Ambassador Alan Keyes: "Euthanasia and Democracy"

Part 3 (Conclusion)

Do you feel safe, in a world like that? See, maybe there are people who do, because . . . I remember once, a long time ago, having a discussion with a friend of mine who happened to be Jewish. And we were comparing notes about our attitude toward the world. And it turned out that both of us shared a fundamental kind of -- I guess, these days, you'd call it paranoia. Not in any acute sense, but just a feeling that if there's a bad thing out there that other people can do to people, we shouldn't assume that it won't happen to us. You see?

And I think that people in America who have lived complacent lives, they think bad things don't happen to them -- in spite of all the evidence in the world to the contrary. But certain peoples, who look back on a heritage where bad things could happen, where the moment you give human beings the sense that power belongs to them -- I have to tell you: I deeply believe that the moment you give people the power, they will abuse it. You'll excuse me for this belief; I think I have a lot of proof of it.

Now, I'm not the only one who thinks that, of course, because our Founders thought the same way. And these very people who prognosticate on the Supreme Court, pretend they're so smart in putting forward their opinions, will tell you "yes, that's what they thought; and they set up a separation of powers, federalism, and all of these things that were supposed to make sure that power wouldn't be abused, and so forth and so on." They want you to believe that it was these institutional arrangements that were supposed to safeguard your liberty.

I think we need to get back to the first principle, the one from which all those safeguards were derived -- the notion that you cannot trust human beings, and human judgment, with the ultimate power over human life and human rights. And if you can't trust human beings and human judgment, then you must put that ultimate authority in hands that are out of human reach.

And so not only is there a ground of truth for the argument that we must acknowledge the authority of God; if we wish to remain a free people, there's also a ground of practical prudence: we better acknowledge the authority of God. Because if God doesn't have it, that means some human being has it. And if some human being has it, they will abuse it to destroy; you mark my word.

Now, have we come to the point now where we don't believe that anymore? I know that there are a lot of people in this country who behave as if they really think we are supposed to trust government, we're supposed to trust "medical tribunals", we're supposed to trust doctors and other people: they'll do what's good for us.

On what grounds do we come to this conclusion? At the end of the 20th century, on what possible grounds could we come to the conclusion that that kind of trust is justified? That we can surrender that kind of power to any human institution? As a matter of fact, all the evidence goes just the other way. The doctors in Nazi Germany were some of the worst abusers of the human person. Once you had convinced them that there was no ultimate constraint, no power to which they had to answer in their use of their knowledge, they then abused it as if they were God. Because, after all, if God is not God, then surely human beings who have godlike powers must be God. Or at least they will come to think of themselves that way.

What we are being asked to do, therefore, in accepting these arguments -- however they want us to be distracted by questions of compassion and all of that -- what we really being asked to do is to remove those safeguards, and to trust ourselves, in terms of power, to human beings whose conscience, by virtue of our surrender of these great principles, will have been corrupted. So not only will we be giving up the power, but by surrendering the principles, we will be corrupting the conscience that ought to constrain that power.

I really think that this is suicidal. But I firmly believe that this discussion over the right to suicide is, in fact, a kind of metaphor for our overall situation. We live in the age when, as a free people, we are being invited to commit suicide. We are being told that this (inaudible) on all kinds of grounds that are good for us, that we will indulge our pleasures and be relieved of our pains, if only we surrender the first premise of our liberty.

Now, are we going to do this, and is it worth it? That's the question. A long time ago, I used to give speeches the theme of a question: do you want to be free? And I think these issues are putting this question to us as a people in the ultimate sense. Freedom is a challenge, you know, in the right sense. There was a time when Americans understood that without having to be told. They knew that freedom didn't mean that things were going to go easy for you, that life would be comfortable and without pains. Because, in the practice of it, freedom by definition meant that you had the freedom to go from comfortable cities in the east to uncomfortable and dangerous places in the west. You had the freedom to decide that you were going to live in, oh, Kansas, scratching your living out of the ground, or in some other place, where hostile Indians would kill you, and so forth.

Everybody understood that when you exercised your freedom, you were doing a dangerous thing. That didn't mean that you would be relieved of trouble. It didn’t mean that you would be granted all security, relieved of all pain. The promise that you would be secure and relieved of all pain is not a promise made by leaders who want you to be free. It is a promise made by people who want to seduce you into slavery. Freedom is not for people who want to be comfortable all the time, who want to be free of the burden of deciding the important questions for themselves rightly, and who want to get out from under the discipline of all that authority which might constrain their passion. That's not what it is about.

Just the opposite. Freedom is for people who have a certain kind of spiritual ruggedness, but also it is for people who, on account of a profound faith, are more willing to surrender to God than to human power.

If we are no longer that kind of people, then I am afraid these seductive arguments will win out. If we are -- if there is still within us a spark of a desire to fulfill the destiny we are supposed to have -- then I think there is some hope. But only if we begin to realize once again that our liberty is not about institutional arrangements; it's not about parsing legalisms. All of that can be a consequence. You know, the lawyers get their opportunities to argue, so long as these institutions remain on firm and sure moral ground.

But what we have forgotten, and I think what we are almost invited to forget, led to forget, coaxed to forget, encouraged to forget, is that our claim to rights, to dignity, is not derived from the institutions, it's not derived from the words of the Constitution. It is derived from a truth that is beyond our reach, and therefore provides a secure ground for our confidence when we assert that truth against any powers there are.

This obviously puts me in a bit of a different camp from some people. And I came, today, to participate in this discussion at least in part because I think it's very important that we realize that some folks we regard as champions are coming up now against issues where they will no longer be our champions.

I will say it explicitly: I think Justice Scalia will fail to deal with these issues properly, when the time comes. I think he has to fail, unless he achieves a conversion -- ceases to base his views on the mere understanding that we will be bound by the words of the Constitution -- and comes to realize that the words of the Constitution themselves are animated by principles that must be respected, principles that bind us to respect the sense of justice that our Founders attempted to embody in the Constitution. He, and all legal positivists, do not believe this. They do not accept it.

And ultimately, confronted by issues that require that we reason out the consequences of our moral first principles, they must fail; because there is no other ground on which we can morally stand except those moral principles. That's why I have tended to emphasize the Declaration more than the Constitution. The Constitution's not going to protect you; haven't you realized that? The Constitution is just an instrument; it's like a hammer. When the Founders put it together, most of them didn't think it was that good. If you go back and read their actual words, they thought, "Well, it's the best we can do, and it sure is a miracle that it happened at all, but it has all of these problems in it."

But they had an allegiance to it, because they did believe that it was the best effort they could make at the time to respect the principles of justice which they all shared in common, and which were summarized and articulated in the Declaration of Independence. Without the Declaration's principles, the Constitution becomes a mere thing of clay, to be molded into whatever the judges want it to say to them.

And do you know why that is? At least in part because without the doctrine that there is a law higher than human judgment, those who exercise judgment, even on the bench, don't have to have any discipline. They don't. They are like the military people: they have a power, and they can do whatever they can get away with. That's what judges are like, these days. It's why, in the end, they will come to be despised -- because they are going to be just another . . . . they'll be like warriors on the battlefield: they'll have no claim to special respect for their authority; and at the end of the day, in case you haven't noticed, they don't really have any power. They sit on benches; they write opinions. When people start to disregard their opinions, they will be nothing. They will have no authority. Their authority comes entirely from opinion. Because -- today -- some people decide that they are going to respect it. But if the judges themselves show no respect for authority, why should we respect theirs? The system must break down, when this happens, and it will. And it is happening.

Because they do not acknowledge that there is a law higher than the law that they are dealing with that comes from human hands, that our Founders would have read, in Blackstone and elsewhere, as the law of nature. And what was said in the famous philosophers, like Locke, who equated that law with reason. There is a law of nature, and reason -- which is that law -- then dictated certain things about our life. That is an idea which goes all the way back to Aquinas, and people like this, who understood in a way that God had endowed us with the capacity to understand Him (inaudible). He endowed us with the capacity to understand what He has to say. Some of it He has said through revelation, and some of it He has writ upon our heart, with his finger, directly in the way we are and the way we think.

But if we have come to that point where we discard the whole idea of such a law, then -- though we do not realize it -- we have put ourselves in the position where we no longer have to be reasonable. And this is, of course, what is happening in our courts today. You read these opinions, and what you learn at the end of it is that -- they still feel constrained, sometimes, to be logical -- but they didn't seem at all constrained to be reasonable anymore. Any notion that they, themselves, must respect a superior tribunal, and must make decisions in which they are trying to discern how well what they say, what the law says, what we do, conforms with the dictates of that higher law -- this is no longer their exercise. They are simply about doing what they can get away with.

Now, some of them feel like it is easier to get away with things if you base them on precedents and language that was written a couple of hundred years ago. "So that's what I'll do." -- that's Justice Scalia. "I'll base my stuff on stuff that everybody agrees on; it was written two hundred years ago; and more people are likely to respect it than not."

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I mean, they were nice guys. They had reasonable lives for their time. Why should we care what they thought? Why should we give it any respect whatsoever? Why shouldn't we just do what WE feel like doing today?

What is the answer to that question? Why should those founders have any hold on us whatsoever? The mere fact that, two hundred-odd years ago, some folks agreed on a document, doesn’t give that document any power over our lives whatsoever. There is no argument that can be made that on the face of it -- by, in, and of itself -- would give those words a power over us, unless, of course, there is reason to believe that in the framing of that document they respected enduring principles of justice, and right and wrong; they captured, in some way, an enduring glimpse of what is a better way of conducting human political affairs.

But, you see, in order to make that appeal to the Founders, I am actually appealing to something greater then that. I am saying that we respect the wisdom of the Founders because the Founders came closer than anyone has -- before or since -- to respecting, in a practical instrument of government, the wisdom of Almighty God. Then we have said something.

But, of course, it is something Mr. Scalia doesn’t want to say; it's something Mr. Rehnquist doesn't want to say -- It is something no one who believes that human law is the consequence of mere human action, and that its justice can be determined on the basis of mere human standards -- it's something none of them would say.

But at the end of the day, if we are going to make a right decision, I believe, about whether or not there is a right to suicide, whether or not we have the right to kill our offspring in the womb, etc., no amount of reasoning about our empirical circumstances, no amount of balancing up of different interests we may fancy in this place or that, are going to help us here.

And if you haven't noticed, the thicket of moral challenges grows greater; it will not grow less. As human beings discern, in various ways, how to devise instruments of greater and greater power, that increase in power will more and more bring us to the point where we are faced with that ultimate statement of the challenge which makes explicit what is true anyway, and what I started out by saying is true: ultimately we are always faced with the question, "On what grounds do we constrain the use of power?" "If I have the power, why don't I have the right?" And as our power grows, we will have to face this dilemma more and more.

If I may compare small things to great, whenever I talk about this I am reminded -- I don't know whether there will be too many Star Trek fans in this audience -- but I am reminded of a scene from one of the Star Trek movies, where (inaudible) the President of the Federation is giving a speech to the assembled worthies at the end, and he uses a line that has stuck in my mind, because it has a certain amount of truth. He says that they are going to have to agree that just because they have the POWER to do a thing, that doesn't mean that they SHOULD do that thing.

How do you decide that question? How do you decide on the limits of power? When human power goes more and more enormous, that decision will require that we rediscover the ground for claim to any rights at all. If we are unwilling to acknowledge that limit, then the growth of our power will necessarily mean the destruction of our rights.

And this is what we, as a people, are deciding right now. We are setting the precedents that will govern the tendencies and inclinations of the next century. We can't know for sure what is going to happen in that century. The extremes seem to be that our power will destroy us, as it has promised to do for several decades now, or that the more optimistic -- at least technological -- scenario will be worked out, and that power will grow; we will discover, through the application of our science, more and more wondrous things, and more and more wondrous machines at more and more fantastic levels, will be produced.

But that won't make the moral challenge less; it will make it greater.

And so I think that we need to focus on the fact that in dealing with the questions both of abortion and euthanasia, we are not just deciding whether we shall kill our children in the womb or whether we shall kill ourselves when we feel that like is no longer worth living. We are actually deciding whether we shall respect that principle by which our freedom lives or dies. If we claim the right to suicide, if we continually clam the right to abortion, then we have thrown away that which is the only reliable ground for our liberty. This is the true nature of this debate.

Sadly speaking, I noted, both in the questions and in the opinions on the Supreme Court, nothing that remotely approached, touched, or even hinted at this issue. My respect for the Court diminished greatly in that.

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. . . consolidate that power which, through all the ages of humankind, they have hungered for. If we are to pass liberty on to our children, we must -- in this era, as we have in the past -- disappoint that hunger.

But that will require two things of us: that we have the discipline to acknowledge and accept the limits of our freedom, and the faith to go down before our Almighty God, and pray that He will confirm those limits before it is too late.

Thank you.

(Q & A to follow)

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