I asked you if the Oregon assisted suicide referendum contradicts the most fundamental principle of ANY federal law? -- And, - is this supposed 'law' based on any constitutional fundamentals?
Your answer was a backpedaled, moralistic no, just as I expected.
Life & liberty, as mentioned in the declartion, - are not religious concepts, they are political principles.
Nope. I think the American beliefs on life, death and liberty, on which the national union was explicitly and formally based at the beginning, in what Jefferson and Madison called "the fundamental act of union of these states,", i.e. the Declaration, DOES trump your beliefs about those matters.
I asked you if the Oregon assisted suicide referendum contradicts the most fundamental principle of ANY federal law? -- And, - is this supposed 'law' based on any constitutional fundamentals?
Perhaps the notion of "principle" is unclear to you . The principles of a thing are distinct from the thing. Principles are that from which a thing comes, or upon which a thing is based. My answer to you, and the point of the Keyes column, was that Ashcroft was justified in looking to the principles of ALL federal law -- the foundation of all federal law. The Declaration expresses that foundation. Without some such foundation, there is no basis that I am aware of that obliges me to even obey federal law. When an officer of the executive branch finds himself obliged to pass judgment on the particular matters about which a federal law obliges him to pass judgment, the formal and official criteria to which he must look are not the opinions of one out of fifty states, but of the national principles that illuminate the meaning and purpose of all federal law.
Your answer was a backpedaled, moralistic no, just as I expected.
Life & liberty, as mentioned in the declartion, - are not religious concepts, they are political principles.
I don't know what kind of ACLU "gotcha" you think this is, but I find it incoherent. The Declaration is the fundamental act of union of the American republic. It grounds our rights, and the meaning and purpose of government, in the equality and rights which the CREATOR endowed all men with. That is not a religious statement. That is the formal statement of public and civic justice on which our regime is based. You may disagree with the Declaration. But claiming that the Declaration does not commit America to recognizing the authority of Nature and of Nature's God is an act of your private and arbitrary will. The Declaration, a political document, is quite explicit, and you can call its invocation of the Creator and of the laws of nature's God "political" or "religious" as it pleases you, they are in the document, in the central passages, and it is incoherent without them.