X-Message-Number: 24394
Date: Thu, 15 Jul 2004 07:22:41 -0700 (PDT)
From: William O'Rights <>
Subject: Re: CryoNet #24389 - #24392

You know your getting off to a bad start when your an immortalist and one
member is painting you as a mortalist, when someone you have admired for
years sends you hate mail telling you to post somewhere else, and the Father
of Immortality, a living legend (whom I admire and respect) is implying that
you are somewhat less than an advocate for Immortality and the practice of
cryonics. 

It may take a few weeks before I am ready to respond to Robert Ettinger
Kobayashi Maru test, in the meantime, in hope that I might persuade some of
you that I have a passion for Immortality and the practice cryonics, I'll
offer these past postings.


Question: Is HB 2637 Unconstitutional?


CONSTITUTIONAL PROVISIONS INVOLVED
 
United States Constitution

Bill of Rights

A. FIRST AMENDMENT OF THE UNITED STATES CONSTITUTION.

  "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or
prohibiting the free exercise thereof, 

B. FOURTEENTH AMENDMENT OF THE UNITED STATES CONSTITUTION

     "No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the
privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any
State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process
of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection
of the laws."



Universal Life Extension Church Inc. 
Mission:  Our mission is at once the oldest and the most basic of all
religions, we seek Physical Immortality as a desired and promised goal. This
is our hope. This is our faith. This is our deeply-felt (held) religious
belief and we are wholly opposed to the state being used to compel,
prohibit, or persecute the free exercise of our religion. 


On behalf of the many individual members Universal Life Extension Church
Inc. who have chosen to practice their faith, we ask that you do not subject
individuals to the potentially unconstitutional regulation proposed in HB
2637. The HB 2637 restrictions would serve to undermine the current
religious practices of the members of the Universal Life Extension Church
who use Cryonics as an alternative approach to funeral arrangements, in that
the body is frozen indefinitely in the hope that some time in the future it
will be possible for the person to be brought back to life. These matters,
involve the most intimate and personal choices a person may make in a
lifetime, choices central to personal dignity and autonomy, and are central
to the liberty protected by the Fourteenth Amendment. As stated in Casey,
505 U.S., at 851, Beliefs about these matters could not define... were they
formed under compulsion of the State."

Our practices may be unorthodox, but that's no reason why they should be
regulated, for religious freedom - the freedom to believe and to practice
strange and foreign creeds - has classically been one of the highest values
of our society. See, e. g., Murdock v. Pennsylvania, 319 U.S. 105, 115
(1943); Jones v. City of Opelika, 319 U.S. 103 (1943); Martin v. City of
Struthers, 319 U.S. 141 (1943); Follett v. Town of McCormick, 321 U.S. 573
(1944); Marsh v. Alabama, 326 U.S. 501, 510 (1946). If there is any fixed
star in our constitutional constellation, it is that no official, high or
petty, can prescribe what shall be orthodox in religion. If there are any
circumstances which permit an exception, they do not now occur to the
members of Universal Life Extension Church.

HB 2637 interferes with our" last rite" by interfering with our First Right.
With the very best of reasons our Government should loath to interfere with
anyone's - but anyone's - religious practices if it can possibly avoid such
tampering. We contend that the HB 2637 will prohibit the free exercise of
our religion.

We hold that HB 2637, as construed and applied to the our members, deprives
us of our liberty without due process of law in contravention of the
Fourteenth Amendment. The fundamental concept of liberty embodied in that
Amendment embraces the liberties guaranteed by the First Amendment. The
First Amendment declares that Congress shall make no law respecting an
establishment of religion or prohibiting the "free exercise" thereof. The
Fourteenth Amendment has rendered the legislatures of the states as
incompetent as Congress to enact such laws.

The men who led the fight for adoption of our Constitution and also for our
Bill of Rights gave us the very guarantees of religious freedom that forbid
the sort of governmental activity which Arizona is attempting here. Our
review of HB 2637 confirms that the proposed law in question is being
proposed by officials who do not understand, fail to perceive, or chose to
ignore the fact that their official actions are in violation of the Nation's
essential commitment to religious freedom. It should be up to us to decide
and choose which method of burial is appropriate for us, traditional
in-the-ground, or cryonic interment. While cryonic internment is relatively
new, we are dealing with rights older than the Bill of Rights and older than
our two political parties, and intimate to the degree of being sacred.
Arizona should not fall into the trap of making up laws that force people to
conform to state practices, especially in such obvious aspects as the
"rites" of what is done with the body after death. That should be a matter
of personal taste and belief.  The very purpose of a Bill of Rights was to
withdraw certain subjects from the vicissitudes of political controversy, to
place them beyond the reach of majorities and officials and to establish
them as legal principles. Ones right to life, liberty, and property, freedom
of worship and free excercise of religion and other fundamental rights may
not be submitted to a vote.

Since the earliest days men have dreamed of a country where the mind and
spirit of man would be free, where men would be free to explore the unknown
and to challenge the most deeply rooted beliefs and principles. Our First
Amendment was a bold effort to adopt this principle. The Framers believed
that the ultimate happiness and security of a nation lies in its ability to
explore, to change, to grow and ceaselessly to adapt itself to new knowledge
born of inquiry free from any kind of governmental control over the mind and
spirit of man. 

The rights to free excercise of religion to which appeal was made in the
American Revolution were rights understood to inhere in all men simply as
men. In no small measure, that was why they were asserting their
independence.  These rights were understood to be knowable by all men
capable of fully developed, unassisted reasoning. In particular, the rights
were not understood as dependent on or derivative from divine revelation.
These rights were not regarded as having been granted or created by any
human act or agency or historical process. They therefore could not be
superseded, revoked, or even surrendered. They were, in Paine s words,
 indefeasible  or, as the Declaration of Independence has it,  unalienable. 
But the rights were not merely asserted to be unalienable, inherent in all
men, and knowable by reason; they were held to be so because and only
because they were  natural -the essential and undeniable endowments of human
nature. 

While it was readily conceded that the nature and hence the natural rights
of man are better recognized in some times and places than in others, the
rights were nonetheless understood to be in principle derivable, in all
places and at all times, from the rational or scientific study of human
nature. The rights were the product not of revelation,  history,   culture, 
or  creativity  but of  nature.  

As the Declaration stated clearly, rights are not a gift from government. 
They are natural and unchanging, inherent in the nature of mankind and
possessed by people by virtue of their humanity. What is important is that
rights are imprescriptible, that is, not granted by another human.  In
particular, they are not granted by government; people form governments in
order to protect the rights they already possess. We argue that is
intuitively right that we enjoy the security of such rights; the burden of
explanation should lie with those who would take these rights away. 
 
The Constitution is the supreme law of the land. It is the highest
authority. No person, and no branch of government, not the president, not
Congress, and certainly not the Arizona State Legislature, has the right to
set the Constitution aside, its words and its rules are law. As such, we
cannot subscribe to the omnipotence of the state legislature, or that it is
absolute and without control as it's authority is expressly restrained by
the Constitution. No man should be compelled to refrain from acts which the
Constitution and the Bill of Rights permit. There are acts which the State
Legislature cannot do, without exceeding their authority.  This proposed Act
of the legislature (for we cannot call it a law) contrary to the great first
principles of the First Amendment cannot be considered a rightful exercise
of legislative authority. It is unconstitutional as the proposed statute
directly restrains the free exercise of our religion. The First Amendment is
clear enough that people on opposite sides of this issue can agree on what
it commands. This proposed statute finds no support in the words of the
Constitution, in fact this is not what the First Amendment requires; it is
what the First Amendment forbids.

We hold that there are  absolutes  in our Bill of Rights, and that they were
put there by men who knew what words meant, and meant their prohibitions to
be  absolute.  The whole history and background of the Constitution and the
Bill of Rights belies the assumption or conclusion that our ultimate
constitutional freedoms are no more than our English ancestors had when they
came to this new land to get new freedom. The historical and practical
purposes of a Bill of Rights, the very use of a written constitution,
indigenous to America, the language the framers used, the kind of
three-department government they took pains to set up, all point to the
creation of a government which was denied all power to do some things under
any and all circumstances, and all power to do other things except in the
manner prescribed. Our Constitution may be old, but it is not outdated, and
at any rate not all old things are bad. The 
evils it guards against are timeless.

 We ask Arizona to uphold the commitment to individual liberty as untold
tens of thousands have died for that commitment in our comparatively short
history. Let us live in the America that exist as the beacon of liberty,
providing light and hope and inspiration to the entire world, let us live in
the America of Washington, Jefferson and Madison, let us live in the America
our Founding Fathers bequeathed to us when they enacted the Constitution and
Bill of Rights.

In other lands freedom to exercise Religion are not allowed, we must make
efforts here to keep them free. In other lands Religions are threatened by
intolerance, we must provide a safe place for their perpetuation.  The fires
of freedom and civil liberties burn low in other lands, they must be made
brighter in our own because the benefits of liberty are boundless and the
tyrannies of government can be limitless as well.

Freedom, the greatest of all earthly blessings, give us that precious jewel
and you may take everything else....

Live Long and Well
Rev. William C. O'Rights PhD
Founder and President
Universal Life Extension Church, Inc.


=====
William Constitution O'Rights
The First Immortal


		
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