Abortion is a civil rights issue, though not in the way pro-abortionists want to spin it. We should not forget that, after Roe v. Wade was decided in 1973, there were liberal Democrats who opposed the ruling as a civil rights violation. Senators William Proxmire of Wisconsin and Harold Hughes of Iowa spring to mind, as do congressmen like Jim Oberstar of Minnesota.
The fundamental duty of any society is to protect the lives of its members. There is no more basic function of a society than to keep its members alive. That means protecting them from foreign assault by providing for national defense. That means protecting them from domestic violence by making and enforcing criminal accountability.
This is the bottom-line purpose of any society. English philosophers as different as Thomas Hobbes and John Locke agreed on this point. When Thomas Jefferson opines about “unalienable rights” of life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness, he was not just putting in some “nice words” before he got to his point: declare American independence. Go back and reread his argument (which, while changing “property” to “pursuit of happiness” basically comes straight out of Locke).
- There are “inalienable” rights.
- Those rights do not come from any government or even democratic majority. They come from God and nobody — not even a democratic majority — can take them away.
- When governments “become destructive” of those rights, they forfeit their subjects’ allegiance.
- When that destruction becomes grievous enough, people even have the right to overthrow such rights-destructive governments.
That’s where Jefferson’s independence argument comes in: King George III and the British Parliament had so systematically violated the rights of people in these colonies that any claims of allegiance were dissolved.
Now, the list of rights Jefferson enumerates as divinely conferred and inalienable are limited and ordered. They start with “life.” Not with “liberty.” Not with “happiness.” Life is prerequisite to the other two.
So, if a government exists to protect “certain unalienable rights” which include “life,” that government has got to conclude who is alive. Think that through: if governments exist to protect the unalienable right to life, governments have to determine who is alive. It is very clear from Jefferson (and Hobbes and Locke) that question cannot be one of private judgment: everybody decides it for himself. No society can fulfill its basic responsibilities if everybody has his own opinion of what constitutes life. Nor did Jefferson or Hobbes or Locke consider that question a purely religious or doctrinal question, even far less one that was epistemologically insoluble. They all would have considered the notion that everybody makes up his own mind on that question utter nonsense, an example not of deep thinking but not thinking.
Jordanuh17
Comments are closed.