"Rights of persons. Section 1. All men are, by nature, free and equal, and have certain inalienable rights - among which are those of enjoying and defending life and liberty, acquiring, possessing and protecting property, and pursuing and obtaining safety and happiness."
-- Iowa Constitution - ARTICLE I. - Bill of Rights
May 24, 2014
Today Iowa Right to Life didn't endorse me for Governor in the June 3rd Republican primary. Which is no surprise, since I didn't fill out their candidate questionnaire.
Why not?
Because their language told me right up front that I couldn't possibly earn their endorsement, even though I've spent the last two decades as an uncompromising right-to-lifer, in political battles all across the land.
In order to answer their questions "correctly," I would have had to agree to support legislation that I know to be immoral, unconstitutional, illegal, and futile. Lawless "laws" that, in effect, end in "and then you can kill the baby," which grant express permission to commit most abortions, despite the fact that God forbids murder, without exception, and even though our Constitution explicitly and imperatively REQUIRES equal protection for the right to life of EVERY PERSON, in every jurisdiction in America. IT’S NOT OPTIONAL.
There are only two scriptural, moral, constitutional, legal, and political arguments against the practice of human abortion: 1) The God-given, unalienable, nature of the individual right to live, and 2) the absolute obligation borne by all officers of government, in every branch, at every level, to provide equal protection under the law. Those two all-important principles also happen to be the basis for the rule of law in America, and for our form of republican, constitutional self-government. Destroy those principles, as permitting abortion, any abortion, does, and you have obliterated the foundations of our American claim to liberty.
The bills that continue to be forwarded by IRTL, and their parent organization, National Right to Life, which they were asking me to agree to, surrender those arguments right up front.
Of course, they had no problem endorsing my opponent, Governor Terry Branstad.
Again, I’m not at all surprised. But here’s the problem with continuing to cede a “pro-life” label to politicians like Mr. Branstad: In order to write a truly pro-life bill, one that actually fulfills the explicit, absolute requirements of the Iowa and the U.S. Constitutions, that all persons be protected equally in their God-given, unalienable right to live, you have to erase Terry Branstad's, and Iowa Right to Life’s, entire "pro-life" legacy from the Iowa Code.
I know. I helped craft Tom Shaw's House File 138, which meets the moral and constitutional test of a true pro-life bill. In addition to rightly identifying the unborn child as a person, its language scrubbed all the unconstitutional Branstad/IRTL code sections that permit abortion.
Of course, the Branstad Republican establishment consistently insisted on burying HF-138 in sub-committee, while pushing even more unconstitutional "pro-life" legislation, so that they could then go out again and pretend to their naive pro-life constituency that they are doing something to stop this American holocaust.
Wake up, people. Read your own constitutions, and start demanding that those who represent you fulfill the primary purpose and duty of their offices, which is the defense of the supreme right of every single individual human being, the right to live.
"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..."
-- The Declaration of Independence
"We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America."
-- The Preamble, or Statement of Purpose, of the United States Constitution
"No person shall be deprived of life without due process of law."
-- The Fifth Amendment to the United States Constitution
"No State shall deprive any person of life without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws."
-- The Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution
"The appellee and certain amici argue that the fetus is a 'person' within the language and meaning of the Fourteenth Amendment. In support of this, they outline at length and in detail the well known facts of fetal development. If this suggestion of personhood is established, the appellant's case, of course, collapses, for the fetus' right to life would then be guaranteed specifically by the Amendment."
-- Justice Harry A. Blackmun, Roe vs. Wade, 1973
"You shall not murder."
-- Exodus 20:13
"God who gave us life gave us liberty. Can the liberties of a nation be secure when we have removed a conviction that these liberties are the gift of God? Indeed I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just, that his justice cannot sleep forever."
-- Thomas Jefferson
"Abraham Lincoln recognized that we could not survive as a free land when some men could decide that others were not fit to be free and should therefore be slaves. Likewise, we cannot survive as a free nation when some men decide that others are not fit to live and should be abandoned to abortion or infanticide. My Administration is dedicated to the preservation of America as a free land, and there is no cause more important for preserving that freedom than affirming the transcendent right to life of all human beings, the right without which no other rights have any meaning."
-- President Ronald Reagan - Abortion and the Conscience of the Nation