The Right “Right to Life”

Posted on June 22, 2011 by Bull Sullivan

The “Sanctity of Life” is a phrase bandied about by many “Right to Life” activists, and it a phrase with which I agree. Life is sacred. Nature, all living animate things, is best defined by the struggle for life, for birth, for growth, for maturity. To survive, to live a complete life cycle, in order to reproduce, is the “prime directive” of all life, regardless of the cellular sophistication of any of that life.

Two words come to mind when I consider the phrase “sanctity of life;” two words which in my mind are inexorably linked and inseparable. The two words come from two very different areas of intellectual inquiry, biology and philosophy, yet they clearly define the linkage between both disciplines. The words are “ontogenesis” and “ontology.” The two terms help define what I mean when I use the phrase “sanctity of life” in support of the notion of a generalized right to life inherent in all human beings.

Ontology, as an academic discipline, is the study of “being,” which I would further define here as the existence of human life. Being includes not only the requisite presence of consciousness, as is often argued, but the presence of all ontogenetical processes by which consciousness occurs.  Without a zygote, the act of conception, no human life, no consciousness, is possible. Importantly, ontogenesis describes a process which begins at conception and ends at termination, at death. Ontogenesis is, in each human being, a continuous process, defined and shaped by evolution, and interruptible only at the price of termination, only by death.

No supporter of “Freedom of Choice,” would willingly agree that a foundation was unnecessary for structure, nor would they willingly board an aircraft without wings, and very few would agree that marriage should precede love. If they were informed that learning to read was unnecessary for an education, or that knowledge and discernment were unnecessary in order to make an informed decision, most would strenuously disagree.  In each and every example, a process required a beginning as important as the end. So it is with life. Life is a process, and every moment is necessary to allow the next. Consciousness, sentience, even responsiveness do not define life, nor justify, if any of these attributes are lacking, the premature termination of life.

What of “sanctity,” sacredness? These are neither biological nor philosophical terms. These are cultural, theological, terms and as such are open to interpretation. And it in this discussion that proponents of “Freedom of Choice” make their best arguments. From a purely cultural point of view, an individual’s right to privacy, while in no way guaranteed by the US Constitution, is fixed in our consciousness, and seems to support the right to make choices which solely benefit the individual, and not society at large.

In fact, it can be argued that a right “of” privacy existed before the US Constitution, and that the need of it was responsible for the migration of many English subjects to the colonies. I would further argue that our Framing Fathers implicitly acknowledged that right of privacy in the Third, Fourth, and parts of the Fifth Amendment  Please note that I differentiate between the prepositions “of” and “to” in the composition of the phrase Right “of” or Right “to” Privacy. The two prepositions are not interchangeable; otherwise we would only need one, not both.  Just as they acknowledged a “Freedom of Speech” existed in the First Amendment to the US Constitution, the Framers, and subsequent distinguished jurists have distinguished between “Freedom of Speech” and freedom “to” speak;  for instance in the often cited example that you may not yell fire in a crowded movie theater, or call out to an acquaintance named Jack,  “Hi! Jack!” in an airport terminal, so also they gave careful consideration to the Colonial notion of the “Right of Privacy.”  They enumerated a Right of Privacy in the Third Amendment that protected the privacy of a citizen in their home, a right that could not be violated except under the direst of conditions, war, and then only through the action of legislation agreed to by the elected representatives of the citizens of the new country. In the Fourth Amendment, the Framing Fathers further extended an implicit Right of Privacy to “persons, houses, papers and effects” against unreasonable searches and seizures. In the Fifth Amendment, the Framers provided that “property shall not be taken without just compensation. These rights, so clearly enumerated by the Framer’s, provide the basis for a “Right of Privacy” in our relationship with governmental authorities.

Note again, no where is any “Right to Privacy” explicitly mentioned or implied. No citizen may claim as a defense against a charge of murder, “It was done in my house.” No spouse may beat another and assert as a defense, “It was done in the privacy of the kitchen of my house.” No kidnapper may hold another against their will, and assert “I held them in the basement of my house.” No rapist may violate another person and defend their heinous actions with the claim that “I raped them on my bed in my bedroom.”

There is no “Right to Privacy” that subtends an argument that any person may willingly take the life of another, and there is no Constitutional justification for homicide at any stage of the ontogeneological process.

The decision of the US Supreme Court in Roe v.Wade, “creating a “Right to Privacy” was made from whole cloth, vaguely “based” on “due process” and the Thirteenth Amendment and follows other stellar decisions by the US Supreme Court such as Dred Scott v. Sandford, reversed by a bloody Civil War; and Plessy v. Ferguson, reversed by 70 odd years of protests, riots, lynchings and preaching.

Blackman, Brennan, Burger, Douglas, Marshall, Powell, Stewart, these are the names of the greatest mass murders in history. Not Stalin, not Hitler, not Mao Zedong, not Pol Pot; no, none of these tyrants, despots, butchers can claim this singular distinction. No, it is seven old white men who have the blood of millions of aborted human beings on their hands. Why? So that their daughters, their nieces, their cheating wives, the daughters and wives of rich and powerful friends could sleep around, and if the Pill or Condom failed, have a “free pass” to an uncomplicated life.

I, too, am such a man, such a murderer as these jurists. I have two wonderful living children. I have five aborted children; five faces who are not at the Christmas Dinner table, five smiling souls who do laugh out loud or playfully banter with me; five human beings who never had the chance to struggle, grapple, or even breathe air. From 13 weeks to 24 weeks they lived, they grew, they yearned, yes, yearned to live another day, to take their place in the crib,  the church, the classroom. They yearned from a million years of human evolution to crawl, to walk, to run, to be held, to be loved, to simply be…

That is the story of our species, evolution, a constant and compelling need to reproduce, each successive generation to improve on the last. I, Bull Sullivan, stole all this from each of them. I stood back and let other’s choose; I “respected” the right of the women I impregnated to their “privacy.”  I applauded these distinguished Supreme Court Justices for taking me “off the hook,” for freeing me to be careless in my licentious life.

No apology to these, my lost children, to you my reader, or to God, can free me from my burden. I did not just take life, I lost life. I lost so much of my life, so many smiles and birthdays, so many hugs and so many never said “Daddy, I love you’s.”

At my age, as healthy and vigorous as I am, I know I will never regain what I lost, what I murdered. But I will speak the words I know each lost child would say, Life is precious, Life is a gift from the Creator, no one has the right to end life but that Creator. No one.

If you believe in the “right to life,” then hear me. No one, not you, male or female, not your neighbor, not your state, nor our Federal Government has the right to take life.

The problem with reversing Roe v. Wade is simple. Most arguments that support right to life values are moral, Christian not Constitutional, in nature. You can not assert a moral imperative if that imperative is couched in moral ambiguity. You can not support a “right to life” agenda, and support capital punishment, or War. Morally, neither you nor the “The State” has the right to take life. Either you accept this fact or you condone and accept  the murder of millions of unborn children each year. Capital Punishment is morally wrong because is it an act of societal revenge. There is no other component, no other excuse, no other justification. You can not forgive a human being and then take their life. If you believe in the “Right to Life” you must oppose capital punishment.

You can not wage War and call it Christian. You can admit to the necessity of self-preservation, at the cost of another’s life; you can accept that necessity, as I do, but it is still morally wrong. If you are a soldier, ask the Creator to forgive you for the acts you do to preserve the lives of those you love. All of us must admit that War is wrong, and we must seek to minimize the use of War to accomplish our self-preservation, and determine it is never to be used as an instrument of statecraft. Then and only then may we tell the world we oppose abortion, then and only then will we have the moral strength and support necessary to repeal Roe v. Wade.

Abortion, State Sponsored Murder, War: these are all one symptom of moral decay and nascent materialism. Our Constitution, while not perfect in securing and guaranteeing  our rights, is far better than our current statecraft and far superior to our current judiciary. Regrettably, the Framers of the Constitution appear to be far more principled and moral than the majority of today’s citizens, the majority that is us, you and I. Only you and I can implement  the changes so desperately needed, but only if you and I change first.

I am no Pollyanna, no pacifist. If War need be waged it should be waged. But Iraq? Afghanistan? Libya? Yemen? Iran? We have elected mad men, good men, but nonetheless mad, drunk with power, wealth and ego. Read what the Father of our Country said:

“Why quit our own to stand upon foreign ground? Why, by interweaving our destiny with that of any part of Europe, entangle our peace and prosperity in the toils of European ambition, rivalship, interest, humor or caprice?”

G Washington, Farewell Address, 1796

We must work to bring “us” home from these foreign shores, to secure our borders and our peace, and commit to using diplomacy and economic strength to shape a peaceful world.

But above all, we must once again cherish human life, from the first moment of cellular life, to the first heart beat, to the first breath, through each day of life until that heartbeat is naturally stilled, until the last breath is exhaled.  We must learn once again, that nature has a process, and that human life should should begin in the womb, and end, no matter how long its course, by natural cause. No exceptions exist, no life is less valued than any other, all life celebrates the diversity of the human genome, all human life is unique and priceless. And no one, no human, has the right to end life before nature acts to do so.

 

 

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News Flash! Caylee Anthony Still Dead!

Posted on June 15, 2011 by Bull Sullivan

Somewhere tonight, in West Palm Beach, Florida, a drunken father will beat his son with his fists. In Sarasota, a step father will rape, for the fiftieth time, his step daughter.  In Orlando, an enraged mother will shake her infant to near death. In Tampa, a little boy and girl will cower under the filthy mattress of a day-bed in the corner of a cluttered, disheveled room while their daddy beats their momma black and blue, and then pinning her, belly down, across the dinette table, rapes her. In Tallahassee, three children will go to bed hungry because their mother traded her food stamps for beer at an east-indian owned Superette.

Caylee Anthony is dead. The spectacle  that the press and yes, the pathetic public, has created will not revive her, not put flesh on gnawed bones, not show her at five playing happily with her mother, not see her going to the first day of first grade; no, the spectacle will only waste millions of dollars in a prosecution that borders on persecution, weaken the willingness of the underclass to trust the judicial system, and further re-enforce the picture of America, as seen by the rest of the civilized world, as a pandering, cloying, corpulent public pustule.

The notion concerning Casey Anthony of innocent until proven guilty is obviously not of any concern to anyone in the media; further, that ancient Colonial common law notion is not “presumed innocent” but “absolutely innocent” until found guilty by a jury of peers.  I can not say, given the evidence presented, that I am certain, without any doubt, that Casey Anthony, with malice a forethought, murdered her daughter. Nor can the prosecution. The very fact that the prosecution is seeking the death penalty is proof that justice will have no part in what ever verdict the jury renders.  This prosecution is political and personal, and is an abuse of prosecutorial power, a tragic farce, a miscarriage of justice, a waste of the District Attorney’s time and the public’s money.

What fools we look to much of the rest of the world, where the notion of ” innocent until proven guilty” is seen as absurd, where the defendant must prove their innocence, and where the time from judgement to summary execution is a matter of days, not decades. Even in England, our mother country, the rule of law protects the accused from identification and vilification until and unless the defendant is found guilty. We, the defender of liberty, the upholder of individual rights, the paragon of reason and public virtue, show no such sensibility.

The electronic media and its audience are no more than a Twenty-First Century electronic lynch mob, and worse, the life of a little girl who will never grow up has been made into a circus sideshow of family movie clips and a rancid legal animation. Caylee’s memory will always be a bad taste in the mouth of the body-politic, her smiling face a grotesque reminder of vulgarity of life and the certainty of death.

I believe Casey Anthony is responsible for all of Caylee Anthony’s life, from her birth until her death. I have known child abusers, molesters, I have seen and documented the physical and emotional abuse of children. I do not see an abusive mother, rather I see a negligent mother, a woman who, at the time of Caylee’s birth, should never have been a mother. In the evidence presented, I do see clearly a broken, dysfunctional  family; but I also see clear and apparent affection, a maternal bond, an expressed and reciprocated love between a mother and daughter.

This case should have never been “played out” as it has been; by the ratings hungry media, by the breathless commentary of so many talking heads, by the clear ambition of the District Attorney and the confused sense of justice by law enforcement personnel, who were lied to and mislead by a borderline personality. There will be no justice for Caylee, nor will there be justice for the children, the women whose desperate situations I described first above. What there needs to be is empathy and love and aid and treatment. We don’t need better schools, or more police, or more men sent to jail, we need better parents. Why doesn’t the media get that story right; why don’t we demand true justice for all children, not some sensationalized yellow journalism calling for media mob justice for one little girl; but let us demand a righteous justice  assuring well feed, well clothed, secure, nurtured, educated and loved children thriving in a country the world respects and emulates.

Only then will Caylee’s death, and Casey’s life begin to have meaning, only then will this spectacle have value, only then will the truth be told of all the lost children, all the beaten and abused spouses, only then will all the callous, gratuitous pandering of the press, in the Case of Florida vs. Casey Anthony, be forgivable.

 

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State’s Rights, Republicans and Romney!

Posted on June 10, 2011 by Bull Sullivan

Excuse me if I’m confused.  My father was a Republican, and I grew up a Democrat in a Buckhead home in which the mention of  Thomas Dewey’s stinging defeat by Harry S. Truman was never allowed. Like many American boys, I had a hero-worship admiration for DDE (Dwight David Eisenhower), the man who had led the crushing defeat of Nazi Germany, and the man who keep my father from harm’s way in the Korean UN police action; though in retrospect both Truman and he left unfinished business on the table. I was always taught that Republicans were conservative, constitutional and eminently reasonable people, and I enjoyed the weekly “Eve and Charlie Show” (Sen. Everett Dirksen R, IL, and Rep. Charles Halleck, R, IN) and at times felt myself comfortable in the company of both Gov. Nelson Rockefeller R, NY and Sen. Barry Goldwater, R, AZ, that is, in the company of their thought.  I even found strength in the vision and enthusiasm of Pres. Ronald Reagan, R, CA, though I often disagreed with his policies. And I’ve met a good number of prominent Republican, including many of the senior staff of CFTR, Reagan’s think tank, Lyn Nofsinger and Barbara Buchanan included. As President of Childers & Sullivan, Inc., I worked for men of integrity on both sides of the political spectrum and even served to manage fund raising and political opinion research in 1978 for Republican gubernatorial candidate Guy Hunt, who would later become Alabama’s first Republican Governor since Reconstruction.

There’s a point to this name dropping, which I will soon present, but it is important to note that I am a conservative southern Democrat, and yet I have found men and ideas of value across the aisle, as it were. As a “Blue Dog” Democrat, I have long admired the mutual admiration that Republicans have for the Tenth Amendment of the US Constitution, though in practical terms, inside the beltway, that Amendment seems to lose hold of their voting hand; it seems somehow less important to elected Republicans than when they pump their hand in emphasis on it, in acclamation of it, on the stump when campaigning.

For your consideration and edification:

Amendment 10:

“The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.”

To me, the most important phrase of the 10th Amendment is the last, “…or to the people”

Here now we come to the point of this essay, the bizarre rebuke by Republicans of a candidate for the Republican Party’s nomination for President, Mitt Romney.

Consider this. If the people of a state have rights that transcend the written language of the Constitution, and if they choose to exercise those rights, it that act not the very fulfillment of that last phrase of the 10th Amendment of the US Constitution? If a State Government, and its Governor, duly elected by those people, feels compelled, by demand of the people and in fulfillment of that state’s constitution, to offer a plebiscite on a controversial issue and that issue is approved by a majority of the voting citizens of that state, isn’t that how federalism is supposed to work?   The will of the people is acknowledged by the State Government in which those people reside, and absent any conflict with the enumerated rights of all US citizens found in the US Constitution, that people’s will becomes the law of that State.

We are, of course, writing about Massachusetts, Governor Romney and “RomneyCare.”

A State exercised its rights under the US Constitution and created a law with which you or I might disagree, but it is the right of that state to do so. It does not effect you or I; we live in Georgia. I feel certain that such a broad, sweeping “solution” to rising health care costs and the diminishing quality of health care would never pass into law in Georgia, and I feel certain that conservatives in either party here would never support any such intrusive legislation here in Georgia.

But Romney was Governor of the State of Massachusetts, and he was responsible for fulfilling the expressed will of those damn yankees, excuse me, those euroamericans, whose parents and grandparents came to America not to escape from oppression and exploitation, not to find freedom to worship as they willed, or to find freedom from government intrusion in their private lives; but rather, they came to make a “better” living, to have an easier life, to enjoy the many opportunities and freedoms paid for by those who earlier fought and died for them.

Governor Mitt Romney did what the chief executive of a state should do, act to enact the will of the people of that state. He did it well, he did as he was advised by the Legislature, and by many prominent businessmen, educators and health professionals.

I will fight against any attempt by any government official or agency to “mandate” my participation in any health program. I might well urge citizens take up arms against such tyranny. But if the people of Georgia demanded it, voted for it and intended to enforce it, I would do what wise men have done since before the American revolution, I will go west! I’ll move to Alabama!

Republicans can decide whether Mitt Romney is fit to be their candidate. He is, on my score card, a prototypical Republican, and I will never, ever vote for any Republican. But Mitt Romney is the first Governor to run for President since Reagan who heard and obeyed the voice of his state’s people, and then did the people’s bidding; then did what all elected officials should do, the people’s work.

I do not know whether he intellectually supported the health care initiatives in Massachusetts, or whether he did not. Y’all Republicans need to find that out, but he has said he would repeal all parts of ObamaCare, and that’s a damn good start to a conservative campaign to return power to the people, one this yellow dog democrat can applaud and  support, that is, after he is elected. I’m just hoping Hillary will run again, or maybe she and Bill will support their girl child, what’s her name? After all, you Republicans started this recent nepotism, and we can agree the Bush’s sure weren’t the Adam’s!  Then again, maybe we need a constitutional amendment to ban the election of the progeny of a President unto the third, fourth, hell, just to be safe, the fifth generation. How many Bush’s can there be?

My conclusion is this: If the people of Massachusetts want socialized medicine, that’s their right, and if you don’t like it, don’t live there. As President Reagan is often quoted as saying: “Vote with your feet.” If we in Georgia vote to cut medicaid, medicare, welfare, peach care, who cares? The people speak and they should be heard. I will, of course, campaign vigorously against any such cuts, but should the other side prevail, well, I’ll see you in Huntsville!

 

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