Allow me to explain further the concept of natural rights, which we should all know: Government doesn't give us rights, God gives us them from the time of conception. Rights to life, to liberty, to private property, and a host of others, but the first three are the triumvirate of the most important natural rights. Before we form governments, we are in what Thomas Hobbes calls a "State of Nature" where "life is nasty, brutish, and short." To protect our rights, we agree to form government, which is a pure and abominable, but regrettably necessary in some instances, evil, in what John Locke calls the "social contract." Government is allowed to secure our rights, but as it is the most evil institution known to man it may do nothing else but protect our rights, whenever it does otherwise it breaks the social contract and we are free to form a new government.

But here's the catch: not all rights are created equal. The most important is the right to life, without life you have no other rights. Therefore the right to life outweighs all other rights anyone may have -- that's why you'd be justified to steal food if you were starving to death or shoot an attacker. The Founding Fathers, when they said the Constitution was the highest law of the land, meant as I said before, the highest HUMAN law of the land. Since the Constitution doesn't give us our rights but God does, according to the political theory of the founding fathers, government would be failing its duty if it did not fight with every fiber of its being to defend human life.

I am a man in favour of States' Rights, but when it comes to the abridgement of preexisting natural rights, granted by God, I am more in obedience to Higher Law than the Constitution. So would be all the Founders.