From California State Senator Richard Pan (D-Sacramento) proposing legislation to prevent parents of children attending government or private schools from making their own decisions regarding vaccinations, to American Conservative Senior Editor Rod Dreher suggesting the US government should mandate vaccinations, vaccination orthodoxy enforcers are out en masse this week. Fortunately for freedom, Judge Andrew Napolitano has written a new editorial emphatically challenging their threat to individual rights and defending constitutional limitations on the US government’s power.
According to Napolitano, mandatory vaccinations are inconsistent with a free society. Napolitano, a Ron Paul Institute for Peace and Prosperity Advisory Board member, states “in a free society, we are free to reject scientific orthodoxy and seek unorthodox scientific cures.” Expanding on this concept, and addressing the unconstitutionality of US government vaccine mandates, Napolitano argues:
The issue, according to [US Senator Rand] Paul, is: WHO OWNS YOUR BODY? This is a question the government does not want to answer truthfully, because if it does, it will sound like Big Brother in George Orwell’s novel “1984.” That’s because the government believes it owns your body.
Paul and no less an authority than the U.S. Supreme Court have rejected that concept. Under the natural law, because you retain the rights inherent in your birth that you have not individually given away to government, the government does not own your body.
Rather, you do. And you alone can decide your fate with respect to the ingestion of medicine. What about children? Paul argues that parents are the natural and legal custodians of their children’s bodies until they reach maturity or majority, somewhere between ages 14 and 18, depending on the state of residence.
What do the states have to do with this? Under our Constitution, the states, and not the federal government, are the guardians of public health. That is an area of governance not delegated by the states to the feds. Of course, you’d never know this to listen to the debate today in which Big Government politicians, confident in the science, want a one-size-fits-all regimen.
Read Napolitano’s complete editorial here.
