Dr. Alan KeyesNancy Pelosi appears to be in high dudgeon over "the number of undocumented children being held without their parents in U.S. government custody."
They're doing away with children being with their moms. I just don't even know why there aren't uprisings all over the country, and maybe there will be when people realize that this is a policy that they defend.
I would say, instead, that "I just don’t even know why" the Democrats' House minority leader can't see that people all over the country will dismiss her show of outrage as an unbelievable self-contradiction. She pretends to feel that it's too painful to keep the children of would-be immigrants from mothers who have broken our immigration law. But she believes that it's every mother's right to kill innocent children growing in her womb. That mother-child separation lasts forever.
Pelosi's self-contradictory stance abandons our American creed, which says that all human beings are created equal and endowed by the Creator with certain unalienable rights. These words make it clear that God determines the content of the rights essential to our humanity, rights every human power must respect. Since babes in the womb are personally innocent of any lawbreaking, Americans who embrace the understanding that defines our identity as a people must agree that deliberately killing them violates their primordial human right. Since such murder isn't right, it can't be a right.
Why should anyone believe in Nancy Pelosi's self-righteous outrage about separating lawbreakers from their children for a while when she staunchly advocates the self-evidently phony "right" to separate nascent infants from their lives forever?
People like Nancy Pelosi get away with this sort of posturing because Americans who should know better tolerate the absurd notion that "freedom" and "right" are equivalent terms. Every right involves the exercise of freedom. But it ought to be obvious to anyone who bothers to think about it that not every exercise of freedom accords with right, as God endows it. People with sufficient power, skill and cunning may plot the perfect murder and get away with it. They may organize terrorist attacks that take the lives of thousands. They may rape women, interfere with children or, by shrewd dealing, bilk people of their life savings, property or businesses. The fact that they have force, intelligence and ability enough to overpower others does not give them the right to do so — not according to God and not according to our common sense.
"Might makes right" may have determined the meaning of justice for the ancient Romans and other bullies who rose to so-called greatness. But from its first beginnings, the people of the United States looked beyond human power to the will of our Creator, God — Who carefully provided for our being here when we had neither heart nor mind to care about ourselves. This careful provision is the first meaning of His natural law, from which all others arise in consequence.
So, no matter how superior this or that merely human power may be, the standard of right, according to God, overrules their abuse of it. People utterly powerless and defeated may appeal to that standard, even when they, and all else, fails. As the poet surmised, the torch that illuminates what is right, in God's eyes, may pass from failing hand to hand until the appeal to God enlightens the spirit and emboldens the courage of those who reject the meaning of any defeat where wrong and evil falsely exalt themselves above right and God.
People in the United States were obviously not the first to find in themselves the dauntless spirit infused in all whom no oppression can tempt to disremember the indefeasible quality of right. We were, and perhaps still are, the only people who made this spirit our chief resource of unity, courage, self-discipline and pride. We proved it time and against in ever greater contests against the powerful will-to-evil prevalent in so many of those inordinately ambitious few who long to be as God.
But as we fall prey to the false conflation of licentious freedom with fundamental right, we surrender to the shameless, self-worshipping logic of human power.
But as we fall prey to the false conflation of licentious freedom with fundamental right, we surrender to the shameless, self-worshipping logic of human power. Rejecting the "laws of nature and of Nature's God," we forget the transcendent tribunal that is the only recourse when many, who have thoughtlessly devalued the precious worth of their humanity, are lured into submission by a few, who remember its implications, but only in respect of themselves.
The final stage of that submission is at hand when people, having refused the protection of God's transcendent rule to those more helpless than themselves, realize that it has ceased to be available to them as well. They let short-lived lusts replace the unifying hunger and thirst for justice that once united them (from time to time, as need be). They succumbed to the tyranny of transient pleasures. So they ceased to nourish the great capacity for self-government that derives from practicing the capacity to overrule them, a little and a little more each day. They eventually come up hard against the hard truth, variously observed: Those who will not be governed by God will be governed by tyrants.
Christ tells us that to them that faithfully care for the little things, God will more and more entrust the great. Thus, when each of us is faithful to the little ones God made us to conceive with such great pleasure, we can become a people capable of governing ourselves and sometimes all humanity. By letting people like Pelosi turn that individual good faith into a shiftless, self-serving pose, we are losing that capability. So, to paraphrase the Lord, "Even that which we have is slipping away." An alarming thought? Then hear it and awake!
Dr. Alan Keyes served as Assistant Secretary of State for International Organizations under President Ronald Reagan, and ran for president in 1996, 2000 and 2008. He holds a Ph.D. in government from Harvard, and writes at his website Loyal to Liberty.