by Timothy F. Ley M.A.
I was aware of the “death penalty” issue when I was very young. I grew up in an Irish-Catholic community in the post-World War II Bronx and went to Catholic schools through college graduation. It was a no-brainer to me, that willfully inflicting death on any human being was against God. After going through Catholic college under the Irish Christian Brothers and studying Theology and Philosophy with other men of like mind I found myself at the extreme liberal end of philosophical Catholicism and at that well-thought-out perspective I recognized the evil of the death penalty. I recognized, of course, that logically God was the “Giver of Life” and therefore would not “give death” by authorizing anyone to have the power of death over anyone else. I also recognized that no government should have the right to kill anyone because in itself the authority of death will pervert that government into using death as a political tool.
I had also derived a third perspective beyond the theological and political perspectives. This perspective is to view whatever social issue you want to understand from the viewpoint of how it affects all of humanity, not just one part. Simply put – “The survival of all humanity is the purpose of all humanity”. Under this perspective the idea of killing any member of humanity is contradictory to the survival of all humanity. Death of one human by another is inhuman. Let me give you a simple example of how an inhuman act is contrary to the survival of all humanity. Let us suppose that we have a theoretical person who has within him the ability to solve the problem of aging. I am saying that this person possesses the potential secret of life over death. Now supposing this person causes the death of another person and is convicted and sentenced to death. If this person is executed then the secret will never have been found and what would have been the salvation of all humanity is destroyed with the life of that person. Ask yourself if that is a sensible thing. I would say that based on this one scenario the death penalty should be ruled as anti-human and alien to our American democratic principles expressed in the Declaration 0f Independence.
The Declaration of Independence expresses in its two “self-evident” truths the fullness of theological, political and humanical truth. Bringing all three arguments together into one statement is the genius of Thomas Jefferson. Let me review the essence of Americanism. “We hold these truths to be self-evident that all men are created equal and that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.” Very simply put in regards to the death penalty; Life is an “unalienable” right. What this means is that anyone who claims to be an American of the Declaration of Independence must respect the right to live in everyone without exception. If you look deep within this thinking you will see the political intelligence of removing the tool of the death penalty from the hands of any human authority including our own government. It is obvious in present day society that the death penalty has been broadly misused across our nation just based on the many cases of wrongful conviction exposed by DNA testing. Our prisons are filled with two groups: blacks and drug criminals. Both these groups are political purges. Allowing any group to have the power of life and death over any individual or group of individuals is contrary to the principles of American freedom. As Americans we cannot allow our government in any form to have the right to take someone’s life or restrict someone’s freedom. The recent attitude that our government has had about the “Wikileaks” revelations shows that the government has separated itself from the people and exposed itself as an oligarchy comprised of individuals whose political principles are inimical to individual American freedom even calling for the DEATH PENALTY against people that leak information about the secret doings of the U.S. government. The only restrictions that should come upon an American’s freedom are those restrictions that the American puts upon himself or herself in violating another American’s freedom by theft or harm. To allow a government to make up a bunch of unprincipled, capricious restrictive laws against the unalienable liberties of Americans, beyond the necessary laws that come from the “theft or harm” violations of American freedom, is to allow that group of individuals who control that government to control the politics of American society by its own agenda driven by its own self-interests as the “controlling” group of the government. It now has the political tool necessary to suppress dissent. Essentially the government criminalizes political dissent and incarcerates millions as a result. As it eliminates dissenters through control and incarceration it increases its own power by expanding its personnel to take care of the dissenters. A prime example of this form of political action by a government regime is the “War on Marijuana”. Through this ploy the government has been able to suppress the voting power of millions of Americans. Since Nixon’s launch of the war in 1972 there have been over 20 million Americans arrested for possession of marijuana. This was (and is) an obvious political purge of a targeted group of Americans. The inertia of this illegality is still going strong today as reflected in the massive anti-drug war machine comprised of millions of government-sponsored individual soldiers permeating the entire society in every police department, sheriffs department, prison, jail, drug rehab program, government program, corporate program and everywhere you can think of. Everyone of these anti-drug soldiers – whether full-time or part-time – are earning their living from helping the government suppress individual freedoms. All of these people in the “anti-drug army” only care about earning their money, getting their health care and retirement and having the “American Dream”. They want to keep their economy which is to produce no economic value at all in their work but only cost the American people money. The anti-drug army has effectively taken control of the government by its economic dependence on keeping freedom to use drugs suppressed. As long as drugs are a crime the government can continue to expand. This is where there is too much government and this excessive government can be shown as the primary cause for the economic collapse of the United States of America. What has been the result of 38 years of the drug war? When I say result I can only be referring to cost versus benefit. The drug war has cost hundreds of billions of dollars and has produced no benefit for America. As a matter of fact the drug war has caused nothing but harm and has created a crime world of its own manufacture that costs Americans billions of dollars every year to fight. The government has created a problem that it then uses to extend itself into larger government (the drug-war machine is over-large government at its max and it is expanding daily).
What is the obvious solution to over-large, controlling, tyrannical, murderous government? Make the size of the government smaller than the Declaration of Independence and return control of society to the American people. What do I mean by this? I mean that the freedom of each American and the protection of that freedom should be the basis of an American government. The only laws necessary are those that deal with violations of individual American freedom by theft or harm. Literally the government should act on our part to protect our individual freedom from interference domestically or interference from any foreign power. It’s pretty simple that we only need police to protect individuals from real criminals and we only need armed forces to protect Americans from world criminals. On a world scale we reduce government by removing all of our armed forces from every foreign country in the world and by removing all of our weapons from all foreign countries. We disavow all agreements and treaties with all foreign countries because agreements with enemies of American freedom defined in the Declaration of Independence are treasonous. We establish a firm policy of giving only humanitarian aid to foreign countries. As to any military aid we establish a condition of statehood required. In other words we open up applications for statehood to the entire world. If any country wants the protection of the U.S.A. then that country will have to become a state of America. This should be the condition of empowerment for all foreign nations - membership in the United States of America union. Only by accepting the authority of the two self-evident truths of the Declaration of Independence which state that our lives and our right to be free comes from, as John F. Kennedy said in his Inauguration speech, "from the hand of God", only then can you not be an enemy of America. In order to legally and truthfully accept Americanism as a nation of people that nation must follow normal procedure and apply for statehood. Other than that it is against the freedom of all Americans to give non-humanitarian aid to any nation on the earth without exception. The whole world will become us because we will never give up our divine freedom and become the world. The truth of the Declaration of Independence is the final truth of human freedom.
"The rights of man come... from the hand of God." - John F. Kennedy
You can't do better for humans than basing a political system of government upon the God-given sanctity of individual American freedom. The death penalty is a denial of that sanctity and any person that goes along with the death penalty is a traitor to American freedom. This whole argument applies equally to abortion because what is it other than the death penalty being enacted against a helpless American when you willfully execute an unborn American. The self-evident truth "that all men are created equal" would logically conclude that the human creation point which is right before conception is equal to all points of human creation, which is to say that a fully mature human is exactly equal to a freshly created human zygote and visa versa. It is treason to commit an abortion and to kill an unborn American.
"For I have sworn before you and almighty God the same solemn oath our forebearers proscribed nearly a century and three quarters ago... And yet the same revolutionary belief for which our forebearers fought are still at issue around the globe... The belief that the rights of man come not from the generosity of the state but from the hand of God."
John F. Kennedy 1/20/1961
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