Alan Keyes
July 12, 1997

"Euthanasia, Civil Law, and Natural Law"

Thank you very much.

I'd say I'm glad to be here this afternoon, but [inaudible]. This is one of those topics that I'd just as soon we didn't have to talk about, and that we were not a nation . . . I don't think the country is actually going mad; I think that our elite has pretty much gone mad though.

We live in a country where people who ought to have the intelligence to know better have, through the corruption of their education, managed to achieve a state of what actually seems to me to be kind of like adolescence. Really. What is the definition of an adolescent? Someone who is smart and capable, but hasn't the common sense to apply either the intelligence or the capability, so you have to supply some periodically to make sure that they don't do away with themselves.

But our problem is that we have to apply it, in our case, in order to make sure that our elites do not do away with us. And at some level I've begun to suspect that this incompetence on their part--since it is leading us down a road that will, at the end of the day, return us to a way of life in which the elite have unchallenged sway over everyone else--I have to begin to wonder whether it is stupidity or whether it isn't a calculated form of intelligence that takes the rest of us for fools, in order to turn the clock back to the days when the people counted for nothing, and what we call elites today were the kings, the oligarchs, the rulers of us all.

We are returning to that day--we are in the midst of the destruction of government of the people, by the people, for the people--and in the midst of returning to that form of government--call it what you will--which pretty much prevailed throughout the history of mankind, when the many did what the few told them to do, and when they did not, they were killed. For the good of the few? For their own good? It really doesn't matter, once you reach that stage, you're dead anyway.

And that, I think, is a necessary introduction to the topic we are dealing with today, because I think it is very important that we not be fooled by the way in which this debate is presented. They present it as if this about somehow or another respecting individual freedom or relieving individual pain. This is a lie. That's not we are discussing here. We are discussing the circumstances under which it is okay for people who have the power to kill to use it.

And, you see, throughout most of human history it was considered the case that, if you had the power to kill, you could use it any time you could get away with it. Because once the dust cleared, you were the one who was going to determine what the standards were. When Thrasymachus in Plato's Republic is asked what justice is, he replies that justice is the good of the stronger. And actually, if justice means obeying the law and you are strong enough to make the law, then that's a pretty good definition. And though it may seem a little bit repugnant to us, you've got to understand it is the definition that prevailed throughout most of human history.

We live in a society extraordinary in that, for a while now, we have actually lived with the impression that this is not the way things should be; that people who do not have the power, do not have the strength, do not have the wherewithal to dominate, nonetheless must be respected in their persons.

If we keep going down the road that our, seemingly incompetent elites are leading us down, we are going to lose this wonderful moment. And we're going to return to the status in which most human beings have lived most of the time--the status of serfs, and slaves, whose lives were worth no more than the will of the strongest among them. Because that principle--might makes right; whoever has the power, has the right to make the rules and to determine the difference between what is will-able and what is not, what is qualified for respect and what is not--that has been a fundamental premise of human life.

And I say this at the outset because we have at some point, as a people, got to return, for a moment or two before we are utterly lost, to a situation where we stop taking for granted the things we are about to lose. So that we will not be distracted by the arguments . . . . do you know, the Supreme Court doesn't matter a bit. What goes on in courts of law is of no importance, whatsoever, unless it is in the context of an already established society.

So when you posit the extreme situations--and we don't usually, because we've taken it for granted; this is going to go on forever, this wonderful life we have. It's not, you know. In many, many ways, we are preparing the executioners of our freedom every day. Undermining the constraints on our military--doing away with that education which leads them to respect our principles. And as we move down that road, then we'll reach a point some day where somebody's going wake up with all this power in his or her hand, thinking to themselves, "Why shouldn't I use it? I have the power. Tomorrow, I could enslave this whole country. And nobody else would have the power to stop me. Why shouldn't I go ahead?"

You don't think that's important, maybe, but it's terribly important. And the greatest minds that have considered the problem of government broke their teeth on this particular one. In Plato's Republic, the "ideal regime" . . . that whole big book takes place when they finally realize that if you educate or train people well enough that they can defend you against the dangers that threaten you, they become the greatest danger that threatens you. And then they have to figure out, "How do we educate these people so that they won't use the power they have to destroy us?" That's the key question involved.

Working in the human heart, working in the breast of everybody out there who has the power to do harm, physically and otherwise, to human beings, there is the temptation to believe that it's okay--to glory in it. As a matter of fact, to believe that it's not only okay; it's kind of wonderful. There are civilizations that were built on this belief, you know. You find it even with the ancient Greeks. Achilles. What was he good at? Killing people. "Nothing afeard of what he himself did make, strange images of death." This was the definition of the warrior. That's from Macbeth. And you see what happens when somebody goes out and saves the kingdom by the sword; when he comes home, he may just kill you in your bed and take your throne.

I go through this because, if we think about these particular issues in a form of mind that forgets the worst possibilities of human nature, then we are making a great mistake. This is not an issue of peace, the questions of euthanasia and abortion. These are not peace issues. These are war issues. These are the issues of who we kill and when and how. And that, at its heart, is the issue of when we may justly go to war, when we may justly allow that consequence of war, which is death, to overtake this one or that one or the other one, and say that it's okay. And who will then have in their hand the sword that can execute this decision, and who shall be able to do it in good conscience. This is what we are talking about.

We come at these issues at the end of a century when we should be forewarned, in any case, against being complacent about these things. This is what amazes me every day. Mike was mentioning the writing that was done by German equivalent of our present day elite mad-people. Coming forward to argue that some people were in great pain, and they were living lives that were basically existence without life: dasein ohne leben. Then you could do away with that one. And you were actually doing him a favor.

What we mustn't forget--and yet we do, don't we? -- is that those fellows in their intellectual and academic garb, putting out their nice little pamphlets all in . . . you know how the Germans wrote in those days--thick, turgid sentences that require a great deal of effort in order to get through, so that you can really feel at the end of it that your intellectual muscles have been worked out--a real intellectual arrogance in all of it. And we may think that it was just a playground for them, but have we forgotten who took up the cudgel from it? That particular pamphlet, when they made it into a movie--which they did by the way--who made the movie, do you know? Who produced and directed the film? In a sense, Adolph Hitler did. It was a film, as I recall, about a pianist--I can't remember the name right now--written about a beautiful young pianist, and she comes down with a terminal illness, and they follow her as she decides that she is going to kill herself. And having watched this sensitive, intelligent person reach the logical conclusion that life without achievement, the quality of this-and-that, was without purpose, without meaning, they then applied this logic to the infirm and the mentally incompetent and all of them--"Look, if a sensitive, intelligent person in this situation--her life had no quality, no savor--decides to kill themselves, then surely if these individuals here, whose brains are impaired, whose capacities are dulled, if they had the capacity, they would make this decision for themselves. And therefore,when we kill them, we do them a favor."

That's how the Nazis justified, and proselytized for, their euthanasia program. If you ever wonder how it was that supposedly civilized, wonderful people like the Germans--who have produced some very civilized and wonderful things, you know; it's hard to believe that the same sort of people who produced the great music, symphonies, and so forth and so on, that can delight the high, also produced that terrible and demonic thing which was the Holocaust. But they did.

And it wasn't, either, that suddenly some terrible madness just came over them. No. They talked themselves into this. That's right. They reasoned their way into this madness. And they were led by people sitting on the benches in their courts and wearing nice clothes in their intellectual and medical elites, who convinced them that this was quite logical, and reasonable, and that any sane person would do it. And when people [inaudible], they often have this delusion that they are acting rationally; within the false premises they lay down, they are.

And so I think we need to remember the context in which this discussion really takes place. It's not a context of compassion and concern for the individual. It takes place in the context of the age-old struggle between what our Founders called the "the princes and the people." "The princes" being those who--by virtue of capacity, ability, warlike abilities, intelligence, whatever it may be--select themselves to be on top, and "the people" being all the other ordinary folks.

And if you think that this argument is about whether someone cares about you or not, that's not it. This argument is simply about one thing: somewhere along the way--and I'm about to describe it--folks actually articulated a principle that allowed the serfs and the slaves to lift their eyes up from the ground and challenge the right of the superior beings to decide what to do with their lives. And this actually unlocked the floodgates of confidence, self-respect and courage in the mass of the people, and made that rule of the few over the many impossible in the form that it had taken through the centuries.

We live in a society that is the fruit and beneficiary of that insight. And what we are discussing, whether the Supreme Court Justices acknowledge it or not, is whether we shall throw away that premise, that insight, which makes this way of life possible for ordinary folks.

Now, by way of a side-light before I get into that, though, I want to explain my own personal motivation. Because there are some people in this society who are tempted to think of themselves as part of that oligarchy because they happen to be a little smarter, a little better, perform a little better, than others. Having a black skin, I cannot be subject to this delusion. No matter how well I do, I shall always identify with the people on the bottom, because I'll always be put there, eventually--you bet. And a lot of us need to remember this.

What they used to talk about, and what our Founders referred to in the Federalist Papers and other places, is that our nation came about as a moment when people were going to decide whether government could be well founded by conscious choice, or whether it was always going to depend on what they called "force and fortune"--you know, luck; the luck of the draw.

And this is what we are deciding, as well. Because no matter how good you think you are, as used to be the rule of the old West, no matter how fast you were, there was always somebody faster. No matter how wonderful you think you are, no matter what the odds are that you will end up riding the others, instead of being saddled to be ridden . . . you can't be sure; it's a throw of the dice. The likelihood is that most of us will end up on the wrong side of the power, because that's the way it has always been. Only a few people can have this kind of power, and they must [inaudible] a lot of folks to maintain it.

I don't understand why we don't take this seriously. I'm bringing forward some of this horrible stuff, because it is the only context in which to have this discussion. Do not think of this as a discussion that we should have, thinking of hospitals and suffering people. "Do we administer things that will relieve their pain?"

Think of the death camps! Think of purges! Think of all of the millions who have died by the hand of power in this century! And then ask yourself, "What is it that separates us from their fate? What is it that keeps us from such abuses of power?"

So, what is it? If you had to deal with that person who had awakened one day and found that they had power to enslave America. They had the missiles; they had the guns; they had the troops who were loyal to their person and would do their bidding, like Caesar. And don't fool yourselves; we're going to get there. If we keep telling our military people that there is not truth; there is no honor; there is not decency; there is no integrity; there is no discipline--and what they will soon discover is that there is power; they have it; and since there is no constraint on that power, why shouldn't they use it? And they will. They will use it against us.

It's inevitable. Always happens that way without exception throughout human history, and we will not be the exception.

So think to yourself, "What do you say to that person?" And remember that when I posited that you've got to persuade one individual not to abuse their power . . . don't think of it as an abstraction, because it's really not. What I'm really talking about is how you educate young men and women so that when they are put into that uniform, when they are given that kind of power--be it military or technological--they have within their hearts the kind of character that will keep them from abusing it. What do they have to learn to respectin order to be guardians instead of tyrants?

Well, I think that the answer is actually fairly simple, and it is put to us in a fairly simple way by our Founding Fathers. And even though in our legal profession it's part of the reason for their madness, they don't acknowledge this anymore. It can be fairly simply stated. The reason that you don't get to abuse power, even when you have it, is because that power is no ground for just claims to superiority, in terms of that kind of decision--it has no foundation.

And why not? This gets us to the question of equality. It doesn't give you any special claim because we are all equal. Now, of course, that's an absurd statement, isn't it? It would be a particularly absurd statement to make if somebody happened to have a gun on you at the time. At that moment, you're not their equal. If you are disarmed, they are superior to you, because they could take your life.

So in what sense are you equal? Well, only in a moral sense. Only in the sense that there is something basic about you that has as much claim to respect, under any circumstances whatsoever, as there is in that person with the power, with the skill, with technology, with the weapon to destroy you. What sustains that premise of equality, which is the basis of our understanding of justice? That wonderful statement in the Declaration of Independence, "All men are created equal." Everything else flows from that--the elections, the due process, the sense of constraint, the need to respect individual persons. As a matter of law and politics, EVERYTHING flows from that premise.

Discard that premise, and we've had it. Oh, sure, the forms will last a while, because people get into good habits. But, little by little, they'll fall out of these habits; they already are. And give it a generation or so, and they won't have good habits at all. Then it will just be a matter of who reaches first for the palm of tyranny in this country. I mean, I hope I'm dead by that time, myself. But, if we keep going the way we're going, I won't be, and neither will some of you.

"All men are created equal." That's the premise that safeguards us then, in some sense, from this presumption that mere power constitutes a right to do with others as we please. "And they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights." I have tried very hard, over the years--and I'm not the only one, of course--I have tried for other reasons, but some people try it because they would dearly love to be able to get away from any dependence on the deity, and so they have written great books, tomes, they have studied all kinds of things in the hope that they will find ground for the claim to rights and equality other than the simple statement I just presented to you. "All men are created equal, and endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights."

I must report to you, though, that they have not succeeded, any of them at all in any way. There is no way to justify our claim to rights, except that simple premise. Throw it away, and [inaudible] finished. It's just a matter of time.

What does this have to do with the subject at hand? Well, a lot. Because,if you think through that simple phrase, "All men are created equal, and endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights," then all you have to do is think it through, and you know that there can be no right to take our own life. It's that simple. If we claim the right to take our own lives, we are flushing down the toilet the notion that we have unalienable rights that must be respected by power.

Now, why do I say that? Well, on the face of it I say it because the word "unalienable" means what I just said. It literally means--I ask people about this . . . what does the word "unalienable" mean in that wonderful phrase from the Declaration. And most people think that it means that these are rights that can't be taken away. But that's not true; that's not what the phrase implied.

In England, for instance, under the laws whereby dukes and other aristocrats came into their estates, a certain part of that estate, certain parts of the lands and other things that attached to the title, were "unalienable," because they attached to the title, and were therefore not under the control, ultimately, of the person who had the title. So that person couldn't contract to "alienate" them, to sell them away from the estate.

So you see, the word "unalienable" doesn't mean that somebody can't take it from you; it means that you cannot give it away. "Unalienable" is not a constraint upon power; it is a constraint upon us. It implies that we claim freedom, but in the very act of claiming these rights, we acknowledge that there are limits to our claim.

That makes perfect sense, as a matter of fact, when you consider the basic premise that we are talking about. "All men are created"--by whom? By God. Therefore, the need to respect rights doesn't depend on anything we do; it depends on an authority that is beyond our will, beyond our choice, beyond our power, beyond our control and that of any other human being. That's what makes it possible for us to assert this claim AGAINST all human power.

So, simply put, discard the premise that there is an authority higher than our own, that in the end is the controlling authority for rights, and we lose the claim to those rights. In the ultimate sense, we have thrown it away.

And that is what is at stake in this debate. We are being lured by these--I think some of them well-intentioned, others maybe not--mostly thoroughly incompetent people in our legal system and in our politics. We are being lured into a situation where we are going to do what Rousseau ridiculed at one point, I think, in, I think it was the Emile or somewhere--he talked about a savage who sells his bed in the morning, forgetting that he is going to have to sleep on it at night. This is the very definition of a very stupid and short-sighted thing to do.

But what if somebody comes along and offers you the right . . . says, "I'm going to let you have the right to kill yourself." And we take that right, forgetting that if we take the right to kill ourselves, then we have asserted that it is [inaudible] power and authority which determine whether we should [inaudible]. Not over a higher authority, not over a higher power, but our own.

We have, therefore, reclaimed authority. We have put it back into human hands--in this case, our own. But if we claim that power for ourselves, the power to take our own lives, then we have by definition also surrendered it to others, under certain circumstances, automatically.

[Break in the tape]

Mustn't that power automatically pass on to someone else, who can use it supposedly in my interest? And under what circumstances is this transfer legitimately made? If I have the power over my own life, and, therefore, ultimately over all of my own rights and freedoms, and you happen to get me into your power, if you threaten to kill me unless I surrender all those rights, is that a legitimate bargain?

And if you say, "Yes, that's a legitimate bargain," then you know where we're back to, don't you? We are back to the notion that the conquerors, the dominators, the stronger, can legitimately enslave us, by basically getting us to surrender what belongs to us--our claims to rights and to life.

The beautiful thing about our founding principle is that, in order to make us safe from the deprivations of others, we had to surrender authority over our ultimate goods to a power higher than ourselves. In order that we should not be abused by others, we had to surrender any claim even to abuse ourselves. It's beautiful, actually. It's sort of the understanding that, if you want to hold on to your money, it's safer to put it in a bank. The bank in this case is the bank of divine authority, and the money in this case is the ultimate rights that we claim as a people.

But you and I both know that if you decide to go to that bank and withdraw the money, and you are carrying it on your person, then you are easily robbed.

And that's what is going on HERE!

Either through malice or stupidity, we have leaders who want us to withdraw our deposit of rights and dignity from the bank of God and keep it on our person. Claim authority over it, so we can use it any time we please. Are we so stupid that we do not understand that by that same act we shall put ourselves in a position where they can steal it any time they please?

And, surely, surely, it will occur to somebody--because it always has. And if we look around the world, it has occurred to people many times in this century. I'm not talking about ancient history--the despotisms, the tyrannies, the totalitarian usurpation of all power and dignity--has been the most common occurrence of the twentieth century. Anything else has been an exception.

But there has been one people immune to these phony arguments and claims; one people vigilant in defense of its own rights; and, because of that vigilance, capable of coming to the rescue of the world from these worse tendencies two and three times in this century.

That's us.

And now we are being confronted by arguments aimed at corrupting our judgment and understanding. And they are very, very seductive arguments too--arguments that set us up to have all our rights taken away, by offering us the right to do things that will make our indulgence of our passions so much easier.

This first took the guise of abortion. The notion that, in order to have sexual freedom, you can claim the right to kill your babies in the womb. Then you can do whatever you like, because the consequences can easily be disposed of; don't worry about it. So, in order to have sexual indulgence and promiscuity and liberation, we claim the right to kill our offspring in the womb--which right, of course, can only be claimed if we have dethroned the higher authority and put ourselves in its place; in this case, mothers.

Now an extension of that same mentality, which would apply to us all, in the form of euthanasia and the right to suicide.

But you surely realize, by now, that, if somebody comes and offers you the right to kill yourself, you ought to pause for a minute and consider, "Are they offering you the right or making a suggestion?" And it won't be very long before the offer of the right becomes a suggestion. It will first, of course, be a suggestion for all of you gray-haired elderly people. I am, day by day, developing greater sympathy for gray-haired elderly people; it's remarkable how a few gray hairs can do that to you.

But in case you haven't realized it, the first candidates for this wonderful ride are, in the end, the folks who obviously have outlived their usefulness. And though we start with this argument that we're going to offer as a right to people in pain--but what could be more painful than the loss of all the wonderful pleasures of life? The vigor of youth, the prospect of all those wonderful things that come with strength, and so forth. I mean, old age is kind of, by comparison--in the hedonistic, materialistic equations of our time--it doesn't have much quality to it at all. That's why they make so many commercials telling us how we can escape it. You know, do your hair this way; put the cosmetics on that way. You won't look this old or that old. You see, old age is, by definition, a disease for which we have not found a cure. It is, as one realizes at some point in life, a terminal disease. It is. Doctors may be wrong about their diagnosis of how long it's going to take, but it is going to happen.

And the rest of us could be excused, if the world is filling up, other things are needed--you know. "You're occupying places other people need." So not only will we have the argument that what we do is good for you; we're going to have the argument that what we do is great for the society! Ecologically sound! Environmentally correct.

And one would be backed up, in all of this, by the notion that if your aim is to do right, you do not have to respect any basic claims that human beings may have to dignity or anything else, because that's a choice that we get to make. OUR standards prevail and apply; it is OUR judgment that will determine whether the child in the womb lives or dies, that gray hair lives or dies, that the mentally incompetent live or die. We are taking out of the hands of God the basic judgments about human rights and human dignity, and putting them back in human hands--first, the hands of mothers for their children, so that they can be sexually liberated; second, the hands of people in pain and suffering, so that they can do away with themselves; and finally, the hands of anyone shrewd enough to come up with an idea to justify it. And believe me, it won't take long.

Do you feel safe, in a world like that? See, maybe there are people who do, because . . . I remember once, a long time ago, having a discussion with a friend of mine who happened to be Jewish. And we were comparing notes about our attitude toward the world. And it turned out that both of us shared a fundamental kind of--I guess, these days, you'd call it paranoia. Not in any acute sense, but just a feeling that if there's a bad thing out there that other people can do to people, we shouldn't assume that it won't happen to us. You see?

And I think that people in America who have lived complacent lives, they think bad things don't happen to them--in spite of all the evidence in the world to the contrary. But certain peoples, who look back on a heritage where bad things could happen, where the moment you give human beings the sense that power belongs to them--I have to tell you--I deeply believe that the moment you give people the power, they will abuse it. You'll excuse me for this belief; I think I have a lot of proof of it.

Now, I'm not the only one who thinks that, of course, because our Founders thought the same way. And these very people who prognosticate on the Supreme Court, pretend they're so smart in putting forward their opinions, will tell you, "Yes, that's what they thought; and they set up a separation of powers, federalism, and all of these things that were supposed to make sure that power wouldn't be abused, and so forth and so on." They want you to believe that it was these institutional arrangements that were supposed to safeguard your liberty.

I think we need to get back to the first principle, the one from which all those safeguards were derived--the notion that you cannot trust human beings, and human judgment, with the ultimate power over human life and human rights. And if you can't trust human beings and human judgment, then you must put that ultimate authority in hands that are out of human reach.

And so not only is there a ground of truth for the argument that we must acknowledge the authority of God? If we wish to remain a free people, there's also a ground of practical prudence. We better acknowledge the authority of God, because, if God doesn't have it, that means some human being has it. And, if some human being has it, they will abuse it to destroy; you mark my word.

Now, have we come to the point now where we don't believe that anymore? I know that there are a lot of people in this country who behave as if they really think we are supposed to trust government. We're supposed to trust "medical tribunals." We're supposed to trust doctors and other people. They'll do what's good for us.

On what grounds do we come to this conclusion? At the end of the 20th century, on what possible grounds could we come to the conclusion that that kind of trust is justified? That we can surrender that kind of power to any human institution? As a matter of fact, all the evidence goes just the other way. The doctors in Nazi Germany were some of the worst abusers of the human person. Once you had convinced them that there was no ultimate constraint, no power to which they had to answer in their use of their knowledge, they then abused it as if they were God. Because, after all, if God is not God, then surely human beings who have godlike powers must be God. Or at least they will come to think of themselves that way.

What we are being asked to do, therefore, in accepting these arguments, however? They want us to be distracted by questions of compassion and all of that. What we really being asked to do is to remove those safeguards and to trust ourselves, in terms of power, to human beings whose conscience, by virtue of our surrender of these great principles, will have been corrupted. So not only will we be giving up the power, but by surrendering the principles, we will be corrupting the conscience that ought to constrain that power.

I really think that this is suicidal, but I firmly believe that this discussion over the right to suicide is, in fact, a kind of metaphor for our overall situation. We live in the age when, as a free people, we are being invited to commit suicide. We are being told that this [inaudible] on all kinds of grounds that are good for us, that we will indulge our pleasures and be relieved of our pains, if only we surrender the first premise of our liberty.

Now, are we going to do this, and is it worth it? That's the question. A long time ago, I used to give speeches the theme of a question. Do you want to be free? And I think these issues are putting this question to us as a people in the ultimate sense. Freedom is a challenge, you know, in the right sense. There was a time when Americans understood that without having to be told. They knew that freedom didn't mean that things were going to go easy for you, that life would be comfortable and without pains. Because, in the practice of it, freedom by definition meant that you had the freedom to go from comfortable cities in the east to uncomfortable and dangerous places in the west. You had the freedom to decide that you were going to live in, oh, Kansas, scratching your living out of the ground, or in some other place, where hostile Indians would kill you, and so forth.

Everybody understood that, when you exercised your freedom, you were doing a dangerous thing. That didn't mean that you would be relieved of trouble. It didn't mean that you would be granted all security, relieved of all pain. The promise that you would be secure and relieved of all pain is not a promise made by leaders who want you to be free. It is a promise made by people who want to seduce you into slavery. Freedom is not for people who want to be comfortable all the time, who want to be free of the burden of deciding the important questions for themselves rightly, and who want to get out from under the discipline of all that authority which might constrain their passion. That's not what it is about.

Just the opposite. Freedom is for people who have a certain kind of spiritual ruggedness, but also it is for people who, on account of a profound faith, are more willing to surrender to God than to human power.

If we are no longer that kind of people, then I am afraid these seductive arguments will win out. If we are--if there is still within us a spark of a desire to fulfill the destiny we are supposed to have--then I think there is some hope. But only if we begin to realize once again that our liberty is not about institutional arrangements; it's not about parsing legalisms. All of that can be a consequence. You know, the lawyers get their opportunities to argue, so long as these institutions remain on firm and sure moral ground.

But what we have forgotten, and I think what we are almost invited to forget, led to forget, coaxed to forget, encouraged to forget, is that our claim to rights, to dignity, is not derived from the institutions. It's not derived from the words of the Constitution. It is derived from a truth that is beyond our reach, and therefore provides a secure ground for our confidence when we assert that truth against any powers there are.

This obviously puts me in a bit of a different camp from some people. And I came today to participate in this discussion at least in part because I think it's very important that we realize that some folks we regard as champions are coming up now against issues where they will no longer be our champions.

I will say it explicitly. I think Justice Scalia will fail to deal with these issues properly, when the time comes. I think he has to fail, unless he achieves a conversion--ceases to base his views on the mere understanding that we will be bound by the words of the Constitution--and comes to realize that the words of the Constitution themselves are animated by principles that must be respected, principles that bind us to respect the sense of justice that our Founders attempted to embody in the Constitution. He, and all legal positivists, do not believe this. They do not accept it.

And ultimately, confronted by issues that require that we reason out the consequences of our moral first principles, they must fail; because there is no other ground on which we can morally stand except those moral principles. That's why I have tended to emphasize the Declaration more than the Constitution. The Constitution's not going to protect you. Haven't you realized that? The Constitution is just an instrument; it's like a hammer. When the Founders put it together, most of them didn't think it was that good. If you go back and read their actual words, they thought, "Well, it's the best we can do, and it sure is a miracle that it happened at all, but it has all of these problems in it."

But they had an allegiance to it, because they did believe that it was the best effort they could make at the time to respect the principles of justice which they all shared in common, and which were summarized and articulated in the Declaration of Independence. Without the Declaration's principles, the Constitution becomes a mere thing of clay, to be molded into whatever the judges want it to say to them.

And do you know why that is? At least in part because without the doctrine that there is a law higher than human judgment, those who exercise judgment, even on the bench, don't have to have any discipline. They don't. They are like the military people. They have a power, and they can do whatever they can get away with. That's what judges are like these days. It's why, in the end, they will come to be despised, because they are going to be just another . . . . they'll be like warriors on the battlefield. They'll have no claim to special respect for their authority; and at the end of the day, in case you haven't noticed, they don't really have any power. They sit on benches; they write opinions. When people start to disregard their opinions, they will be nothing. They will have no authority. Their authority comes entirely from opinion. Because--today--some people decide that they are going to respect it. But, if the judges themselves show no respect for authority, why should we respect theirs? The system must break down, when this happens, and it will. And it is happening.

Because they do not acknowledge that there is a law higher than the law that they are dealing with that comes from human hands, that our Founders would have read in Blackstone and elsewhere, as the law of nature. And what was said in the famous philosophers, like Locke, who equated that law with reason. There is a law of nature, and reason--which is that law--then dictated certain things about our life. That is an idea which goes all the way back to Aquinas, and people like this, who understood in a way that God had endowed us with the capacity to understand Him [inaudible]. He endowed us with the capacity to understand what He has to say. Some of it He has said through revelation, and some of it He has writ upon our heart, with his finger, directly in the way we are and the way we think.

But if we have come to that point where we discard the whole idea of such a law, then--though we do not realize it--we have put ourselves in the position where we no longer have to be reasonable. And this is, of course, what is happening in our courts today. You read these opinions, and what you learn at the end of it is that--they still feel constrained, sometimes, to be logical--but they didn't seem at all constrained to be reasonable anymore. Any notion that they, themselves, must respect a superior tribunal, and must make decisions in which they are trying to discern how well what they say, what the law says, what we do, conforms with the dictates of that higher law. This is no longer their exercise. They are simply about doing what they can get away with.

Now, some of them feel like it is easier to get away with things if you base them on precedents and language that was written a couple of hundred years ago. "So, that's what I'll do." That's Justice Scalia. "I'll base my stuff on stuff that everybody agrees on. It was written two hundred years ago, and more people are likely to respect it than not." I mean, they were nice guys. They had reasonable lives for their time. Why should we care what they thought? Why should we give it any respect whatsoever? Why shouldn't we just do what we feel like doing today?

What is the answer to that question? Why should those founders have any hold on us whatsoever? The mere fact that, two hundred-odd years ago, some folks agreed on a document, doesn't give that document any power over our lives whatsoever. There is no argument that can be made that on the face of it--by, in, and of itself--would give those words a power over us, unless, of course, there is reason to believe that in the framing of that document they respected enduring principles of justice, and right and wrong; they captured, in some way, an enduring glimpse of what is a better way of conducting human political affairs.

But, you see, in order to make that appeal to the Founders, I am actually appealing to something greater then that. I am saying that we respect the wisdom of the Founders because the Founders came closer than anyone has--before or since--to respecting, in a practical instrument of government, the wisdom of Almighty God. Then we have said something.

But, of course, it is something Mr. Scalia doesn't want to say. It's something Mr. Rehnquist doesn't want to say. It is something no one who believes that human law is the consequence of mere human action, and that its justice can be determined on the basis of mere human standards. It's something none of them would say.

But at the end of the day, if we are going to make a right decision, I believe, about whether or not there is a right to suicide, whether or not we have the right to kill our offspring in the womb, etc., no amount of reasoning about our empirical circumstances, no amount of balancing up of different interests we may fancy in this place or that, are going to help us here.

And if you haven't noticed, the thicket of moral challenges grows greater; it will not grow less. As human beings discern, in various ways, how to devise instruments of greater and greater power, that increase in power will more and more bring us to the point where we are faced with that ultimate statement of the challenge which makes explicit what is true anyway, and what I started out by saying is true. Ultimately, we are always faced with the question, "On what grounds do we constrain the use of power?" "If I have the power, why don't I have the right?" And as our power grows, we will have to face this dilemma more and more.

If I may compare small things to great, whenever I talk about this I am reminded--I don't know whether there will be too many Star Trek fans in this audience--but I am reminded of a scene from one of the Star Trek movies, where [inaudible] the President of the Federation is giving a speech to the assembled worthies at the end, and he uses a line that has stuck in my mind, because it has a certain amount of truth. He says that they are going to have to agree that just because they have the power to do a thing, that doesn't mean that they should do that thing.

How do you decide that question? How do you decide on the limits of power? When human power goes more and more enormous, that decision will require that we rediscover the ground for claim to any rights at all. If we are unwilling to acknowledge that limit, then the growth of our power will necessarily mean the destruction of our rights.

And this is what we, as a people, are deciding right now. We are setting the precedents that will govern the tendencies and inclinations of the next century. We can't know for sure what is going to happen in that century. The extremes seem to be that our power will destroy us, as it has promised to do for several decades now, or that the more optimistic--at least technological --scenario will be worked out, and that power will grow; we will discover, through the application of our science, more and more wondrous things, and more and more wondrous machines at more and more fantastic levels, will be produced. But that won't make the moral challenge less; it will make it greater.

And, so, I think that we need to focus on the fact that in dealing with the questions both of abortion and euthanasia, we are not just deciding whether we shall kill our children in the womb or whether we shall kill ourselves when we feel that like is no longer worth living. We are actually deciding whether we shall respect that principle by which our freedom lives or dies. If we claim the right to suicide, if we continually claim the right to abortion, then we have thrown away that which is the only reliable ground for our liberty. This is the true nature of this debate.

Sadly speaking, I noted, both in the questions and in the opinions on the Supreme Court, nothing that remotely approached, touched, or even hinted at this issue. My respect for the Court diminished greatly in that.

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. . . consolidate that power which, through all the ages of humankind, they have hungered for. If we are to pass liberty on to our children, we must--in this era, as we have in the past--disappoint that hunger.

But that will require two things of us: that we have the discipline to acknowledge and accept the limits of our freedom, and the faith to go down before our Almighty God and pray that He will confirm those limits before it is too late.

Thank you.