Feb 22, 2020
In this episode of Life Matters, Commissioner Johnston discusses the tendency of pro-abortion and anti-life advocates to use higher law against the principles of the right to life, inverting logic and defying their own appeals to conscience.
Two recent examples are House Speaker Nancy Pelosi‘s condemnation of the President attempting to hold accountable the illegal gang MS-13. She insists that he referred to all illegal immigrants as animals. But she intentionally twisted the words of the President, as he was clearly referring to this particular El Salvador and criminal game.
President Trump was appealing to a very basic principle of society: that individuals who use the desire to control and rule over others by violent force, or appealing to their own lower nature and seeking to employ the baser elements of humanity, or lower nature, is the reason that laws exist, to restrain those that use brute force and the “law of the jungle“ to get their way in society.
Similarly, actor Joaquin Phoenix made a passionate appeal to justice and a sense of higher law, to address our entire society. Phoenix rightly pointed out that selfishness and self-absorption is a bane of modern society. He appealed to a sense of responsibility and justice in his speech accepting the award for Best Actor at the recent Oscar award ceremony.
Phoenix was clear that personal feelings can cloud our understanding of the principles of justice and a higher law to which society must be accountable. Unfortunately, he immediately gathered a collection of perceived emotionally difficult social questions - from animal rights to sexual diversity and other contemporary confusing issues based in individuals’ feelings.
While appealing to a higher law, Phoenix, like so many others, defies that very principle in relegating the idea of injustice as being based on individual feelings. This is a common thread amongst those who rely on disordered thinking and emotionalism to establish their standards of right and wrong.
Western Civilization has advanced in bringing great freedom and prosperity, has ended slavery. [A recent Reuters news story (Feb. 2020) states that this work is not yet done, that half of the nations in the world still have not banned slavery.] Western Civilization has established justice, on the basis that there is a higher law to which all societies and other cultural standards must be held accountable. The right to life was proclaimed by America’s founders as the pre-eminent and essential element of a just society. It is not a passing feeling. It is a self-evident truth. “To ensure these rights governments are instituted among men.”