The Loss Of

Conscience Rights

To the Editor:

In the face of Obama’s intense and focused push to eliminate conscience rights (and our own Judiciary Committee and Attorney General are on the forefront of the anti-conscience juggernaut), now our “courageous” senators have voted down another conscience amendment that would have guaranteed the liberty of health care providers who choose to obey the original Hippocratic Oath and not do abortions.

 The famous mantra, “abortion-is-a-private-decision-between-a-woman-and-her doctor,” which was never a rational argument but merely a trump card to shut people up, is now unmasked for the ugly lie it is, as those who call themselves pro-“choice ” demand that the most sacrosanct choice a person can have — to not kill the innocent — be legally removed so that he or she too becomes complicit, like an urban gang that forces new members to commit murder so that they are compromised. “My superiors made me do it” was no defense at all during the Nuremberg Trials of the Nazis.

 It’s not enough that there are a zillion extremely lucrative abortion mills in operation — everyone must participate. Even the Army allows conscientious objection, but apparently the principle of liberty the country was founded on is too dangerous for the current administration.

 Loss of conscience rights is the hallmark of totalitarianism, which, whether of the left or right, operates the same way: the State becomes the All, it expands into every possible corner of the human experience; not content with ordering the political, it seeps into every private niche, and demands that the transcendental be reduced to just another program — demands to become the Transcendental itself, so that nothing is allowed to critique it.

 I hope that English teachers are teaching books that illuminate totalitarianism — 1984, Brave New World, Animal Farm — and that history teachers are making students take a good, hard look at pre-World War II Germany, the Weimar Republic, another period of economic fear that left the door open to despotism.

We ask why the Germans were silent in the last century, but why are we silent now? Also, atheists have the same stake as everyone else, and should remember that it was the early church that brought the concepts of conscience/liberty into our discourse: they said they would obey the laws of the state, but there remained something above the state, so they would not worship the Roman emperor. St Thomas More is the world’s hero of conscience (though he wouldn’t have described himself that way); he was executed “the King’s good servant, but God’s first.” Pope Leo XIII reminded the world that “Man precedes the State.” The reason the UN Declaration on Human Rights reads like a compendium of the Catholic social justice encyclicals is that one of the drafters was the great Catholic intellectual, Jacques Maritain. The Reverend Martin Luther King, referencing St Augustine and St Thomas Aquinas, repeated that unjust laws were no laws at all.

This is our patrimony. Do something about it for your children’s sake. Protest loudly and vigorously to the administration and your representatives.

Mary Taylor

31 Jeremiah Road, Sandy Hook April 7, 2009