The Great Charter of Our Being
I’m not a lawyer. I’m a minister. I’m not a military officer. I’m a minister. I’m not a politician. I’m a minister. I’m not a judge. I’m a minister. I’m not a minister. I’m a human being.
There is only one question. Do you want this done to you or someone you love?
At the point of a soldier’s gun you are taken into custody, bound, blindfolded and whisked away on a jet. You find yourself in a prison, without the faintest idea of what continent you are on. You don’t know what the charges against you are. That’s classified. You have no access to a lawyer. There is no way for you to address your incarceration. You languish in this hellish limbo for six years while a pitiless administration and a spineless Congress do a nauseating dance that keeps you there.
There is only one question. Do you want this done to you or someone you love?
This is the black hole realty for 305 men in our Guantanamo Bay, Cuba prison. For the third time now during the Bush human rights nightmare their plight is being argued before our Supreme Court.
The question facing the court is whether the detainees have the right to go into the U.S. courts to challenge their detentions, using the constitutionally guaranteed procedure called a writ of habeas corpus.
The Founding Fathers put the writ into the Constitution as a check on the government’s power to arbitrarily put someone in prison.
But the Bush administration contends that the detainees have no constitutional rights because they are being held outside the United States, and that even if they do, the Constitution allows suspension of the writ of habeas corpus if an alternative is put into place that is adequate and effective.
The Bushies furthermore argue that Congress approved just such an alternative when it stripped the courts of the right to hear the detainees’ habeas corpus challenges.
The champion of Democracy, Rev. Theodore Parker vigorously maintained that matters like justice and equality are “part of God’s universal revelation, his law writ on the soul of man, established in the nature of things.”
Pompous Presidents, Senators, Constitutions, Courts and their make believe Country borders are out of cosmic synch when they bypass the sacred fabric of reality. They will not stand the test of eternity.
Parker preached of our innate potential and longing; “Often enough have the mights of men been organized but not the rights of man…rights derived from no conventional compact of men with men…but rights derived straightway from the Author of Duty and the Source of Right, which are secured in the great charter of our being.”
