Natural Rights and our Constitution

We've had some spirited conversations here over Church and State this past week.  I am thankful for all of you who visit here and contribute to the conversation.

I am writing this not so much to preach to the progressives, but to establish what I believe and why I believe it.  It scares me when I encounter people, especially conservatives, who believe our rights come from the constitution.  They do not.  I also want to say that I get wound up sometimes, but I genuinely respect the views of all my interlocutors and I greatly appreciate that you take the time to come here and debate.

A Living Document or Carved in Stone?

Progressivism depends upon a "living document" constitution, malleable and subject to modern reinterpretations, while strict constructionists insist the only valid manner of "reinterpretation" is to go through the amendment process.  I am a strict constructionist, but I can see the other side's point.

But anyway, here is my argument...

Natural Rights:  The Philosophical Foundation of our Constitutional Republic

Our founding fathers were born in the age of the divine right of kings.  The ruler was the lawgiver.  Some were tyrants about it, others were merely capricious, while some were downright enlightened in their rule. England's Glorious Revolution restored some power to the people, but Parliament came to be seen as capricious, issuing commands that violated personal sovereignty instead of discovering and enshrining broadly applicable principles as they existed among the people.

The founders based their political philosophy upon concepts explained in Locke's Second Treatise. All people possess the natural rights of life, liberty and property. Man exists in a state of nature, but as Hobbes observed, life there is "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short,"  so people gather in clans and communities where mores and societal norms spring forth and evolve.

Further, societies make rules to guarantee the rights of all. As such, Enlightenment minds considered "lawmaking" an abomination. "Law discovery" is a concept more fitted to a free people, for it presupposes that laws naturally exist by history and custom of a people. Lawmakers and judges merely discover and enunciate them as the need arises. A radical concept, but our founders were radical men.

Our Constitution Binds the Government, Not the People

They wrote the constitution to charge the federal government with specific responsibilites like national defense and regulating certain activities among the states. It was written to regulate the behavior of government, not that of the citizens. It was also written with man's natural rights in mind, which is why it is short on strictures on human behavior.

In the founders' minds, there were two spheres, the public and the private. Man is the sovereign of his personal sphere and government may not intrude upon it so long as a man does not intrude upon the personal sphere of another. Government may not compel a man to surrender property to another man, or press him into involuntary service unless it is specifically stated in the constitution, such as military service.

It is significant that the only positive rights mentioned in the constitution are legal rights that protect the citizen from the state, such as habeas corpus, representation, speedy trial, etc. All other rights mentioned are negative ones, essentially the right to conduct your own affairs as you see fit so long as you allow others to do the same.

There are no rights to food, or shelter or other material things. Indeed Hamilton and others argued against a Bill of Rights because they feared craven officials would use such a list to claim that other rights were excluded since they were not mentioned, or that listing them would give a pretext for government to claim to be the source of them and therefor subject to the whims of presidents and legislators.

We have no positive rights granting us the property of others

There is no right to health care, and there is no right to have others pay for it. It doesn't exist. To those who insist it does, I ask you then why you are not vociferously arguing against any religious exemption, especially the one that exempts churches from providing these services to employees? If it is a right, it may not be violated.

Does the federal government have the authority to tell a business to give things away?  That's what Obama's tissue-thin fig leaf of a compromise does.  It commands insurance companies to give stuff away.  If the government can do this, why not command grocery stores to give food away?  Better yet, solve the birth control issue by decreeing that all birth control products are free.  All someone has to do is walk in and take them.

This is the lala land we find ourselves in when government intrudes upon our personal sphere.  It has no business there, it violates the constitution, and leads to much illogic.  If goverment can tell you what kind of insurance you must provide your employees, why can't it tell you what kind of food to eat?

The reason it cannot is because nothing in the constitution authorizes it to invade the private realm of the individual.  To say otherwise is to expose us all to the whims of our elected officials and their army of bureaucrats.  It is tyranny.

Links:
Second Treatise of Civil Government - John Locke
US Constitution
Federalist Papers
See also Chapters 11, 12, and 14 of Hayek's The Constitution of Liberty (Sorry, no linky love!)

No God, No Rights

What's behind Barack Obama, NBC, Harry Reid and a host of other progressives editing God out of the Pledge of Allegiance, the Declaration of Independence, and public discourse in general?

Simply put, get rid of God (or The Creator, or Divine Providence if you prefer), and you eradicate the concept of natural rights.  Erase our natural rights, and you destroy the foundation upon which rests our constitutional republic.  Progressives hate the concept of natural rights as espoused by our founding fathers, because it stands in the way of their grandiose master plan to remake society in their own twisted image.

Awhile back, a liberal blogger said a very ignorant thing:

There is no such thing as "God given rights" because if we returned to the original state of nature, or that which was "God given" we would find ourselves bound only by our own personal power, our conscience, and or by forces superior to our own.

The rights that we enjoy today are man made rights; and as such are not "natural rights" nor are they permanently fixed.

The first sentence is incoherent, and the second absurd. They cannot be defended. The first sentence is either nonsensical or it contradicts the author's thesis. It is so poorly written that a sane person cannot tell what was intended.

The second sentence is absurd. We get our rights from man? OK. So if "man" decides to enslave all bloggers then it's OK? If man grants rights, he can take them away. This explains liberals' infatuation with strongmen like Mussolini, as well as uber-liberal Tom Friedman's current love affair with the Red Chinese politburo.  It also explains how 20th century statism was able to kill over 100 million people.

The writer didn’t even cite a philosophical work to defend his unsubstantiated claim. I know why. No credible thinker could defend this. Even if there were someone loony enough to try to defend such a preposterous supposition, it would be written in incomprehensible Cornell West psychobabble.

American liberalism is a hopeless, self-contradictory tangle, an intellectual cul-de-sac.  In contrast, our Natural Rights, as enunciated by our founding fathers, are axiomatic:

"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." (Declaration of Independence)

Yes, we have a social contract called the US Constitution, but our rights do not emanate from that document.  They are natural rights that preexist and supersede man-made institutions. 

Natural Law -- Our Foundation

Natural Law is a philosophy, a theory.  As such, it is open to debate and question, as is Christianity and global warming.  Natural Law is the philosophical foundation of our constitutional republic, and today it stands in stark contrast to the central economic planning and social tinkering of progressives.

Jonathan  Dolhenty explains:

What do we mean by "natural law"? In its simplest definition, natural law is that "unwritten law" that is more or less the same for everyone everywhere. 

To be more exact, natural law is the concept of a body of moral principles that is common to all humankind and, as generally posited, is recognizable by human reason alone. Natural law is therefore distinguished from -- and provides a standard for -- positive law, the formal legal enactments of a particular society.

To sum it up, then, we can say that the natural law:

• is not made by human beings;
• is based on the structure of reality itself;
• is the same for all human beings and at all times;
• is an unchanging rule or pattern which is there for human beings to discover;
• is the naturally knowable moral law
• is a means by which human beings can rationally guide themselves to their good.  

(Source:  Radical Academy)

Banish God, and you destroy the concept of Natural Rights.  Without natural rights, the US Constitution is a worthless piece of paper.  This opens the gates for progressive hordes to storm the citadel of individual liberty, and that is the goal of those statists who are offended by free people exercising their God-given individual rights to shoot guns, drive gas guzzlers and live however they damn well please. 

Such a free society is deeply offensive to the social engineers afflicted by Hayek's fatal conceit.

Further Reading:
Locke's Second Treatise Of Civil Government
The Principles of Natural and Politic Law