Before he became vice-president, Mike Pense delivered a speech “The Presidency and the Constitution” at Hillsdale College, Hillsdale, Michigan, on September 22, 2010. In that speech he stated: “the Constitution is given life by the Declaration of Independence, the greatest political document ever written.”
The prolife community has from the beginning recognized the need to bring the Declaration into the Constitution, most especially its declaration of the unalienable rights of man:
“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are LIFE, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness…”
Constitutional law scholar, John W. Brabner-Smith, who founded the International School of Law in Washington, DC, (now the George Mason School of Law) taught his students that the Declaration of Independence was really a “Declaration of Dependence upon God”; and the charter of our nation. He taught that it was like the charter of a corporation – the founding document of a corporation that sets forth what is intended and what the corporation will be about.
He went on to explain to his students that the nation’s Constitution could be likened to the bylaws of a corporation, and that it is a sound principle of law that nothing in the bylaws can contradict the charter.
Without saying as much, the Dobbs decision recently brought the Constitution back along the road to conformity with the Declaration of Independence when it pronounced that the word ‘abortion’ is nowhere to be found in the Constitution and there is no such thing as a ‘constitutional right’ to abortion. Had the Dobbs court continued on down the road to its logical end, they would have found a constitutional right to life (the unalienable right, the primary right first mentioned and set forth in the Declaration of Independence) – the court should have found a constitutional right to life of preborn children.
To send the abomination of abortion back to the states was to desert our nation’s ongoing posterity to the political process, divide the nation further, and shirk their true duty as a court sworn to uphold the Constitution.
When Mike Pense speaks of the Declaration of Independence as giving life to the Constitution, he is saying much more eloquently what the prolife community has been saying: the need to bring the Declaration into the Constitution.
If the court would but do this it could not stray from its duty to find an “unalienable right to life” for all preborn children created in the Holy Image of God!
Yours very sincerely and respectfully,
R. Martin Palmer
P.S. Has any consideration been given to inviting Mike Pense to say a few words from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial on June 24th? As a lawyer he has proven to be a constitutional law expert in his own right.
It was because of Mike Pense’s respect for the Constitution and sworn oath to uphold it that he was not able to follow President Trump’s desire to seize unto himself alone the power to dispute the outcome of the election and send the results back to the states for recount.
He points out in his biography that only the Congress has such a right and toward that end in performing his ceremonial constitutional role of presiding over a joint session of the Congress to receive the Electoral College vote on January 6th, he planned to recognize individual congressmen who wished to contest their own state’s election results and put it to the floor of the Congress for debate and decision what, if anything, was to be done. Many of the congressmen were beginning to rise and speak when the Capitol Hill riot broke out and that ended that.
Returning to Mike Pense’s eloquent observation that the Declaration of Independence breathed life into the Constitution, one is reminded of the biblical reference of God breathing life into Adam at which point Adam became a living soul. God is in the Declaration of Independence (in reference to God-given unalienable rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness). As such it is a God inspired document that must never be separated from the Constitution especially when the foundational questions of the equal humanity and personhood of all men and women as preborn children and their unalienable right to life are to be contemplated and ruled upon.
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