euthansia-selection article appeared 11 days after President Obama's inauguration. Then on March 19, Emanuel was appointed to the Federal Coordinating Council on Comparative Effectiveness Research, to begin the design of a Federal system for withdrawing care from those chosen for death.
Emanuel sums up who is to be treated, and who is to die:
"When implemented, the complete lives system produces a priority curve on which individuals aged between roughly 15 and 40 years get the most substantial chance, whereas the youngest and oldest people get chances that are attenuated." This may be justified by public opinion, since "broad consensus favours adolescents over very young infants, and young adults over very elderly people."
Emanuel decrees that we must not kill only the elderly, but also infants.
"Strict youngest-first allocation directs scarce resources predominantly to infants. This approach seems incorrect. The death of a 20-year-old woman is intuitively worse than that of a 2-month-old girl, even though the baby has had less life. The 20-year-old has a much more developed personality than the infant, and has drawn upon the investment of others to begin as-yet-unfulfilled projects.... Adolescents have received substantial substantial education and parental care, investments that will be wasted without a complete life. Infants, by contrast, have not yet received these investments.... It is terrible when an infant dies, but worse, most people think, when a three-year-old child dies, and worse still when an adolescent does."
You can read more about it at this
blog.
This is one of the key advisers to this administration on Healthcare. Emanuel is shaping policy in this country that could soon determine who lives and who dies because of some formula some beancounter in Washington has on a spreadsheet.
What will be the magic age for Life? At what age will we lose our UNALIENABLE RIGHT to Life? When does it just go away? 60? 66? 70? 75? 80? Younger? It's like living in some weird sci-fi world like Logan's Run, where you had to extinguish your life at 30.
This slippery slope is about to get much more slick. It all started, I believe, when we took our CREATOR (from TJ's words in the Declaration) out of things. If we don't acknowledge a Creator, then we slowly don't recognize those rights that are given to us by the Creator. The Creator was taken out of government, so to speak, in the 60's. The first assault on Life started in the 70's with Roe v Wade. And now, what the Pro-Life movement has been warning for years (and ridiculed about by the "progressives") is so close to being a reality. The Duty to Die.
Now that you can see there is an assault one of the basic rights we have as humans, when will the assault on Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness pick up? Is it already happening?
Finally, one last thing - the final sentence I quoted in my snippet from the Declaration -
That to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.
Our representatives in Washington have totally forgotten this part - they derive their powers from US.
The majority of Americans DO NOT WANT this healthcare bill to pass. But, sadly, I fear our representatives in Washington will forget "the consent of the governed" part. And instead, from their Ivory Towers, look down on us all and tell us what they think is best.
Thomas Jefferson must be rolling over in his grave, along with all the others who shed their blood in the hope of creating a free country that recognized basic, natural, unalienable rights. As I watch the news each night and read the internet daily, I just shake my head and wonder if I'm living in bizarro world. It certainly seems like it.
Life Matters.
