What Have the Personhood Folks Been Up To?

I'm taking a break from my investigation into the Religious Left and have decided to focus on what the Colorado Fertilized Egg Gang has been up to lately.

And those Fertilized Eggers have been really boiling and rockin' and rollin'!

They've been working on their public relations campaign to come across as... more, more... well... well... better at expropriating intellectual property rights as well as attempting to violate individual rights. In particular, they have a YouTube announcement of their intent to try to get another constitutional amendment on the Colorado ballot for 2010.

In their attempt to grovify themselves across a broader spectrum of the electorate, they've selected the works of singer/songwriter "Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers" as their rallying really-cool song. Playing loudly in the backgroud, Tom Petty's, "I Won't Back Down" introduces their rejuvenated attack on the culture. They are going to try again in 2010 to get another Personhood Amendment on the ballot in Colorado.

Because I really dig "Tom Petty and The Heartbreakers" and really disagree with the Personhooders, I sent an email to the record company informing them that Mr. Petty's song was being used to advance "Colorado Personhood USA's" agenda to grant full legal rights to fertilized eggs. If the rock group is in agreement with this agenda, then that is their own business and their right, and I acknowledged as much in my email. But I would be very surprised if this Colorado Religious Right activist group had obtained proper permission to propagandize with this incredibly groovy song.

So, who are the players now, and what scrambled eggs get rights in the next election?

Let's be clear: these activists are not to be underestimated.

They have studied very carefully why their amendment failed by about 75% in the last Colorado election. They are not going to make the same mistakes twice.

So they've altered the language of their proposal. Previously, the key wording referred to rights of "any human being from the moment of fertilization." Now, they have altered the wording so it is more palatable to the general electorate:

An amendment to the Colorado Constitution applying the term 'person' as used in those provisions of the Colorado Constitution relating to inalienable rights, equality of justice and due process of law, to every human being from the beginning of the biological development of that human being.

The key phrase is: "from the beginning of the biological development," rather than from "from the moment of fertilization," which is easier for many mainstream religious Americans to accept.

The next step is to get enough signatures, around 76,000 registered Colorado voters, to place the measure on the ballot.

Let us not underestimate these people. They may be your next-door neighbor, or the person in line at the supermarket, or your coworker. These are Americans who believe that those "at the beginning of biological development" have rights; and because of their religious beliefs, they maintain that somehow fetuses are people and the right to abortion is wrong.

Let me bring us back to the fundamentals of human existence in a rational way. The right to life only applies to the living, born human being. Ayn Rand, the genius novelist and philosopher of Objectivism cogently writes:

Rights do not pertain to a potential, only to an actual being. A child cannot acquire any rights until it is born. The living take precedence over the non-yet-living... Never mind the vicious nonsense of claiming that an embryo has "right to life. A piece of protoplasm has no rights--and no life in the human sense of the term... To equate a potential with an actual, is vicious; to advocate sacrifice of the latter to the former, is unspeakable...

We must watch these people because they are evil. Our true right to life is at risk.