Where do those ‘unalienable rights’ really come from?

By David McElroy · July 4, 2011

Where do rights come from? That’s a foundational question for anyone who advocates individual freedom. If “unalienable rights” exist, every action that would conflict with them should be legally constrained. If rights don’t exist, they’re merely pragmatic rules of a game that can be changed at someone’s whim.

On this day in the United States, we celebrate the pronouncement by the Founding Fathers that the 13 colonies were joining together to declare political independence of Great Britain. The Declaration of Independence is one of the most important documents in the history of classical liberal thought, because it not only asserted a right to break away from the controlling political entity binding those people at the time, but it laid out the philosophical case for why people had the right to be free. (Read the text and think about what it’s really saying. It’s quite well-written, even if your history or civics teachers bored you to death with it at the time.)

When it comes to the question of rights, the text says the following:

“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.”

Thomas Jefferson’s original wording said, “We hold these truths to be sacred and undeniable,” and it was Benjamin Franklin who suggested the change to “self-evident.” To me, that says that they, too, were struggling to figure out how to explain something that they understood intuitively. (I’m not going to get into the issue of their personal contradictions because of their failure to see women and those of other races as equal, but let’s acknowledge that that blind spot was huge.)

The question of where rights come from is a complicated philosophical issue without an objective answer we can all agree on. Those who come from some form of theistic background have an easier time accepting the idea that rights come from God, that is, that they are “endowed by our Creator.” For those who are atheist or agnostic, that’s a troubling position, so humanists have worked hard to make reasonable philosophical arguments to justify rights. Some of the arguments are pretty utilitarian, which ends up seeming more like the product of pragmatism than of rights to me. But we’re coming at it from very different frameworks, so I’ll let them struggle with their philosophical issues while I struggle with mine.

As a Christian, I’m quite comfortable saying that God made us and created us to have certain basic rights among ourselves. He is supreme and isn’t bound by our civil rights, so I don’t see those as being in conflict. As I’ve previously made clear, I don’t see any contradiction between being loving individual freedom and following Jesus.

Some of my fellow Christians have come up with arguments for why rights come from God, but in specific ways. (For instance, my good friend Doug Douma has argued that our rights are rooted in scripture, although he and I disagree on that point.) There have been various other attempts by Christian philosophers to explain where rights come from. Although this is a side point, if you’re a Christian who’s interested in ideas about liberty, you might find a lot worth reading at LibertarianChristians.com.

For me, our rights come from God, but I can’t point a specific chain of airtight scriptural logic — at least not without that argument breaking down for the same reason that I find others’ arguments unsatisfying. For me, it’s a reasonable scriptural inference from what the apostle Paul talks about in several places plus the fact that Jesus never asked His followers to coerce anyone about anything.

In Romans 1:19, Paul writes, “For what can be known about God is plain to [humans], because God has shown it to them.” Then in the next chapter, in Romans 2:14, he says, “For when Gentiles, who do not have the law, by nature do what the law requires, they are a law to themselves, even though they do not have the law.” Then in Second Corinthians 3:17, Paul wrote, “Now the Lord is the Spirit, and where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom.” (I’m using the English Standard Version for the quotes here.)

Paul’s words — and other things in scripture — lead many of us to believe that God’s natural law is written on our hearts. This isn’t a satisfying answer for those who don’t believe in God. It’s also not a satisfying answer for those who want to point to a specific set of words as the source of liberty. For me, I simply accept that what I understand about the rights that everyone has is a natural and inherent thing that’s “programmed into us” at some level. Others will come to their own differing conclusions. I don’t have a need to convince anyone else of my view. It’s simply what my spirit feels. You’re free to disagree — and many will.

There are many paths to believing in human rights. The founders of this country believed we get those rights from our Creator in some way, even if they struggled to say exactly how. I agree with them. For me, I agree with James 1:25 when it refers to “…the perfect law, the law of liberty….” You won’t find any evidence that Jesus was in favor of coercing people into obeying Him. There’s no reason for His followers to coerce people, either.

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If you have problems with high blood pressure, I’d like to encourage you to consider making serious changes to your diet. There might be some people who don’t have any choice but to start taking prescription medications for high blood pressure, but I’d like to tell you that I have completely eliminated my issue by eliminating all sugar and almost all carbohydrates. (A couple of months ago, my blood pressure hit 185/144, which was dangerously high — considered stage 3 hypertension.) By completely changing my eating habits, I’m down 22 pounds and my blood pressure is now in the “ideal” range — without taking any medication. In addition, I sleep better and I have more energy. Getting away from the sugar-laden mess that we generally refer to as “highly processed food” has been a life-changer for me. Now my challenge is to avoid slipping back into old habits — by eating in the dangerous ways that almost everyone in our society has come to see as normal.

When I first heard about this, I thought it must be satire. When I discovered it was real, I was appalled, but I still thought it must be a one-time thing from some nutty activist. But it turns out it’s the latest bit of pandering to a bunch of far-left activists who believe that a man can become a woman if he decides to claim he’s a woman. As everybody knows, men have prostate glands. Women do not. Period. End of story. Men can get prostate cancer. Women cannot. But political activists are so eager to pretend that a man claiming to be a “trans woman” is really a woman that they are insisting that “women” be included in public health messages about the issue. This is nothing but political virtue-signaling. If you’re a man, you know which parts you have. You know that you ought to be screened. Nobody is made any safer by dragging far-left gender ideology into simple medical reality.

Every time someone tries to tighten requirements around the use of absentee ballots, I hear screams from Democrats and others on the political left that such efforts are nothing but “suppression of black voters.” These protests have never made sense to me, especially because it’s never been a secret that absentee ballot fraud goes on all the time in certain areas. (Everybody knew it when I worked in politics.) The people who engage in such fraud are rarely caught — often because the local political establishment approves of the crime — but a Democrat who won a primary election in Clay County, Alabama, last year has pleaded guilty to this sort of cheating. Terry Andrew Heflin was running for a place on the Clay County Commission. He was caught ordering seven absentee ballots in the names of various voters and sending them to his post office box — after which he used the ballots to vote absentee for himself seven time. Did he have other people cast additional fraudulent ballots? We’ll never know. But in a primary in which he was able to win with only 141 votes, it wouldn’t take many fraudulent votes to change the election. The next time you hear “civil rights activists” claim that it’s just “voter suppression” to hurt blacks which is at the root of efforts to stop this fraud, remember Terry Heflin. If you care about fair and honest elections, ballot security and voter identity should matter to you.

A state legislator in Maine has been stripped of the ability to speak in the state Legislature — and her votes are not being counted on legislative issues — all because she made a truthful social media post. Rep. Laurel Libby (R-Auburn, Maine) opposes allowing boys to compete against girls’ teams in school athletics and she’s become known for making an issue of it. On Feb. 17, she posted on Facebook about a recent example that she found outrageous. She posted side-by-side photos of a boy named John who competed last year in a state track event and won fifth place against other boys two years ago — and a photo of the same boy (now called Katie) who won first place in the same event this year against girls. Whether you find this outrageous or not, Libby is clearly being honest and truthful about the objective facts of an issue of public importance. But the state Legislature censured her. Democrats decreed that she could not speak in the House and that her votes would not count on legislation — until she apologized for the outrage of telling the truth. She refused and her constituents have been unrepresented in the state House since then. The people who promote this ideology are out of touch with reality and won’t rest until they force the rest of us to join them in this delusion. But even if you agree with “trans” ideology, you should be appalled at this heavy-handed attack on political speech.

The late Steve Jobs was at the center of our culture’s transition from analog to digital. He co-founded Apple Computer. He led the team that revolutionized personal computing with the first Macintosh. As CEO of Apple, he led the development of the iPhone and later the iPad. You would think the children of such a man would be surrounded by technology. But Jobs and his wife Laureen didn’t let their children use iPads. Their home had few screens of any kind. Even though Jobs spent most of his time developing and selling Macs and iPhones and iPads, he was home with his wife and children for dinner when he was in town. The family ate together at a simple wooden table in their kitchen — and there were no digital devices or focus on popular culture. Instead, he’s said to have guided his family toward deep discussions of art, philosophy and education — with no iPads to be found. If the man who guided the development of such products chose a different path for his own children, does that suggest that his digital experience taught him that children need human connection, not screens? And does it suggest the possibility that we might be better off if we made the same choice for our families?

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