Letter to the Editor
I wrote a letter to the editor of the St. Louis Post Dispatch awhile ago. While there’s still hope that they might print it, I don’t think that they will.
Anyway, here it is:
As we prepare to celebrate America’s independence, we recall the principles on which our nation was founded. Abraham Lincoln recognized that America’s greatness came from her fundamental respect for the rights of the human person. He called American government a government “of the people, by the people, for the people.”
In America today, however, the legality of abortion, embryonic stem cell research, and euthanasia results from a belief that is essentially anti-American: the belief that a person’s rights must be earned. To believe that a person’s rights depend on his degree of physical development, how old he is, what he can do, or whether he can stand up for himself is to be opposed to the principles expressed in the Declaration of Independence itself, which recognized as primary and inalienable each person’s right to life.
As recently as the twentieth century, Americans rejected Communism because it denies that people have any rights besides those which the government grants to social classes. Today, however, Americans ignore the basic right to life of entire classes–especially the unborn and the disabled–simply because they cannot survive without help.
The first gift of America to the world was the firm recognition that a nation exists to protect individuals and that if a nation disregards even one of the most helpless of her members, that nation has acted unjustly. America has always believed herself to be the custodian—not the source—of her people’s rights. Let us not abandon that now.
Boy was it tough to try to shoe-horn what I wanted to say into 250 words or fewer!
