Stand For Life and America's New Revolution

For two weeks America and the world witnessed the passing of two Catholics who led very different lives. Yet both deaths would leave an indelible mark upon the consciousness of our nation and on the world. Many in the nation claimed, quite incorrectly, that reliance on religious doctrine to support the declaration of life, which was guaranteed by our founding fathers, was merely a coincidence of fate. Yet Alexander Hamilton, John Hancock, Samuel Adams and President George Washington, if they were alive, would certainly beg to differ.

You see there is an intrinsic connection between those who are casually labeled (with restrained derision) "The Religious Right" for strenuously supporting our nation's founding fathers' doctrine of protection of individual rights enumerated in the Bill of Rights. This document created our nation's moral foundation which the historically disabled would have known had anyone in their flock had made a mere cursory reading of our founding principles. These guiding principles provide the subtext for connecting the death of a pope and the starvation of an innocent.

Although the demise of Pope John Paul II -- the Holy Father -- was expected and imminent, the timing of the death of this global leader impacts us as well. His comment upon speaking to his fellow Polish people in 1979 set the stage for morally principled activism that was not built on just sitting idly by. He began his reign by declaring, "Be not afraid." He emboldened his fellow countrymen to stand for freedom. He deeply felt this to be the noblest stance one can take as part of a religious doctrine. Too bad most Americans who labeled Terri's life supporters as fanatics forgot that "Be not afraid" was also part of the Revolutionary War leaders' religious call to arms as well.

Samuel Adams, who most Constitutional historians will remember was not only a patriot but a leader of the Continental Congress, spoke about the value of the individual and warned of the "adversaries who would laugh at the rights of humanity, who turn religion into derision." Was he a fanatic? Was he too radical to say, "The hand of heaven appears to have led us on to be, perhaps, humble instruments and means in the great providential dispensation which is completing." He was speaking to the individual who would rise to be a guardian of justice, of the spirit of freedom, of the individual protection of life.

The designers and framers of our nation's Constitution were particularly concerned about the fact that eventually our country would become too comfortable, too trusting of others to do the citizens' duty, and too willing to give to the notion that standing up for the rights of Americans should be someone else's job. They rightly predicted the rise of the disengaged American.

John Marshall, the first Chief Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court, was quite eloquent in accurately describing the dilemma that Terri Schiavo and her family would be confronted with several centuries later. He spoke of the danger that would befall the individual if we claimed that the Constitution and Congress could offer no protection. "What are the favorite maxims of Democracy?... Can we pretend to the enjoyment of political freedom or security, when we are told that a man has been struck out of existence without a trial by jury? Shall it be a maxim that a man shall be deprived of his life without the benefit of law?" Terri Schiavo was deprived of her life because a state court judge in Florida decided he would ignore a subpoena of Congress, a law passed by Congress and signed by the President, all because he put himself above the law he was sworn to uphold.

This is why the Congress had to act, because of its solemn obligation to defend an individual who represented all handicapped individuals, all women who may have been the unfortunate victims of domestic violence and lived. It was for this very reason that the Due Process Clause is an integral part of the Constitution that anyone would have picked up in a first year political science class.

The connection between the founders of our nation and Pope John Paul II's comments in 1994 in devising our nation's test of its own values was no coincidence. The pope said, "the ultimate test of our American society would be in protecting the life of every human being but especially "the weakest and the most defenseless."

Terri Schiavo's death created both a moral dilemma as well as a moral revolution. Her death was expected by most of the morally disconnected in America because they wrote off her fate as being "merely a family matter." It was truly unparalleled since the infancy of our nation. Patrick Henry, another great Revolutionary War figure, said it best in describing the great "unbothered masses" in our nation. He also said, "It is natural for man to indulge in the illusions of hope. We are apt to shut our eyes to a painful truth. Are we disposed to be of the number of those who, having eyes, see not, and having ears, hear not, the things which so nearly concern their temporal salvation?" I suppose he was a radical right-winger of his time because after all those good, uninvolved "citizen patriots" were just waiting for the British to simply come to their collective senses.

Patrick Henry decided that the individual mattered. "I am willing to know the whole truth; to know the worst and to provide for it." That is what the intervention in Terri's life was about. Our nation was dangerously becoming consumed by our own moral passivity. When there exists a question about whether or not a person is to be put to death by the state, then it is a true test of what our nation is and what it has become if we sit and do nothing and just wait -- like those who just hoped for the British to return to their senses -- or simply bury our collective heads in the sand.

Justice was not blind in Florida. Its eyes were wide open. What were those who believed in Terri's constitutional Rights supposed to do? Not get angry because an American citizen was being put to death? What were people of conscience supposed to do, just wait until "Good Judge Greer" came to his senses? No I think Patrick Henry again described the dilemma that moral disengagers conveniently ignore but secretly embrace. "Shall we gather strength by irresolution and inaction? Shall we acquire the means of effectual resistance by lying supinely on our backs and hugging the phantom of hope, until our enemies shall have bound us hand and foot?" or in the case of Terri Schiavo murdered sooner because no one cared?

In a sense we failed that test. We demonstrated our weakness by allowing, as Pope John Paul II put it, our society's continued "permissiveness which lead directly to the trampling" of an American's citizen's human rights. So although Terri's loss of life was protected by the Constitution, it didn't matter. It did not matter that in her last days on earth, her spiritually disengaged husband made attempts to deny her communion, which is her right to practice as a solid devout Catholic.

Our founding fathers' warnings were ignored, as was the Pope's. The Pope also added in his 1994 remarks, "Our permissive values could lead also to the complete destruction of values which are fundamental not only for the lives of individuals and families, but for society itself."

The Pope made those remarks 11 years ago and still we, as a nation, did not hear it or just plain ignored it. The Pope was a scholar, and he well understood what millions of Americans have now come to understand -- that our permissiveness, our timidity, our casualness toward protecting life was predictable because we would rather be more alarmed in seeing a family pet or stray cat be starved to death on our neighborhood street than dare to appear alarmed about a neighbor, a sister, a friend being starved to death.

The Pope warned about how our society's values were developing into a culture that celebrated what we own, what we possess, what we can control, and how we look. The value of life and of humanity would be lost. It is that very shallowness which has created and established all too firmly the "Culture of Death" that the Pope spoke about and President Bush recently addressed.

Yet, there was a lesson that many did see. The lesson was played out over the course of four Fridays. The insincere, the spiritually shallow, the tragically indifferent were blind to the tapestry of events which were solidifying the Pope's message about the value of life.

On Friday March 18, as Michael Schiavo completed his part in this morbid Greek tragedy by allowing his wife Terri's feeding tube to be pulled, he was unknowingly completing the first phase of the rebirth of our nation's value for life. He was sacrificing an innocent who had been judged and found guilty by the entrails of injustice.

As Good Friday arrived the following week, many of us in America and around the world prayed in our places of worship, our homes, or silently in our cars, and we took that moment in time to focus on another innocent victim of a judge who had been betrayed by someone who claimed also to have been devoted to his life and his work. Now somehow that public or private display of "moral charity" was permissible because it was a private show.

Somehow those same religious detractors who so ungenerously abandoned any public or private support for Terri Schiavo the week before managed somehow to demonstrate their temporary "piety" because it was the expected thing to indulge in. Somehow they still managed to even miss Christ's message of sacrifice altogether. This was not hard to imagine because it only dealt with caring for the innocent, the weak, and the defenseless and for believing in the value of life. It must not have been in their abridged edition of the Bible.

Yet it was the passing of Terri Schiavo and the Pope within the same week which gave rise to a new revolution of faith that was not radical -- unless those of the Jewish, Muslim, and Christian faiths as well as others who wrote emails by the tens of thousands, and made phone calls in the hundreds of thousands to support Terri Schiavo's life. They openly declared and shared their fear -- whether handicapped themselves or the fear of their loved ones who may be handicapped -- that it was now possible in America for them to become targets for death was perhaps being too rabid and too over the line.

You see, my friends, in this nation it really has not mattered what period of time we have found ourselves in. Whether or not we were founding a nation or trying to find our moral compass more than two hundred years later, there will always be those who make up a vast number of Americans who would rather be unbothered because unless they are paid for it, let the other Americans care. That's fine because in truth, that kind of grudging support is best kept relegated to ones own backyard.

It is not political to care. It is not rigidly rabid to care about the religious fabric of our nation, because one cannot be separated from the other, unless of course those who show disdain have never truly become educated about what the founders of our nation truly believed. Unfortunately they and those who they surround themselves with are the poorer for it.

Our nation's first president put it this way: "Let it be simply be asked, 'where is the security for property, for reputation, for life, if it simply be asked if the sense of religious obligation desert the oaths, which are the instruments of investigation in courts of justice?' And let us with caution indulge the supposition that morality can be maintained without religion. Whatever may be conceded to the influence of refined education on minds of peculiar structure, reason and experience both forbid us to expect that national morality can prevail in exclusion of religious principles," stressed President George Washington in his Farewell Message.

As President George W. Bush said, "Let us always err on the side of life" and be a part of what can be called Terri's Revolution and Stand For Life. Pope John Paul II warned us; our Founding Fathers warned us; and now the life that was lost by an innocent should have warned us.

A flame in the soul of America has been lit and now we are prepared to stand boldly, with older Americans, with children, with people of all faiths and raise millions of marchers, millions of emails, millions of faith actions, millions of resources to develop an alliance which is stronger than any misguided action of a Florida state judge, or a disinterested federal appeals court or even a U.S. Supreme Court that refuses to examine the precedent of our Judeo Christian Values along side the legal precedent that it claims steers the course of this nation.

Kevin Fobbs is President of National Urban Policy Action Council (NuPac), a non-partisan civic and citizen-action organization that focuses on taking the politics out of policy to secure urban America's future one neighborhood, one city, and one person at a time. View NuPac on the web at www.nupac.info. Kevin Fobbs is also Outreach Communications Vice Chairman of the Michigan Republican Party and daily host of The Kevin Fobbs Show on News Talk WDTK - 1400 AM in Detroit as well as co-founder of the Jackson, MI-based American Conservative Values Television Network. Listen to The Kevin Fobbs Show at www.wdtkam.com. daily 3-4 p.m. on-line and call-in nationwide to make your opinion count toll-free at 800-923- WDTK(9385).

I've been distressed over the past few weeks to note comments here on FR from "conservatives" who confidently reject the premise in this article.

Those people, no matter how long they have been here, never actually read FR's homepage I guess.

5 posted on 04/06/2005 10:48:47 AM PDT by yellowdoghunter (The Terri issue is legally complicated, but not the moral issue. I want to be on the side of life.)

Bump for Terri's Revolution.

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