The Founder's Wisdom

by Jim Bemis

Most people consider the recent July 4 holiday simply as a pleasant break from the summer doldrums. Few recall Independence Day's deeper meaning: Our country's breaking the yoke of English tyranny, which began with the Continental Congress' signing of the Declaration of Independence in 1776.

It's easy to think of the Declaration as document that once served its purpose, but now has little meaning for modern life. But the ideas put forth by the Declaration's authors are still important. In many ways, the battles they fought are being waged today.

Perhaps the most enduring of these ideas is that our rights are given by God - not by government - and they can never lawfully be taken away. Among these, the Declaration asserts, are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

A current battle in California points up the relevance of the Declaration's words. Senate Bill 1301 (the so-called "California Reproductive Privacy Act"), currently slithering through the California state legislature like a python through a murky swamp, is a pernicious and evil bit of legislation. Pushed by radical homosexual Senator Sheila Kuehl (D - Santa Monica) and co-authored by 11 other senators, SB 1301 purports to enshrine abortion as a fundamental "right," making a mother's prerogative to "choose" death for her unborn infant equivalent to the God-given rights enumerated in the Declaration.

Placing abortion on par with life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness is a macabre perversion of the notion of civil liberties. Only in an age that has completely lost its senses could abortion - which 30 years ago was a despicable crime and abortionists treated as social pariahs - be considered a positive good, something worthy of glorification. The legislature might as well proclaim a "right" to human sacrifice! It's as if SB 1301's sponsors are rectifying a flaw in the Declaration of Independence: these geniuses apparently discovered something Jefferson, Franklin, Madison, and Washington all missed.

SB 1301's backers reveal a startling ignorance about what a "right" is. Philosophers as far back as Cicero and St. Thomas Aquinas recognized that rights have their basis in the natural law, not in man-made positive law. It follows that governmental laws contradicting God's natural law are of no binding effect.

Nothing is more contrary to the natural law than abortion. No individual possesses the authority to take an innocent life, and government cannot convey such a right. If such a killing occurs, our sense of justice is outraged in large part because we intuitively know an eternal law is violated. When it is a mother ordering the execution of her own child, horror is added to the injustice.

Even the most rabid pro-abortion zealots realize this. Thus, they use euphemisms as anesthesia whenever abortion is discussed: expressions such as "terminating (never "killing") a pregnancy (never "a child"), "fetal tissue" (never "a baby"), "a women's right to choose" (never "the mother's decision to abort") numb the mind to painful reality. Such evasive language allows diversion of the abortion debate to a clinical discussion of "choice" instead of the real issue: Whether, as the Declaration asserts, "governments are instituted among men" to protect the right to life of its citizens, the first right mentioned in the Declaration. (The other two enumerated rights - those of liberty and the pursuit of happiness - mean little without the first one.)

In essence, then, the question is do those with power have the authority of life and death over the weak and powerless, who may be condemned in a process without justice, appeal, or mercy? If natural law exists, the answer must be no.

Thus, Sheila Kuehl and company are on a collision course with our country's founding principles. Either the Declaration of Independence is wrong or SB 1301 is: There simply cannot be a right to life and a right to abortion too. Our society is better off and our liberties safer if we recognize that our eternal rights are given by God, not by the state Legislature. For what Kuehl giveth, Kuehl may also taketh away.

James Bemis is an editorial board member, weekly columnist and film critic for California Political Review. He is also a columnist for the Internet website Catholic Exchange and served for years as a columnist for the Los Angeles Daily News. He is a frequent contributor to The Wanderer, the oldest weekly national Catholic newspaper. Mr. Bemis' work has appeared in National Catholic Register, Catholic Faith & Family, Catholic Digest, Thomas Aquinas College Newsletter, The Wanderer Forum Focus, the Los Angeles Times, the Ventura County Star, and the Simi Valley Enterprise. His five-part series, "Through the Eyes of the Church," on the Vatican's list of the 45 Most Important Films in the Century of Cinema, was published in The Wanderer. Mr. Bemis is currently writing a book on Catholic art, literature and film.