Equal Rights?

 

The Purpose of the Bill of Rights

It is a common misconception that the Bill of Rights grants certain rights to citizens.  It does no such thing.  The Bill of Rights recognizes God-given, inalienable rights.  What, then, is an inalienable right?  An inalienable right is an intrinsic liberty, granted to you by God that creates no countervailing obligation on another.  Inalienable rights are symmetrical: I recognize them in you, and you recognize them in me. 

The Second Amendment is clearly one such right, as the right to self-defense is absolute.  Make no mistake: the Second Amendment is not about hunting, or plinking.  It's about repelling intruders and tyrants with deadly force.  The origins of the Second Amendment can be traced specifically to April 19, 1775, when the British Crown took its tyranny one step too far; it marched on Lexington and Concord, seeking to confiscate the arms and ammunition of the colonists.

The Bill of Rights, by simply serving to articulate some of our God-given rights, puts the government on notice that none of these rights may be truncated in any way, irrespective of any government's incessant desires to do so — be it on guns, protest, or speech.  The government has exactly zero standing on any of these issues.

Colin McWay, Brace yourself: You're about to become a felon

Our Rights Come From God

It is a common misconception that the Bill of Rights grants certain rights to citizens.  It does no such thing. The Bill of Rights recognizes God-given, inalienable rights.  What, then, is an inalienable right?  An inalienable right is an intrinsic liberty, granted to you by God that creates no countervailing obligation on another.  Inalienable rights are symmetrical: I recognize them in you, and you recognize them in me. 

The Second Amendment is clearly one such right, as the right to self-defense is absolute.  Make no mistake: the Second Amendment is not about hunting, or plinking.  It's about repelling intruders and tyrants with deadly force.  The origins of the Second Amendment can be traced specifically to April 19, 1775, when the British Crown took its tyranny one step too far; it marched on Lexington and Concord, seeking to confiscate the arms and ammunition of the colonists.

The Bill of Rights, by simply serving to articulate some of our God-given rights, puts the government on notice that none of these rights may be truncated in any way, irrespective of any government's incessant desires to do so — be it on guns, protest, or speech.  The government has exactly zero standing on any of these issues.

Colin McWay, Brace yourself: You're about to become a felon

Equal Rights?

Violating Terrorist's Rights?

When a government earnestly seeks to root out terrorism, public opinion immediately accuses it of violating the terrorists' rights.

Alexander Solzhenitsyn, A World Split Apart. Cited by Phillip E. Johnson, The Right Questions: Truth, Meaning & Public Debate, pg.162

Special Rights May Leave You Unemployed

It makes no sense from a business standpoint to hire a black worker if a white worker can be hired with the same qualifications who can’t start a lawsuit. So what this suggests is that when you give some people special rights, those special rights have special costs, not only to other people but to the people with special rights.

Thomas Sowell, Thomas Sowell Talks About Discrimination, Race, And Social Justice

Life, Liberty, and Property Come From God

Life, faculties, production—in other words, individuality, liberty, property—this is man. And in spite of the cunning of artful political leaders, these three gifts from God precede all human legislation, and are superior to it. Life, liberty, and property do not exist because men have made laws. On the contrary, it was the fact that life, liberty, and property existed beforehand that caused men to make laws in the first place.

Frederic Bastiat

Invented “Dignity”

Since the issue of the [1948] Universal Declaration [of Human Rights], dignity has no longer been about obligation, but about claims and entitlements. The new dignity did not oblige people to strive for any moral merits or deserts; it allowed them to submit whatever claims they wished, and to justify these claims by referring to a dignity that they possessed by the mere fact of being born, without any moral achievement or effort. A person who desired to achieve the satisfaction of a pig was thus equally entitled to appeal to dignity to justify his goals as another who tried to follow the path of Socrates, and each time, for a pig and for a Socrates, this was the same dignity. A right to be a pig and a right to be a Socrates were, in fact, equal and stemmed from the same moral (or rather nonmoral, as the new dignity practically broke off with morality) source.

Having armed himself with rights, modern man found himself in a most comfortable situation with no precedent: he no longer had to justify his claims and actions as long as he qualified them as rights. Regardless of what demands he would make on the basis of those rights and for what purpose he would use them, he did not and, in fact, could not lose his dignity, which he had acquired for life simply by being born human. And since having this dignity carried no obligation to do anything particularly good or worthy, he could, while constantly invoking it, make claims that were increasingly more absurd and demand justification for ever more questionable activities. Sinking more and more into arrogant vulgarity, he could argue that this vulgarity not only did not contradict his inborn dignity, but it could even, by a stretch of the imagination, be treated as some sort of an achievement. After all, can a dignity that is inborn and constitutes the essence of humanness, generate anything that would be essentially undignified and nonhuman?

Ryszard Legutko, The Demon in Democracy: Totalitarian Temptations in Free Societies, pg.33

Wall of Shame?

I wonder if an invisible wall of shame is being built around this nation in the name of liberation. Have we fallen for a counterfeit freedom that is locking us into a prison of hopeless depravity? Are we becoming a people ruled by the ever-changing winds of general consensus in which each person does what is right in his or her own eyes?

In this liberated age have we forgotten that freedom by itself is never free—is never enough? It must always be accompanied by responsibility. No society in history ever survived when its rights became separated from its responsibilities. Has our nation’s newly acquired lifestyle enticed us into a perverted sense of freedom so that now we are held fast in a prison of liberation?

Hope MacDonald, The Flip Side of Liberation: A Call to Traditional Values, pg.14

Where Our Rights Rest

A man's rights rest in three boxes: the ballot box, jury box, and the cartridge box.

Frederick Douglas

The Prosecutor Is No Longer Just Standing By

Did churches in ancient and medieval times sometimes overstep their bounds?  Of course, but defining Christianity in terms of the sins that have been committed in its name is like defining electricity solely as that which made the electric chair.  The key question in American society is not whether church will overawe state but whether the state will deprive Christians the freedom to criticize what the Bible says is sin.  Will media and governmental leaders accept a diversity of opinion and tolerate those who say what God has said, or will any such comments be labeled Talibanesque “hate speech”?  The prosecutor is standing by.

Marvin Olasky, Standing for Christ in a Modern Babylon. pg.65

Conservative Ideology

Conservatives generally favor not only the private ownership of personal property but also of the means of production.  Some refer to such a system as capitalism, though they are using Marxist terminology when they do so.  Generally speaking, they believe that property justly acquired belongs to the owner by right.  If they subscribe to the natural law-nature rights philosophy—not all conservatives do—, they believed that private property is a natural right.  Conservatives usually do not subscribe to the current doctrine of “human rights” because it is a phrase contrived to leave property rights out of the definition of rights.  Conservatives favor freedom of enterprise, though they differ among themselves as to the extent to which it should prevail.  They generally tend to oppose both government intervention in enterprise by regulation and control or government engaging in economic undertakings.  They tend to favor a free market, oppose the exclusion of foreigners from the American market or the granting of monopolies by government.  They differ considerably over the desirability of “antitrust” legislation, but it has bee in effect for so long that it rarely comes up as an issue.

As a rule, conservatives are constitutionalists.  That is, they believe in limited government.  They hold that government is a dangerous instrument, and that it is necessary  to take measures to contain and restrict it.  The American approach to that has been by having written constitutions.  These written constitutions are a contract between the governors and the governed.  Generally, conservatives favor a government of laws and not of men, and that the law for the United States government is the United States Constitution.  Conservatives do not accept out of hand the notion that the Constitution is what the courts say it is, since it is a written document.  They differ somewhat over the extent to which they would accept the view that a written constitution can properly be changed by judicial construction.  Traditionalists, who may be in the Catholic or English tradition, would tend to attach greater significance to court precedents than do conservatives in the Protestant tradition.  The latter tend to view a written constitution as fixed until it is amended by the regular and prescribed process.

Conservatives tend to be individualists.  If the sole issue were the individual versus the collective, as in collectivism, they would be almost invariably individualists.  They accept the primacy of the individual, his first ness and vastness, though most believe that in regard to the rights of the individual these are bounded by the necessities of living in society and of cooperation with others.

Conservatives tend to have the greatest respect and attachment for those organizations and institutions nearest at hand to the individual: the family, the church, the local community, the neighborhood school, the local government, as well as customs, traditions, and ways of doing things rooted in locales and regions.  Not all conservatives, or those who have some affinity for conservatism, will subscribe to this hierarchy of values.  Libertarians and rationalists (those who propose to be governed by reason alone) generally do not.

As a rule, conservatives are not revolutionists, do not favor radical and disruptive change, are not utopians, tend to believe, with Jefferson, that abuses are to be tolerated as long as they are bearable, are not relativists, and tend to believe that in the midst of change there are things that endure or are eternal.  They tend to focus upon the fixities, the unchanging, the underlying order, in contrast to thoroughgoing evolutionists.  They are more favorably disposed toward order, tradition, and authority, to the nature of things, than are Liberals and the like.

Clarence B. Carson, A Basic History of the United States, Volume 5: The Welfare State 1929-1985, pg.287-289

Results of Bad Anthropology

Bad anthropology has given us natural rights without foundations or directions—a freedom of indifference but not for excellence. Bad anthropology has debased modern man’s mind so that it is unable to distinguish liberty from license, rendering man unable to think about which desires should be acted on, which preferences should be satisfied. Bad anthropology has sought to liberate man from the very communities where he finds meaning and purpose, alienating man from work, from family, and from God.

The result is a working class without the values and virtues to flourish in the condition of freedom and a ruling class more devoted to a global community of elites than to its own communities. The result is a working class increasingly isolated from meaningful relationships and thus more anxious about its future in an age of economic uncertainty and a ruling class increasingly isolated from its working-class neighbors and thus unaware of their anxieties. The result is a nation—both working class and ruling class—that increasingly lacks a transcendent orientation and thus fails to have even a decent humanistic vision.

If we do not have God for a Father, we will not see our fellow man as our brother. If we are not made in the image and likeness of God, we will not treat every life as created equal and endowed with unalienable rights—indeed, we will view our neighbors as random, meaningless cosmic dust that gets in our way.

Ryan T. Anderson, “Natural Law, Social Justice, and the Crisis of Liberty in the West”

All Freedoms Begin With Free Economy

A man’s right to work as he will, to spend what he earns, to own property, to have the state as servant and not as master, they are the essence of a free economy, and on that freedom all our other freedoms depend.

Margaret Thatcher

From “Civics” to “Social Studies”

Civics was a class that you used to be required before you could graduate from high school.  You were taught what was in the U.S. Constitution.  And after all the student rebellions in the ‘60s, civics was banished from the student curriculum and was replaced by something called social studies.  Here we live in a country that has a fabulous constitution and all these guarantees, a contract between the citizens and the government — nobody knows what’s in it.  It’s one of the best kept secrets.  And so, if you don’t know what your rights are, how can you stand up for them?

Frank Zappa

No Rights If Not Self-Aware?

If self-awareness is necessary to confer rights upon individuals then rape would be legal provided that the woman was drugged beforehand. Ideas have consequences so think before you decide what makes people valuable.

Mike S. Adams

The Rights of Merchants

The man who owns an article of trade or commerce is not obliged to sell it for any particular price, nor is the mechanic obliged to labor for any particular price.  He may say that he will not make coarse boots for less than one dollar per pair, but he has no right to say that no other mechanic shall make them for less.  The cloth merchant may say that he will not sell his goods for less than so much per yard, but has no right to say that any other merchant shall not sell for less price.  If one individual does not possess such a right over the conduct of another, no number of individuals can possess such a right.  All combinations therefore to effect such an object are injurious, not only to the individual particularly oppressed, but to the public at large. . . .

New York court, 1835, in summary of their judgment against a union which was fixing prices and not allowing non-union members to be hired. Cited, by Clarence B. Carson, A Basic History of the United States, Vol. 3: The Sections and the Civil War, 1826-1877, pg.61-62

Comment:  According to this judgment, even the government has no right to fix wages, nor do activists have the right to force people to sell products to them.  Isn’t it interesting how the modern activist judges now rule against private rights of the merchants.

Rights and Responsibilities

Each individual of the society has a right to be protected by it in the enjoyment of his life, liberty, and property, according to standing laws.  He is obliged, consequently, to contribute his share to the expense of this protection, and to give his personal service, or an equivalent, when necessary.

John Adams, cited by Clarence B. Carson, A Basic History of the United States, Vol. 3: The Sections and the Civil War, 1826-1877, pg. 47

THE Right of a Child

Children should be conceived within a relationship that will provide them with the love and care of the man and woman who gave them life.  The unborn child has a right to life, yes, and also deserves a mother and father, and where possible the mother and father who brought the child into being.  Because of human frailty, it isn’t always possible for a child to be raised in his natural family, but that should be the ideal to which our policy aspires.  And we should never intentionally deprive a child of such an upbringing.  And yet redefining marriage does precisely that.

Ryan T. Anderson, “Truth Overruled: The Future of Marriage and Religious Freedom,” pg.53

Pursuit of Happiness

The right to the “pursuit of happiness” … tends to fuse liberty and property.  It means something like this:  the right to use one’s own faculties for one’s own ends or purposes.  Happiness, it should be noted, did not then refer to some sort of subjective state of bliss, as we might nowadays suppose.  It meant rather that satisfaction that arises from developing one’s abilities and receiving the rewards from doing so.

Clarence B. Carson, in reference to the Declaration of Independence, in A Basic History of the United States, Vol. 2: The Beginning of the Republic 1775-1825, pg.25