Messenger
Our Rights
Posted on 2/7/2010 at 5:42:26 PM
“Human law, … is not binding upon any honest man”
All men should be entitled to two kinds of rights: – natural and artificial. Natural rights are embraced in life, liberty and the pursuits of happiness. Artificial rights consist of powers granted by legislative enactment; hence the machinery of government. …
Men do not enjoy all their rights in any government now existing. They waive the right by appointing men to make laws for the safety and convenience of the whole, allowing the majority to govern. But this is no criterion, or standard to suit the wants and capacities of the people. Every man is above the law, and can act as he pleases if he does not interfere with his neighbor’s right.
This is clearly taught in the great foundation of all law, the ten commandments. Human law, the artificial contrivance of the intellect, is not binding upon any honest man; nor should it be any more than the creeds and dogmas of bigots. Laws are for transgressors. …
Men have a right to petition and protest, and if either is unheeded by those entrusted with powers, they, the people, (oppressed) have what is denominated the reserved right of protecting themselves from insult.
Nor is it less legal for an insulted individual or community to resist oppression. For this reason, until the blood of Joseph and Hyrum Smith has been atoned for, by hanging, shooting, or staying in some manner, every person engaged in that cowardly, mean assassination, no Latter-day Saint should give himself up to the law: for the presumption is, that they will murder him in the same manner. The government has not redeemed the broken faith of the State; but upon the contrary, allowed an indicted murderer to sit in the legislative halls, whereby the whole state becomes accessory to the crime! The partaker is as bad as the thief.
Neither should civil process come in to Nauvoo, till the United States, by a rigorous effort, causes the state of Missouri and the state of Illinois to redress every man that has suffered the loss of lands, goods, or any thing else, by expulsion and the robbery from the one state and martyrdom and state plunder in the other. Commissioners can be appointed to regulate, where the clandestine forms of law might require the strange work of God to rebut it.
Let it be proclaimed to the ends of the earth that the lives of the Saints are their own property, and that they are bound to protect them, and that they will in the name of Israel’s God.
If any man is bound to maintain the law, it is for the benefit he may derive from it. No man can be compelled in a free country, to support a law that deprives him of his natural rights, when, enjoying them is no disadvantage to his neighbor. “Thus,” says Blackstone, “the statute of King Edward IV, which forbade the fine gentlemen of those times (under the degree of Lord) to wear pikes upon their boots and shoes of more than two inches in length, was a law that savored of oppression.”
Well, our charter is repealed; the murderers of the Smiths are running at large, and if the Mormons should wish to imitate their fore-fathers, and fulfil the scriptures making it “hard to kick against the pricks,” by wearing cast steel pikes about four or five inches long on their boots and shoes, to kick with, that’s the harm?
John Taylor, The Nauvoo Neighbor, 23rd April 1845.