Ron Paul's pro-life addendum

By Marylou Barry

Personhood USA and the Liberty Council presented their joint Florida Awake! Presidential Forum from Winter Park, Fla., on Saturday, but only one presidential candidate was in attendance.

Newt Gingrich fielded questions from participants, then briefly addressed the audience. The event was streamed live over the Internet, and the video should be up soon on Personhood USA’s website.

Rick Santorum and Ron Paul, who were out of state, sent their regrets. All three candidates have signed Personhood USA’s Personhood Pledge, as did Rick Perry and Michele Bachmann. Mitt Romney, who claims to be pro-life, both refused to sign the pledge and skipped the event.

Ron Paul, however, included an addendum with his signed pledge that disturbs many, including Personhood USA’s legal analyst.

“[A Human Life Amendment],” Paul writes in the addendum, “must deal with the enforcement of the ruling much as any law against violence does – through state laws. … And I believe states should regulate the enforcement of this law, as they do other laws against violence.”

Are you kidding me? What if some states decide not to enforce a human life amendment because they find it more lucrative to become shelters for the government-funded abortion industry? Where would 40 years of effort to overturn Roe v. Wade be then? Down the tubes, that’s where.

“The United States suffered through a terrible civil war precisely because the federal government left it to the states to decide whether an entire class of people were to be considered persons or property,” Personhood USA’s legal analyst Gualberto Garcia Jones points out.

This also begs the question – it’s a rhetorical one, so put down your weapons – why can’t we just have some slave states and some free states? Sure that’s immoral, but think of the financial magic not having to pay people would work on our depressed economy. Besides, with all belief systems being equivalent, we can’t expect everyone to toe the same line as the narrow-minded Bible thumpers. What kind of diversity would that be?

For that matter, why not let states legalize the murder of born people if that’s what the voters want? States still hung up on the concept of equality could arrange a rotating schedule to legally kill different ethnicities or religions, say, in alternating years, so that everyone is treated equally and gets a fair chance to participate. That would be in keeping with states’ rights and prevent the feds from jamming their overbearing bureaucracy down our throats, wouldn’t it? Well, wouldn’t it?

Can you see, just by substituting one victim group for another, how insane Paul’s proposal is?

“I don’t see the value in setting up a federal police force on this issue any more than I do on other issues,” Paul goes on. “The Fourteenth Amendment was never intended to cancel out the Tenth Amendment. This means that I can’t agree that the Fourteenth Amendment has a role to play here, or otherwise we would end up with a ‘Federal Department of Abortion.’”

Guess I wouldn’t make a very good libertarian then, because if states began passing persecutory laws, as they did during slavery times in the U.S. and some local and state jurisdictions did in early Nazi Germany, I would be the first to welcome constitutional federal intervention. However abusive it may get when allowed to operate unchecked, there is a proper role for the federal government in governing, so let’s not throw the baby out with the bath water.

“As president,” Paul continues, “I will sign and aggressively advocate for a law that removes abortion from the jurisdiction of the federal courts. … Millions of lives would be saved by this approach while we fight to make every state a right to life state.”

Maybe millions of lives would be saved, but how many millions would still be lost to those who don’t want to give up their longstanding license to kill? Ron Paul fails to mention that abortionists and those who profit from their actions vote, too. If every conscience could be swayed by clear evidence of right and wrong, it would have happened in the past 39 years. So how can he “make every state a right to life state” without superseding the decisions of those voters? The answer is: He can’t.

“Rep. Paul’s vague statement on the duty of the federal government to ‘protect rights’ is without effect if there is no mechanism for guaranteeing those protections,” Garcia Jones sums it up. “Pro-lifers are left wondering how a President Paul would seek to protect the right to life in states that would choose to continue to allow abortion after Roe vs. Wade is overturned.”

The unavoidable conclusion is that Ron Paul favors protecting unborn children only if the legislature of the state in which they reside thinks they should be protected.

Not good enough. The Constitution is there to protect all our God-given rights, and the president swears to safeguard that document from all enemies, foreign and domestic. Any president who cannot or will not honor that oath is just another overpriced – and worthless – bureaucrat.

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Marylou Barry is a writer, editor and children’s book author. Visit her bookstore at HouseWithTheLightBooks.com and her editing service at AllThingsEditorial.wordpress.com.