To the editor:

Concerning Terri Schiavo, Jane Eisner asks who gave the federal government the right to usurp individual and state prerogative, that is, to intervene in the Schiavo case (Journal-World, March 23). To answer this question, one must look to history.

Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679) and John Locke (1632-1704) were English philosophers who lived through the English Civil War and tried to explain the purpose of government. Hobbes stated that before government, people lived in anarchy and that by forming government they gave up all other rights in order to obtain one right, the right to live. Locke expanded on these ideas to include the right to liberty and property and added that when a government fails to grant one of these rights it is permissible to remove it. Thomas Jefferson borrowed the ideas of Hobbes and Locke when writing the Declaration of Independence, stating that people are endowed the rights to “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” and that “to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men.”

It was therefore not only the government’s right, but its purpose, to intervene in the Schiavo case. Because life is a right, Terri Schiavo does not have to earn it by stating her will or responding to her environment (though she has done both.) When our country fails to grant the most basic of human rights, it moves away from its ultimate mission statement and towards its destruction.

John Murray,

Lawrence