Right to Live Amendment

Eighteen people play baseball and forty thousand watch. Twenty-two people play football and seventy thousand watch. The reason that the ratios are so great is that there is a tremendous difference in physical ability between the players and the spectators. To achieve the position of a professional athlete requires the kind of talent, dedication and desire that most people just do not have. And it takes all three attributes to reach the highest level as an athlete. Dedication and desire can achieve a lot, but without talent, they cannot achieve greatness. Without dedication, many fall into various vices and also fail to achieve greatness, and all the talent and dedication in the world will achieve nothing without that burning desire to be the best. How many can be the best? Just one I think. So, it seems that there must be a lot of frustration even at the highest level of sports, and of business, in fact of just about everything. The American way is to strive to be the best, but very few can achieve that. This competitive philosophy is the primary reason that America is a great country. We are a pragmatic people; results oriented to such a degree that we as a people think that anything is possible and that no problem is insoluble.

But problems arise when pragmatism is applied to morality and ethics. The morality and ethics that I am referring to here are not statistical in nature. By that I mean that my definition of morality is not the average of what people are doing, but rather what they ought to be doing. This “ought-ness” is the moral fiber of our nation and is contained in the U.S. Constitution as written, not as fictionalized by an activist judiciary. When pragmatism is applied to moral questions, we tend to solve the problems of the present while creating a dozen more problems for the future to deal with. Social Security, Income Tax and Government Schools are just a few examples of pragmatic experiments of the past that have metastasized into huge bureaucracies that now are an order of magnitude worse than the original problems they were meant to solve. We did what was expedient without regard to what was morally right. Obviously, when dealing with matters of morality and ethics, pragmatism is a poor choice. Yet we continue to use it to our future peril, while the classical approach employing the “Laws of Nature and Nature’s God” remains untried. Matters of the practical can be solved pragmatically; matters of morality can only be solved by a study of what is right.

The watershed issue 150 years ago was slavery and while much has been written about the states-rights aspect of the Civil War, the fact remains that its primary cause was slavery which was and is a moral issue, not a practical issue. At the time, many in our nation tried to deal with slavery using our cultural pragmatism; you know, live and let live; but that only led to multiplied problems down the road. Eventually we fell into a terrible war in which more Americans died than in any other war to date. Slavery was not a question of live and let live; it was a moral question: should one person, for their own benefit, be allowed to own another? The United States paid a terrible price for trying to deal with this problem pragmatically. Our Constitution in its original form even institutionalized slavery, to our shame. At a cost of over 600,000 lives, that was changed by the 13th Amendment; forty-three words that dealt with slavery as morally wrong.

Now, we as a country are faced with another great moral issue; that of abortion. Many arguments have been set forth in support of abortion rights, but every one of them avoids the real, moral question. “A woman’s right to choose”, “reproductive rights”, “the right of privacy” and “a woman’s right to control her own body” all sound very convincing, until we discern the exact nature of this so-called “right”. Many in our nation again try to deal with the issue of abortion in a pragmatic way; you know, live and let live. We hear “It’s a matter of personal choice” or even worse, “I don’t think abortion is right, but why should I impose my morality on someone else?” Once again we are likely headed for much more severe problems down the road. Abortion is not a question of live and let live; it is a moral question: should one person, for the sake of their own benefit, be allowed to kill another? We are bound as one nation to suffer greatly if we ever forget that abortion is a matter of life and death, and that no one can be allowed to have the “right” to do what is morally wrong.

So, what can be done to avoid the terrible consequences of allowing this moral outrage to continue? Being a spectator is certainly not a viable option. While I don’t mean to offend anyone, there are many who think they can remain in the bleachers on this subject while those with more talent than themselves play the game. Such is the man who would not own a slave himself, but thought it none of his business if his neighbor owned 50. You will either be pro-life or pro-death, there is no compromise. How long will you wait to take a stand? Will you put it off until spring because it’s too cold, or until summer when it’s more comfortable? Unborn Americans are dying by the millions every year while we watch TV and drink beer. It’s shameful that there are not millions of people standing before the U.S. Capitol demanding that this carnage end today.

We have already paid a staggering price for abortion with forty million unborn Americans dead and still counting. We, the survivors must take whatever talent, dedication and desire we have received from God, ask His blessing upon them and use them to do what is morally right. Now a new Amendment has been proposed: forty-nine words that guarantee the God given right for the unborn to live. Will it ever be passed? That will be up to those of us who have given up being spectators.

Dennis Petticrew

Protect the Unborn!
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