"I would rather be right than president"

Henry Clay

“I would rather be right than president,” answered Henry Clay, when told his abolitionist position would cost him the election. Henry Clay was three times a candidate for president, once only 5,000 votes short.

The son of a Baptist minister, Henry Clay studied law under George Wythe, served in Congress over 40 years and was speaker of the house six times. Henry Clay stated in 1841: “Patriotism, which, catching its inspiration from the immortal God … prompts to deeds of self-sacrifice, of valor, of devotion, and of death itself – that is public virtue, that is the noblest, the sublimest of all public virtues.”

Henry Clay was part of the “Great Triumvirate,” with Daniel Webster and John Calhoun, which led Congress during the early 1800s. He helped negotiate the treaty ending the War of 1812 and was key to John Quincy Adams being the sixth president instead of Andrew Jackson.

In 1824, Henry Clay supported Greeks who wanted freedom from the Muslim Ottoman Empire. He supported South Americans wanting freedom from Spain.

Abraham Lincoln described Henry Clay in a eulogy, July 6, 1852: “When Greece rose against the Turks and struck for liberty, his name was mingled with the battle-cry of freedom. When South America threw off the thraldom of Spain, his speeches were read at the head of her armies by Bolivar. His name … will continue to be hallowed in two hemisphere. … Clay was without an equal. … He exorcised the demon which possessed the body politic. … Clay’s efforts in behalf of the South Americans, and … in behalf of the Greeks, in the times of their respective struggles for civil liberty are among the finest on record.”

In 1832, when an Asiatic cholera epidemic ravaged New York, Henry Clay recommended a day of: “Public humiliation, prayer and fasting to be observed by the people of the United States with religious solemnity.”

Henry Clay was second cousin’s of abolitionist Cassius Marcellus Clay. In 1816, Henry Clay helped establish the American Colonization Society to aid free American blacks in founding Monrovia, Liberia, West Africa.

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Clay addressed the Kentucky Colonization Society in Frankfort, 1829: “Eighteen hundred years have rolled away since the Son of God, our blessed Redeemer, offered Himself on Mount Calvary for the salvation of our species. … When we shall, as soon we must, be translated from this into another form of existence, is the hope presumptuous that we shall behold the common Father of the whites and blacks, the great Ruler of the Universe, cast his all-seeing eye upon civilized and regenerated Africa, its cultivated fields, its coasts studded with numerous cities, adorned with towering temples dedicated to the pure religion of His Redeeming Son?”

Known as “the Great Compromiser,” Clay opposed the Mexican-American War, and struggled to maintain the Union between the North and the South by proposing “the Compromise of 1850.”

Henry Clay told the Senate, Feb. 5, 1850: “I hope it will not be out of place to do here, what again and again I have done in my private chamber, to implore of Him who holds the destinies of nations and individuals in His hands, to bestow upon our country His blessing, to calm the violence and rage of party, to still passion. … May I not ask of Him too, sir, to bestow on his humble servant … the blessing of his smiles, and of strength and ability to perform the work which now lies before him? … I implore … Heaven … that if … the dissolution of this Union is to happen, I shall not survive to behold the sad and heart-rending spectacle.”

Nine year before the Civil War began, Henry Clay died from tuberculosis, June 29, 1852. The first to lie in state in the U.S. Capitol Rotunda, a statue of Henry Clay was placed in the Capitol’s Statuary Hall by the State of Kentucky. Fifteen counties across America were named for him. In 1957, a Senate Committee headed by John F. Kennedy named Clay one of the five best Senators ever.

Rep. John C. Breckinridge recalled Henry Clay as having said: “The vanity of the world, and its insufficiency to satisfy the soul of man, has been long a settled conviction of my mind. Man’s inability to secure by his own merits the approbation of God, I feel to be true. … I trust in the atonement of the Saviour of mercy, as the ground of my acceptance and of my hope of salvation.”

Henry Clay warned the Senate, July 22, 1850: “If there be a war … I will not assert what party would prevail … for you know, sir, what all history teaches … that few wars … have ever terminated in the accomplishment of the objects for which they were commenced. … Think alone of our God, our country, our consciences, and our glorious Union … without which we shall be torn into hostile fragments, and sooner or later become the victims of military despotism, or foreign domination. …”

Clay continued: “What will be the judgment of mankind … who are looking upon the progress of this scheme of self-government as being that which holds out the highest hopes … of ameliorating the condition of mankind. … Will not all the monarchs of the old world pronounce our glorious republic a disgraceful failure? … It is possible that, for the chastisement of our sins and transgressions, the rod of Providence may be still applied to us, may be still suspended over us. … I pray to Almighty God that it may not lead to the most unhappy and disastrous consequences to our beloved country.”

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WND » Faith
"I would rather be right than president"

California Senate passes "right to die" bill

NEW YORK – The California Senate on Thursday took a key step toward being the sixth state to pass a controversial “Death with Dignity” bill, two weeks after the California Medical Association dropped its 28-year opposition to such legislation.

California’s “End of Life Option” SB 128 would allow mentally competent, terminally ill adults to request a doctor’s prescription for medication that they could take to painlessly and peacefully shorten their dying process.

The bill now advances to the California Assembly, where the deadline to pass the legislation is Sept. 11.

“This is a historic moment in our state for terminally ill Californians facing unbearable suffering who need and want more end-of-life options,” said Compassion & Choices California Campaign Director Toni Broaddus. “We are thrilled with the Senate vote and optimistic that the Assembly will respond to the voices of dying Californians by passing this legislation before its Sept. 11 deadline.”

Opposition came from a leading family values organization in California, which says vulnerable people will be pressured to die prematurely now that Democrats in the state Senate are promoting suicide as official state policy.

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“For all practical purposes, SB 128 would open the door to pressure the weak and vulnerable to die prematurely,”

“People who otherwise could have fought to live or at least extended their lives will be ‘helped’ to die early, and that’s shameful,” said Randy Thomasson, president of SaveCalifornia.com, which says it promotes moral virtues for the common good. “Is life precious or is life a burden? Should we prevent or promote suicide? Good government values innocent human life and discourages suicide.”

Thomasson said that when a law “permits doctors to kill patients and exempts physicians from any liability, that’s a license to coerce, if not a license to kill.”

“How opposite from the Hippocratic Oath, where physicians pledge, ‘I will not give a lethal drug to anyone if I am asked, nor will I advise such a plan.’”

The Senate vote came seven months after the debate in California reached a climax with the death of Brittany Maynard, a 29 year-old Californian with terminal brain cancer. She moved to Oregon to be one of the 750 people in the state to take advantage of the medically assisted dying law it passed in 1997.

The other four states that allow patients to take deadly medication prescribed by physicians are New Mexico, Montana, Washington and Vermont.

“Brittany would be very proud to see the monumental shift occurring on the end-of-life option legislation,” said Dan Diaz, her widower.

“Brittany and I respect those who might not pursue this option if they found themselves in a situation similar to hers,” Diaz said. “However, no one should stand in the way of someone who is suffering from a terminal illness from making the decisions that are best for them. An end-of-life option law will not result in more people dying; it will result in fewer people suffering.”

Debbie Ziegler recalled her daughter Brittany’s last days.

“Brittany stood up for what she thought was right, advocating for other terminally ill patients in the last weeks of her life,” Ziegler said. “On this historic day, I profoundly feel my daughter’s presence and pride as the California Senate stands with her, acknowledging that terminally ill Californians have an irrefutable right to decide to die in peace and to seek a doctor’s aid in doing so.”

A YouTube video shows Debbie Ziegler explaining her daughter’s death at a press conference in Sacramento Jan. 21 supporting the introduction of SB 128 to the California legislature.

See Debbie Ziegler speak at the Sacramento press conference

After Brittany Maynard died in Portland, Oregon, on Nov. 2, 2014, Monsignor Ignacio Carrasco de Paula, the head of the Pontifical Academy for Life and the Vatican’s top bioethics official, termed Maynard’s passing a “reprehensible suicide,” arguing that “dignity is something other than putting an end to one’s own life.”

Carrasco de Paula said assisted suicide was also dangerous because it offered a potential “solution” for a society that sought to abandon the sick and quit paying the costs of their illnesses.

On Nov. 17, 2014, Pope Francis sharply warned euthanasia is “playing with life” and “a sin against God,” denouncing what he called a “false sense of compassion” conveyed by those who regard medically assisted dying as “an act of dignity.”

The pope said it was unlawful to take a life and warned of the dangers posed to the elderly by “hidden euthanasia” in our “culture of waste.”

The End of Life Option Act, co-authored by Senate Majority Leader Bill Monning and Senate Majority Whip Lois Wolk, is the first medical aid-in-dying bill to be approved by the California Senate since the first attempt to pass such legislation in 1992.

“I am gratified that my colleagues in the Senate support a compassionate option for dying patients facing difficult end-of-life decisions in their final days,” said Monning. “I look forward to continued collaboration with my legislative colleagues to ensure passage of the End of Life Option Act in the Assembly.

A live-interviewer telephone survey conducted in July 2014 on behalf of Compassion & Choices among 500 likely November 2014 voters in California indicated nearly two-thirds favored a “Death with Dignity Act” ballot measure that would give a terminally ill person who is mentally competent the right to request and receive a prescription for life-ending medication from a physician.

WND » Faith
California Senate passes "right to die" bill