Radically pro-abortion Sen. Bernie Sanders, while campaigning for the highest office of the nation, had the indecency to describe the senseless killing of innocent, defenseless human beings as a “constitutional right.” He tweeted that, “Abortion is a constitutional right – not a privilege for those who can afford it.”
Many Americans think “rights” are for all, while “privileges” are for some, yet “right” and “privilege” are actually synonyms. The two words have historically meant exactly the same. Thus, in our Declaration of Independence, the Founders placed a couple of crucial modifiers in front of “rights” — to denote a short list of “certain inalienable rights” so as to describe them as being set apart from normal, mere rights (i.e. privileges), because these certain ones are given by God and are “inalienable.” Thus we point out that God never gave human mothers an inalienable right to destroy their own offspring while their babies are still in the womb, the place where they ought to be most protected, not exposed to being killed. Furthermore, the Founders explicitly included the God-given right to life as the top of that short list of actual inalienable rights. One cannot have their right to life be inalienable, secured and always honored, so long as someone else is legally permitted to kill them. Bernie Sanders, being Jewish, ought to remember well that the biblical Book of Esther describes exactly such an instance, when Jewish citizens’ right to life was not secure because a law decreed that Jews could legally be killed without any consequence of punishment.
Pro-life Rep. Dan Crenshaw (follow him on Facebook / Twitter) powerfully responded to Bernie Sanders’ atrocious, bogus claim, by tweeting back that,
1. Abortion, or anything resembling the notion of abortion, is never mentioned in the Constitution.
2. To call abortion- wherein a baby dies – a “privilege” is the worst case of casual devaluation of human life that I ever seen from a presidential candidate. https://t.co/qtxP8fZEiN
— Dan Crenshaw (@DanCrenshawTX) December 6, 2019
PS: For any who are wondering why there should be two different words, right and privilege, that mean the same, consider that “right” is from Old English, while “privilege” is a borrow word from French — one of many. We have many such dual-word instances: drink (English) and beverage (French); and fight (English) and battle (French) are just two more examples of a very common duality in our language, due to its rich history.
-Pastor Doug Joseph
State Treasurer,
West Virginians For Life