By Judie Brown
After listening to a recent conversation between Dr. Alan Keyes and Lepanto Institute founder Michael Hichborn, I have once again been extremely impressed by the incredible insight our Founding Fathers must have had when they wrote the Declaration of Independence. The comment that our Constitutional “rights are provisions of God’s will” struck me as brilliant.
Hichborn analyzed the Founding Fathers’ use of the term unalienable rights, saying, “My life is not to serve the government, my life is not to serve my employer, my life is to serve Christ, my Lord, to know, to love and to serve Him in this life so that I can love Him in the next. That is what life is all about.”
Chief among those rights, which is why the Founding Fathers put it first, is the right to life. But today, regardless of the Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision, too many people believe that it is their right, if not duty, to transfer the right to life of others into the garbage to protect their sexual freedoms, or in the case of the elderly, to benefit now rather than later from the personal benefits accrued from the will or wishes of the one who dies.
In Ohio, for example, this is why a majority of voters chose to add abortion to the rights of that state’s citizens, thus erasing the unalienable right to life from the laws of that state. This is a reflection of secular humanism—a belief that there is no God. In fact, the Humanist Manifesto II states, “Promises of immortal salvation or fear of eternal damnation are both illusory and harmful. They distract humans from present concerns, from self-actualization, and from rectifying social injustices. Modern science discredits such historic concepts as the ‘ghost in the machine’ and the ‘separable soul.’ Rather, science affirms that the human species is an emergence from natural evolutionary forces.”
The contrast could not be more obvious. On the one hand we see men and women of faith who are willing to make sacrifices solely because their vulnerable brothers and sisters are at risk. On the other hand we see those who place themselves in the position of little gods who can choose to kill at will, based upon their alleged rights. But such people have lost their sense of truth and right thinking and instead follow the siren song of the evil one, choosing death instead of life.
This is the conflict at this moment in the history of mankind. And while it is a godless theory that has swept away the truth of unalienable rights in far too many places, it is also a fact that when people of faith come together to assert truth in love, incredible changes can occur.
This is the legacy of men like Chris Slattery, founder of EMC Frontline. His recent passing at the age of 68 is a sad event, but his work will live on for years to come. He once said, “My God, you can use me to save babies. How can I do this?”
That was the Chris Slattery I knew. He was a man who understood precisely what the unalienable right to life was all about and who chose to dedicate his life to protecting that right.
His work was pivotal in the city of New York. As a committed leader, he recognized the pressures of unjust laws, including those in his beloved city. Years ago the Clinic Access Law could have cowed Slattery into abandoning the babies, but no! Slattery’s zeal never waned. He stated, “We realize that this is big, but we also realize that God is bigger. . . . If He can work around the laws, so can we.”
The unalienable right to life is at risk in many places in our godless nation today, but we persevere because, like Slattery, we have faith in the power of God. Thus we press on!
And we pray that the soul of Chris Slattery rests in the peace of Christ: “May his soul and the souls of all the faithful departed rest in peace. Amen.”
