"Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal."
When Abraham Lincoln spoke these enduring words at Gettysburg, he was not inventing a new creed. He was calling a bloodied, fractured nation back to its founding Declaration.
Lincoln understood that America is a perpetual mission. She is always progressing, engaged in a relentless effort to align our reality with our founding ideals; always falling short and always striving to be better and always knowing that perfect is unattainable in this life.
As we approach America’s 250th birthday, we must grasp the sheer miracle of this proposition. Human history is largely a brutal chronicle of the strong dominating the weak.
In the modern era, that tyranny merely changed its clothes, wearing the mask of utopian ideology.
We have witnessed the catastrophic evils of socialism and communism — systems that promised a workers' paradise but delivered only the equality of shared misery, crushing the human soul beneath the omnipotent state.
America is profoundly different. We are bound not by the dictates of a tyrant or communist doctrine, but by the enduring text of a written Constitution conceived in the ideal of liberty for all.
Critics today demand a utopian purity from our founders, judging the past by the arrogant standards of the present. But the Framers knew that men are not angels.
The greatness of America is not that she is perfect, but that she relentlessly seeks perfection.
When Alexis de Tocqueville traveled across our young nation, he marveled at our rugged individualism.
The American promise was never a guarantee of equal outcomes — the false promise that makes socialism so destructive. It was the demanding, unapologetic guarantee of opportunity with the risk that goes with it.
This fierce pursuit of a more perfect union has exacted a terrible price.
In his Second Inaugural Address, Lincoln acknowledged that the wealth built by the bondsman's unrequited toil was stained with blood.
He bowed to the divine justice that decreed every drop of blood drawn with the lash would be paid by another drawn with the sword.
Lincoln understood what the Russian novelist Fyodor Dostoevsky would later explore: the inescapable reality of blood guilt.
You cannot sanction systemic death without incurring a devastating moral debt. A society that steps over the moral law fractures its own soul.
It is a chilling historical reality that the two most profound national failings of America — slavery and abortion — were both sanctioned by the courts.
In the Dred Scott decision, the Supreme Court attempted to settle a moral debate by stripping an entire class of people of their humanity.
That profound judicial overreach helped ignite the Civil War. Out of that fiery trial, we ended slavery, and though the struggle for a colorblind society continues, our progress has been undeniable.
Tragically, we forgot the lesson of blood guilt. Over a century later, in Roe v. Wade, the Court committed the exact same constitutional heresy, inventing a "right" to end fetal life.
Once again, judicial hubris resulted in catastrophic death: the killing of 65 million of our unborn citizens. In this widespread embrace of abortion, alongside a culture of contraception that actively severs the creation of life from its natural genesis, we are witnessing the suicide of America in a literal sense.
A nation that willingly prevents and destroys its own posterity writes its own epitaph.
The text of our Constitution contains absolutely no mention of a right to end fetal life.
When a judge discovers a "right" hidden in the invisible penumbras of the text — a right the people never voted for — he ceases to be a judge.
He becomes a super-legislator. It is always, without exception, profoundly wrong for a court to invent law.
It steals the power to govern directly from the people.
When I took the oath to become a lawyer, I swore to support and defend the Constitution of the United States — strictly and unapologetically as it is written.
It is a legal document. It says what it says, and it emphatically does not say what it does not say.
This struggle perfectly illustrates why the modern Democratic Party is fundamentally wrong about how our Republic is supposed to work.
They view the Constitution as an inconvenient obstacle.
When they cannot persuade their fellow citizens at the ballot box, they simply bypass democracy.
They retreat to the administrative state and the courts, seeking to achieve by bureaucratic mandate what they cannot win through the consent of the voters.
Trading our liberty for the soft tyranny of unelected experts is a surrender of our birthright.
Yet, despite the erosion of our institutions, there is profound hope.
We are engaged in a perpetual struggle against wrong, but the structure bequeathed to us by the Framers still stands.
The text remains.
We can take our country back, but we must refuse to surrender the moral and legal high ground. We must insist that words have meaning, that laws must be applied strictly as written, and that sovereign power resides ultimately with the people.
If we hold fast to our Constitution, we shall see a new birth of liberty, and ensure that this extraordinary nation shall not perish from the earth.
Fred Harrison can be reached at: Fred.Harrison@fjhlawoffice.com
