To explain his veto of a bill that would have protected children from transgender genital mutilation, Arkansas Gov. Asa Hutchinson claimed it would be “a vast government overreach.”

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Using language similar to North Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem’s in vetoing a bill to protect girls’ sports from unfair and irrational transgender male competition, Hutchinson further claimed:

I don’t shy away from the battle when it is necessary and defensible. But the most recent action of the general assembly, while well intended, is off course. And I must veto House Bill 1570.

House Bill 1570 would put the state as the definitive oracle of medical care overriding parents, patients, and healthcare experts. While in some instances the state must act to protect life, the state should not presume to jump into the middle of every medical, human, and ethical issue. This would be, and is, a vast government overreach. . . .

Laws prohibiting husbands from beating wives in the privacy of their own home are not “big government” or “government getting involved in people’s private lives.” They comprise and define limited government performing its proper duties to secure people’s natural rights.

Laws banning doctors from harming patients are not “interfering in private matters” or “impeding informed consent.” Protecting people from murder, assault, battery, and mutilation by criminals and predators is the first and most basic government function. A state that cannot do this has no moral legitimacy to do anything else. . . .

The first duty of any legitimate government is to protect its people from serious physical violence. That’s why the most basic function of government is to field competent police and soldiers. It’s the first reason that men form governments in the first place — because one man is not likely to prevail against a band of robbers. He needs backup.

No human can be assured of any of his other natural rights if he is not first secure in his life and body. And nearly no person can secure his or her rights through this implied threat of force as a single individual. That’s why people form the mutual protection alliances we call government, which itself stems from the natural alliances created and protected by the family.

Government is therefore an extension of and the proper protector of the family. And protecting family by definition cannot include looking the other way while parents destroy their children’s bodies. Such parents are destroying their own families and therefore destroying the basis of legitimate governance. Their threatened or actual violence against their own requires restraint, which means laws backed by government force. . . .

To back all this up or understand it, you don’t even need to refer to what should be high-school-level general knowledge — but is not — by referencing the Federalist Papers, Bible, or John Locke, as I did obliquely above. It’s right there in the Declaration of Independence (emphasis added to assist people still at a first-grade level of reading and political comprehension):

We hold these Truths to be self-evident, that all Men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness — That to secure these Rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just Powers from the Consent of the Governed, that whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these Ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its Foundation on such Principles, and organizing its Powers in such Form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. . . .

Those “unalienable rights” include the right to “life.” One’s life is very obviously endangered and damaged by being manipulated into wildly unethical medical experimentation that amputates healthy organs, renders one sterile for life, increases one’s likelihood of heart attack, weakens one’s bones, is correlated with dramatic increases of suicide and mental disorders, and significantly decreases one’s life expectancy.

It is therefore the absolute first duty of Hutchinson, Noem, and every single other governor and state to ban this attack on the lives and physical well-being of their citizens. Instead, they are pretending the exact opposite is true: That it is somehow a conservative idea to defecate all over the founders’ political philosophy and allow children in their states to be mutilated by high-dollar predators wearing doctors’ white coats.

People who obviously haven’t taken five minutes to read and seriously think about the first organic document that created our nation are disqualified from any form of political leadership. That category appears to include about 99 percent of the leadership of the Republican Party — the same people who pump their fists on stages while American flags fly in the background, who tell voters they care about the American founders while lifting not a finger to implement those founders’ ideals when given the power and duty and privilege to do so by the voters.

It is no wonder at all that Republican voters are hugely dissatisfied with their alleged political representation.  . . .

Like abortion, this should be a ridiculously easy issue to take a firm stand on. Mutilating people’s bodies is wrong and must be stopped by any just government instituted to preserve the citizenry’s natural rights. . . .

It is not “limited government” to steer a flood of taxpayer cash to the human charnel profiteers at Planned Parenthood and hospital systems slavering to chop up children for profit in the name of “medicine.” Slavery is not freedom, war is not peace, and men are not women. Anyone who tries to tell you otherwise is a corrupt and dangerous fool who deserves no position of power.

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(Excerpt from The Federalist. Article by Joy Pullmann. Photo Credit: Getty Images.)