by James Austin Bishop

"Freedom is not a gift bestowed upon us by other men, but a right that belongs to us by the laws of God and nature." - Benjamin Franklin

"Freedom is not the sole perogative of a lucky few, but the inalienable and universal right of all human beings." - Ronald Regan, June 1982, London.

"The liberty we prize is not America's gift to the world, it is God's gift to humanity. - George W. Bush, State of the Union, 2003

The history of humankind could be distilled down to a story of one great, long struggle to be free. The desire to be free has always been and remains man's deepest longing, a longing that can be denied only by the force and violence of other men. The United States was founded on the principle articulated in the three quotes above - that freedom is a natural right and cannot be granted by mere men. But freedom can be taken away by men, and so governments exist for the purpose of protecting that right to liberty that our founders recognized as self-evident.

It is this fundamental understanding of the unalienable human right to freedom that has made the United States the most wealthy, powerful and moral nation that the world has ever known. But, to a moral people, along with great wealth and great power come great responsibility. And there can be no greater responsiblity or righteous cause than to use American power and wealth to spread the freedom that we take for granted to the rest of the world.

The morality of it aside, American interest in bringing liberty to other nations can be seen in a practical light as well. Democratic nations do not make war on each other. Political, personal and economic freedom is the only environment in which wealth grows, and people who live with prosperity do not covet that which other people possess. Free people are peaceful people.

Consider this map from Freedom House: The color yellow indicates countries that are free. The light green are countries that are somewhat free, and the dark green are countries that are not free.

The vast majority of the totalitarian states are Islamofascist (with a little old-fashioned Communism thrown in for good measure). That region of the world is the source of most of the violence and war of our time. That region of the world is a cauldrin, cooking up a witch's brew of violence, the ingredients being poverty born of oppression, totalitarian brutality, terrorism, and a handful of weapons of mass destruction thrown in for some bite.

The United States, having now been attacked its own soil by the products of that culture of violence, has three choices; we can do nothing, which would be tantamount to suicide, we could do like Israel does and, when they come after us, we kill some of them, then they kill some more of us, and on and on while the region becomes more militarily powerful and destructive, or we can take our fate into our own hands and use the power, wealth and compassion of America to change that culture of violence forever. The United States, thank God, has leaders who possess the courage and determination to do what has to be done.

But in this new age of American "nation building," there is a large and vocal contingent that asserts that some people cannot handle freedom. The idea of establishing a democratic form of government in the Middle East has been ridiculed or dismissed as impossible by the American and European left (and, to be fair, by a good number of those on the right - many Libertarians and even some Conservatives).

That idea that the Muslim world does not want or is incapable of sustaining Democracy is the height of Liberal arrogance and bigotry. The yearning to live free, as we have seen, is fundamental to all human beings. The lack of freedom in Islamic nations is a result of common, garden-variety thugs and dictators, not of the culture. Thugs and dictators do not have to be Muslims to covet power, and men do not have to be Christians or Jews to covet freedom.

Japan in 1945 was still a feudal society, ruled by an emperor and its military. It was a racist country of totalitarian rule and had been that way for a thousand years. No Japanese citizen had ever voted in a free election. Women had no rights and were often brutalized and treated as property.

But the United States undertook to change that culture of violence when we occupied Japan in 1945. We did not try to convert the Japanese to Christianity as a condition of their liberty - far from it, we introduced the concept of democracy while respecting the ancient Japanese culture. The same thing happened in South Korea, and and it can happen in the Muslim world. But it can only happen with American leadership and our continued presence, to ensure protection and guidance and aid to people only just now learning what it means to be free. Not only does America have a moral right to try to bring freedom to the Muslim world, we have a moral responsibility to our fellow human beings to do so, because we are Americans.

General Eisenhower spoke to this quality of the American people in his farewell address:

"We pray that peoples of all faiths, all races, all nations, may have their great human needs satisfied; that those now denied opportunity shall come to enjoy it to the full; that all who yearn for freedom may experience its spiritual blessings; that those who have freedom will understand, also, its heavy responsibiliteis; that all who are insensitive to the needs of others will learn charity; that the scourges of pverty, disease, and ignorance will be made to disappear from the earth, and that, in the goodness of time, all peoples will come to live together in a peace guaranteed by the binding force of mutual respect and love."

Freedom isn't everything. It's the only thing.

Recently I had the misfortune to become involved in yet another abortion debate, during the course of which I was given cause to ponder a wider perspective on the issue than the usual, mundane "oh no you can't," "oh yes I can" pro and con banalities. Bear with me.

The spark which fired these particular synapses came from an unexpected source - an otherwise intelligent being of my acquaintance, man of science who on most social issues leans decidedly to the right of center. The sentiment leading to my arousal was expressed as follows:

"A fetus, at least early in development, is not a human being. "Killing" a fetus is no different than "killing" any other tissue biopsy. ...the bottom line is that all this bull- about a five-celled embryo being a full-fledged human being is bull-." (Expletives modified so as not to offend my own fragile sensibilities.)

At first blush this would seem a perfectly logical assumption. A mushy little cluster of cells could hardly be characterized as a "full-fledged human being" by any thinking person. That cluster of cells - how many was it? Five? - has not yet had the opportunity to develop any recognizable human form - no arms, no legs, no system of nerves through which to feel pain or pleasure, no brain, no mind, no beating heart. It probably doesn't even have a social security number or a 401K.

The obvious question to proceed from that position is, of course, just how many cells does it take a life to make? What is the magic number of cells to which when just one more cell is added transforms a "tissue biopsy" into a human being? And more importantly, who among us would be so arrogant as to presume to know?

The answer, of course, is that no one can know. Therefore, we are called upon to make one of the two easy choices: Either life begins at conception, or it begins at birth.

There really is no rational reason to believe that a "tissue biopsy" is somehow magically transformed into a human being as it passes into the cold, unless one is willing to believe that God Himself is standing at the end of the delivery table waiting to breathe life and soul into that mass of cells at that moment. But life-begins-at-birth is the most convenient claim for the self-absorbed, or for the justification of such procedures as partial-birth abortion.

The life-begins-at-birth position is, of course, every bit as arbitrary as would be a claim that life begins when the cell count reaches 110,041, if not moreso. Ergo, in our quest to determine just when it is socially and legally acceptable to obliterate a new life, why stop at birth?

Peter Singer, a professor of bioethics at Princeton who calls himself a "Darwinian leftist", is known for his advocacy of animal liberation, infanticide, and euthanasia. In his book Writings on an Ethical Life, Singer argues that logical reasoning from the principle of ethical impartiality supports his claim that the lives of some animals are more valuable than the lives of some human beings. He asserts, for example that "a chimpanzee, dog, or pig...will have a higher degree of self-awareness and a greater capacity for meaningful relations with others than a severely retarded infant or someone in a state of advanced senility."

Killing a human being, then, is more serious than killing an animal only in that humans are capable of planning for the future, while animals are not. Therefor, if it is permissible to kill an animal for some good purpose, then it is equally permissible to kill a brain-damaged infant or a senile oldster.

To take this to its logical conclusion, even normal human infants lack the rational capacities for self-awareness that are found in some animals, and the life of a newborn human is therefore no more valuable than that of an animal with greater intellectual capacities.

There is then no rational behind the arbitrary assigning of "full-fledged human" status to that mass of human cells for no better reason than that it has passed through the birth canal, and the line between infanticide and "abortion" is blurred even further.

Now it falls to someone to decide at just what point in the mental development of the human child it does attain "full-fledged human being" status, with the concomitant right to life.

By extension, the life of an older human who has reached a stage of advanced senility at which his intellectual capacities fall below those found in some animals also has less value than that of those animals, and it becomes permissable to kill him as well, regardless of how his wife, kids and sister, aunt Bessie, might feel about it. But again, someone has to decide when that point is reached - the point at which that human life no longer has "value."

Thinking such as this taps a keg of social horrors which, once released, would continue to foam until society itself is flat and dead.

It is the height of human arrogance to presume to know at what point life begins, or at what point life no longer has value and should end. At the moment of conception, that single cell does not have the capacity to plan for the future, nor can it feel love or hope or charity. But the unique genetic code for that unique individual has been set down at that moment, and the human being who is to come has been absolutely determined.

At that moment, the moment when God's blueprint for that indivdual human has been written, life has begun, and it is not for a fallible human society to decide that it has no value, or less value than its inconvenience is worth.

Nor is it for us to decide that a life in decline has lost value at some point prior to that at which God's code has determined that it should end.

If there exists on Earth just one valueless human life, then no human life has value, and nothing matters.