Extant

\EK-stunt; ek-STANT\, adjective:

Still existing; not destroyed, lost, or extinct.

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Underage children have the ability to emancipate themselves from their own parents should their conditions of living depreciate to such a place that they are in danger of persistent or lifelong mental, emotional or physical harm. Minors across America, should the situation prove detrimental, can claim themselves the victim of abuse and gain the natural human right to be removed from a dangerous environment.

They are innocent. Terrorists are not. But merely for this reason, should they be stripped of all human rights? I thought that humans with the capacity for moral imperatives and logical reasoning had gotten beyond this point, and the Bush administration insists on tugging us back in an arrogant attempt to claim some lives worthless, or at the very least too evil to be concerned with.

Identifying torture, as the administration has, as nothing more than the actual threat of imminent death is an insult to moral agents worldwide. It undermines with such shallow intention those issues which should be foremost on our table—case in point, the rights of all humans, everywhere. People have a right not to be tortured, and by that I mean the non-morally-reprehensible definition of torture: the revoking of autonomy from a willful human by means of physical, emotional and/or mental duress. Not only is the practice unyielding in substantial or even moderate results, it fundamentally contradicts many of the most important pieces of wisdom we have gained about the worldwide respect for human life and human autonomy.

Since the introduction of agriculture, humans have survived by their very defiance of situations beyond their control. To revoke that from anyone, unless the circumstances prove so severe there is literally no other choice (and those situations are few if any) is incredibly morally reprehensible. That our own government weasels its way into re-instituting it by creating its own shallow definition to sidestep Geneva is an insult to intelligent peoples nationwide. I can’t believe we even need to prove why it’s wrong anymore! The issue should not be extant.

Well, at least I got to use the word of the day in my rant.