There is confirmation that innumerable Americans still appreciate our nation's Founding code: "We hold these Truths to be self-evident, that all Men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness...." What else could account for the sorrowful awareness concerning the case of Terri Schindler-Schiavo, who was ordered put to death by dehydration and starvation, beginning Friday under court order?

Within our nation's matchless founding deed, The Declaration of Independence, as upheld by its consequent regulation, The Constitution, there is a momentous idiom, "unalienable." It's a word that delineates certain of our constitutional rights as powerless to be alienated, estranged, surrendered, or reassigned... not even under judicial decree. Life itself is one such unalienable right, and no good administration can reassign the right to life for a category of people into the control of another class of people.

Thomas Jefferson trembled for this nation, in reflecting that God's righteousness cannot slumber without end, presaged, "The God who gave us life, gave us liberty at the same time; the hand of force may destroy, but cannot disjoin them." For all the prosaic speeches about life's giving way to advance liberty, these unalienable civil liberties will either prosper as one, or perish as one.