President Buchanan Celebrates Dred Scott Anniversary
Posted by Rebecca Teti in News on Tuesday, January 25, 2011 1:58 PM
President Obama released a short statement on the anniversary of Roe v. Wade.
What other fundamental “rights” must be protected yet discouraged? Suppose the President or other Roe defenders had said:
I recommit myself to protecting the free exercise of religion, but will support initiatives to discourage faith.
I recommit myself to protecting freedom of speech, but will work to discourage people from having opinions or uttering them.
I recommit myself to protecting freedom of assembly, but will work to discourage groups I disagree with from gathering.
To defend what are not rights, we have to cannibalize actual rights.
Abortion takes a human life.
But even for those who refuse to see that or who wish to tolerate it, the abortion license is profoundly corrupting of our law and civic institutions.
To defend abortion and same-sex marriage, we have to subvert genuine liberty, undermining the freedom of us all. It’s not a right, it’s an anti-right.
Since this President famously proclaimed that whether a fetus is a person is “above his pay-grade,” it’s odd he defends a practice which by his own admission might indeed be taking a citizen’s life (he purports not to know). For a man who’s sworn an oath to defend the rights of every citizen, that’s pretty cavalier.
The very fact that the President of the United States feels obligated to acknowledge the anniversary of Roe is evidence that the claim to abortion as a “right” is weak.
No one releases statements on the passing of the 14th Amendment each year, and no President has to make an annual pledge to uphold the citizen rights of black Americans. Even though there may be occasional racist protests—remnants of the Klan marching through a town here or there—these things are understood to be freak shows, and our national politicians pass over them in decorous silence. We even recognize that allowing such hateful protests is a sign of our strength as a nation.
Why, then, does the President of the United States, use any of his political capital at all to defend a right—if it is a right and all sensible people see it as such?
It’s because the claim is weak and everyone on his side knows it.
Like President Pierce trying desperately to defend the Kansas-Nebraska Act that allowed slavery to spread, or like President Buchanan pleading with the country that the Dred Scott decision had “settled” the matter of slavery, it’s an especially hollow piece of rhetoric.
If abortion were a settled question, people wouldn’t need to keep proclaiming it so.
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