The Supreme Right

​By Brother Simon Ballachi

​In Dred Scott v. Sanford (1857), the United States Supreme Court decided that slaves were property, could not be citizens and therefore were not entitled to due process of law.  Dred Scott was overturned by the fourteenth amendment, specifically by reiterating our inalienable rights to Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness.
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If you don’t have Life, you can’t have Liberty and if you don’t have Liberty, you can’t Pursue Happiness.  This hierarchical order is called a necessity criterion.  Another type of necessity criterion is the fact that something cannot be and not be under the same formal set of circumstances (at the same place and time).  This is called the law of non-contradiction.
 By the law of non-contradiction, if a right is truly inalienable to one person, then it necessarily must be inalienable to all persons, that is to everyone, equally, everywhere and always.  Dred Scott violated the law of non-contradiction by declaring that “people of African descent” were not persons.  By deciding the right to property was more fundamental than the right to liberty, it also contravened the hierarchical nature of the necessity criterion.
Throughout history we have seen time and again that when human beings are denied ‘personhood,’ unbridled brutality against that group or individual becomes normal.  This is most poignantly notable of the twentieth century where multiple political regimes killed people by the tens of millions.
Marxism undermines individual rights by taking a utilitarian view of persons, promoting the sophistry that the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the individual.  This is used to justify the practice of ‘might makes right’ or the tyranny of the ‘majority.’  Inalienable rights describe the concept of free will; that individual persons each have their own sovereignty, their own end and cannot be valued simply for their utility; that we are all made in the image and likeness of God.
In Roe v. Wade (1973), the Supreme Court stated that it could not determine when life begins. That is to say, the court denied infants personhood.  Abortion became legalized and in turn normalized. Since then over sixty million abortions have been performed in the United States alone. That means there is approximately one child out of every three missing from our homes, our schools and our play grounds.
We make many explanations for our actions, but in our hearts we know that it’s wrong.  Good deeds don’t require sophisticated explanations. This conflict between the heart and mind is the death of the soul.  When enough people suffer from interior discord, the lack of peace of soul, that is the true cause of war…
Saint Pope John Paul II said, “The right to life is the path to peace.”  And peace is the path to prosperity, not abortion.  Always choose life.

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