When the claim of right destroys the freedom to do what’s right, is liberty gone?

In 2009 I wrote an article for my blog entitled “Obama Faction moves to make Medical Workers “Slaves in Conscience.” It came to mind today as I read Dr. Jane Orient’s article on ”The Totalitarian side of a ‘right to health care’.” Dr. Orient notes the features of a totalitarian health care dictatorship now making headlines in countries like the United States and Great Britain. Government in such countries is supposed to respect and secure fundamental rights of individual property, parental authority and religious conscience. But these God-endowed unalienable rights, intrinsic to human nature, are now being systematically suppressed in the name of a so-called “right to healthcare.”

I anticipated this consequence in my article years ago, calling it “the essence of the slavery the Obama faction now means to impose upon our health care workers.” Citing the example of the abortion holocaust, I observed that:

Because some people wish to do and benefit from evil, others must become its tools and instruments, against their will. Because some wish to escape responsibility for the nascent life invoked by their cries of sexual ecstasy, others must accept complicity in the murders that carry out their will. At the very least the people who embrace this foul cult of human child sacrifice should have to do the dirty work themselves. But when has evil been content to wallow in its own excrement? The very pride that impels it to defy the boundaries of decent conscience rouses its resentment against those who, by standing apart from its rituals announce their condemnation of its crimes. As it was with slavery, so it is now. Evil does not accept a house divided but will “press forward” until “It will become all one thing or all the other.” …In service to this aim, the Obama faction moves…to make all health care workers slaves in conscience to the state. Soon and very soon this shall be the fate of us all.

Dr. Orient concludes her article with the observation that “Americans need to look behind the “rights” rhetoric, see the chains, and follow the money.” It’s certainly true that the socialists of our day are still following Lenin’s tactical advice. They ruthlessly exploit the greedy motives of some to corrupt and overthrow the liberty of all. But though the love of money is their means, their ultimate goal is consolidation of unconstrained totalitarian power. As I wrote at the beginning of the Obama era’s anti-American nightmare:

Our soldiers and police are being trained and will be required to move against the right to keep and bear arms, born of our unalienable right to preserve and defend the innocent lives of others. Our pastors, rabbis, and other religious leaders will be required to surrender the right to live according to their beliefs whenever their free exercise of religion runs counter to the demands of “gay pride”, the selfish-esteem of homosexuals; or the anti-religious bigotry of atheists who cannot bear to hear the prayers of others. Parents will be required, without exception to surrender their children for indoctrination by the state. Scientists and technical people will be required to lend their knowledge and expertise to refine and operate the instruments of surveillance that utterly destroy all privacy, and the instruments of mollification (chemical and otherwise) that utterly subvert the will. And so on…

As they advance toward consolidation of their power, the forces of socialist totalitarian dictatorship have, in our time, adapted the tactics the Nazi right-wing socialists used in the 20th Century to exploit the vulnerabilities of Germany’s so-called Weimar Republic. Using the rhetoric of “right” they are usurping the authority to nullify the God-endowed unalienable rights America’s creed (epitomized in the Declaration of Independence) constrains just governments to secure. They confuse well-intentioned Americans with their false appeal to “right.”

Veiled in the fog of that confusion, they exploit the lust for money and power to draw together various strains of society’s talented and powerful elites, into a self-serving faction. Using the rhetoric of “rights,” “justice,” “freedom” and even “love,” they maintain the façade of constitutional procedure and electoral politics. From behind this façade elements of their faction attain control over political, corporate and educational institutions. Thus ensconced, they speciously defend “rights” for whomever they please, while adamantly denying the freedom to do right to all those obliged to do so by God’s will.

Yet the freedom to do right, as authorized by God’s endowment of our humanity, is the very definition of rights, including liberty, the American people have relied upon since our Founding to justify their assertion of self-government. It is the very definition of rights that rebuts the superiority of power that elitists—aristocrats, oligarchs, and autocrats—have throughout history forcefully imposed, to prove their right to subject people to their dictatorial rule. If we mean to defeat the ongoing subversion of self-government in the United States, following the money is not enough. We must, above all, rediscover the true path of liberty, whereon we remember to follow God’s rule in respect of our humanity and all creation. By thus limiting our own specious claims of right, we may yet prevent our would-be dictators from exploiting the imposition of our licentious wrongdoing first to mask, and then forcibly impose their own.

Alan Keyes is a political activist, a prolific writer and a former diplomat.

The views and opinions expressed in this commentary are those of the author and do not reflect the official position of The Daily Caller.