To the Editor:

Seventy-five days after the Fourth of July in 1862, on the 75th anniversary of the signing of the Constitution, the single bloodiest day in American military history gave President Lincoln the battlefield victory he needed to issue the Emancipation Proclamation.

Just five days after the Sept. 17 Battle of Antietam, Lincoln issued the preliminary proclamation announcing his intent to free Confederate slaves.

It was arguably a blatantly unconstitutional seizure of property, especially following the 1857 Supreme Court decision in Dred Scott, which ruled that the words of the Constitution were not meant to apply to Negroes.

But it was not the first time a president ignored the Court and there is no reason it cannot be done today. In an era of activist judiciary, the assumed power of judicial review has become a license for government of men and not of laws. Its worst abuse demands correction.

Lincoln wondered aloud in his second inaugural address whether the Civil War would continue “until all the wealth piled by the bondsman’s two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn of the sword.”

Today, this nation stands guilty of the blood of tens of millions of its children, with millions more women and men psychologically scarred for life by their complicity in prenatal child killing.

It is time for a decisive, principled and precedented overruling of the Court to free the nation from this horrible disgrace, which hangs on the obscenely familiar fiction that the word ‘person’ does not apply to unborn babies.

The basis for the choice to discriminate has been simply changed from skin color to physical maturity, but the choice has been applied in a much deadlier fashion.

We need not endure another baptism by blood to give the nation this new birth of freedom from abominations.

Only a peaceful victory at the polls is needed for a truly pro-life president, openly pledged in advance, to ignore the despicable drivel of Roe v. Wade and use federal resources to shut down the killing centers.

But every announced candidate intends to preside over a nation that slays its young and meekly wait for an arrogant judiciary to reverse itself in some longed-for repeat exercise of the phantom power of judicial review, which is nowhere to be found in the Constitution.

Where is the emancipator that will free us from this curse?

Alfred Lemmo

Dearborn, Michigan