OPINION:
The word “precedent” was used many times during Judge Neil Gorsuch’s confirmation hearing, but it was Sen. Dianne Feinstein’s questions that recalled William Blackstone’s iconic work, “The Laws of Nature and Nature’s God.” Blackstone affirmed the parallel equality of the “laws of nature” (the moral law governing nature and inscribed on the heart of man) to the “law of God,” the revelation of that law in the Scripture. Sen. Feinstein pressed Judge Gorsuch to agree that Roe v. Wade of 1973 which decriminalized abortion was not only a precedent but something now called a “super-precedent.” She insinuated it was solidly supreme.
As if to carve in stone the infallibility of the U.S. Supreme Court decisions by tacking on superlatives — no matter how incorrect and unjust such a decision might be, Sen. Feinstein and other dissenters to Blackstone’s “Laws of Nature and Nature’s God” aimed for supremacy over God’s law. In the end, they will always lose no matter how many “super-super-super’s” they put before the word “precedent” because God has already spoken and given us His Supreme Law.
Here it is: the right to life is inalienable, unalienable, absolute, immutable, unassailable, indisputable and undeniable. Supreme Court justices, congresswomen, nor a mob of misguided feminists who march on Washington give us the right to live. God does. In fact, God keeps stacking the deck in His favor making His “super-super-super precedent” on this perceived inconsequential matter of human life known through the realm of science even converted the heart and mind of America’s “abortion king,” Dr. Bernard Nathanson. He is the onetime atheist who cofounded NARAL. The science opened his eyes to the supreme law written on his heart, that the unborn child is his second patient, and that abortion is cold-blooded murder.
Dr. Nathanson told me in 2009 that “the bombshell [for me] was real-time ultrasound. It made everything come alive. It opened a window into the womb.” In his book, “The Abortion Papers,” Dr. Nathanson reflected on the tactics he and others used to establish abortion as a constitutional right. “A political victory achieved by such odious tactics is at best an unstable tyranny spawned by an unscrupulous and unprincipled minority. At the very least this disclosure of those odious tactics should compel those who are uneasy with permissive abortion to re-examine the issue .” If still alive, Dr. Nathanson might be glad that Sen. Feinstein is asking Judge Gorsuch to revisit Roe v Wade.
Dr. Nathanson grew to appreciate that neither our legislators nor our judges can alter the value system for which America must operate. It was settled at the birth of our nation when it was written in the Declaration of Independence. It’s the value system which recognizes the self-evident truth that “all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”
Whether Sen. Feinstein likes it or not, Judge Gorsuch is bound by “the Laws of Nature and Nature’s God.” Neither she, nor any other senator, can undo it because those laws are written on the heart of man. Judge Gorsuch recognizes that they are written in America’s founding documents, and he cannot alter them, either. The intentional killing of innocent life — no matter how the procedure is linguistically sugar-coated — does not abide by our founding principles.
When Judge Gorsuch and future nominees are confirmed and the abortion cases are revisited, these Justices will have what the Supreme Court did not have in the early ’70s: the science of real-time ultrasound showing what it looks like to abort a baby.
In his letter resigning from NARAL in 1975, Dr. Nathanson wrote that “the judgments of the Supreme Court were never meant to be infallible or eternal. And what if we’ve been wrong, if the Court should soon reverse itself on the abortion issue in the light of changing times and/or new scientific evidence? What an incalculable injustice will have been perpetrated. What an immeasurable irretrievable loss will have been suffered.”
The NARAL founder understood the fallibility of man’s perception of precedence and how it can never supersede “the Laws of Nature and Nature’s God.” The truth Dr. Nathanson and our Founders left behind will restore righteous precedent, justice in the courts and a catalyst to heal our land.
• Terry Beatley, president of the Hosea Initiative, is a right-to-life activist and a member of the board of the Virginia Christian Alliance.
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