It Is Dangerous to Be Right When the Government Is Wrong Read Online Free Page B

like the Constitution, will only constrain our government if there are those among us who hold it accountable to the Natural Law.
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    If there is any message that I hope to communicate in this book, it is that all of us should be constantly questioning the validity of our officials’ commands. If they violate the Natural Law, then we must do everything in our power to right their wrongs and restore our freedom; at the simplest, it will entail voting them out of office; at the most extreme, it will mean abolishing that government altogether.
    The importance of questioning the validity of Human Law can be seen in the American civil rights movement. Racially discriminatory laws were, of course, often obeyed, because the consequences of not doing so was imprisonment and police brutality. However, civil rights activists, including the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., knew that those laws did not comport with the Natural Law, and thus if African Americans were ever truly to be free, they must do everything in their power to have those laws repealed:
    When the architects of our republic wrote the magnificent words of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, they were signing a promissory note to which every American was to fall heir. This note was a promise that all men, yes, black men as well as white men, would be guaranteed the unalienable rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. . . . Instead of honoring this sacred obligation , America has given the Negro people a bad check, a check which has come back marked “insufficient funds.” But we refuse to believe that the bank of justice is bankrupt. . . . I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: “ We shall hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men are created equal .” 7
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    Dr. King recognized that those laws were not just bad or unwise, but illegitimate because they violated the fundamental truths of the Natural Law. Civil rights were not mere political rights which could be granted or taken away as government saw fit; rather, since they come from our humanity, they relied upon nothing from the government for their existence. As we shall now explore, and as noted by Dr. King, this scheme of Natural Law was adopted by our Founders and enshrined in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution.
    The Promise of Freedom
    Although our rights would exist even if they were not recognized by the Constitution, a scheme of Natural Rights nonetheless is enshrined in the Declaration of Independence and Constitution, and forms the basis for our entire legal system (or what our Founders intended to be our legal system). As previously noted, Jefferson specifically characterized our rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness as inalienable and self-evident. Moreover, he justified the entire American Revolutionary War as an effort to restore the protection of our Natural Rights:
    When in the Course of human Events, it becomes necessary for one People to dissolve the Political Bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the Powers of the Earth, the separate and equal Station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle them, a decent Respect to the Opinions of Mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the Separation. 8
    Thus, the entire basis for our independence as a nation is the recognition and protection of our Natural Rights. The Founders did not believe that the tyranny of King George III was merely imprudent or unwise but, like Dr. King, found it to be illegitimate.
    In 1798, Justice Samuel Chase acknowledged the idea that government behaviors contrary to the Natural Law are invalid when he proclaimed in the famous Supreme Court case of Calder v. Bull , which addressed the applicability to state legislatures of the Constitution’s prohibition of ex post facto laws,