Governments don’t create rights; your rights are yours from birth

By David McElroy · May 31, 2013

Do you support First Amendment Rights? What about Second Amendment rights? Some people have favorites. They like free speech, so they support the First Amendment, but they don’t like guns, so they don’t support the Second. Someone else might support guns, so they like the Second Amendment, but they don’t think criminal suspects should have any rights, so they think the Fourth and Fifth Amendments are worthless. And so on.

If you do that, you’re confused about what rights are. It’s hard to blame you, though, because you were taught misleading information in school and you’ve grown up in a country where people don’t seem to believe you can talk about rights without finding an amendment to point to and say, “See? That’s where this right comes from.”

Contrary to what you were probably taught, the Bill of Rights doesn’t give anybody a single right. This document was simply a list of a few of the basic rights that some early U.S. politicians thought should be written down and enshrined in the Constitution to make certain that these “obvious” things were protected. But it wasn’t meant to be a complete list. The Ninth Amendment was inserted to make sure that nobody could think that this was all the rights that exist. It reads:

“The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.”

In other words, “We recognize that you have all the natural rights that are yours just because you’re a human being. We’re listing a few of them here, but that doesn’t make them more special than the ones we’re not listing.”

To understand where these men were coming from, you have to understand the intellectual environment of their day and you have to look at the other things they wrote. Look at the prominent words from early in the Declaration of Independence: “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.”

These men believed that God (or nature) grants these rights to everyone. They said so very plainly. (We’ll have to overlook the fact that they were very inconsistent in the extension of those rights to everyone. They were products of their time in that regard, and we recognize today that they were wrong to accept slavery to varying degrees.) But philosophically, they believed that certain natural rights belonged to everyone. They believed that the purpose of government was merely to “secure” those rights. Whatever form of governance we agree to should be about making sure those rights are respected, not about enforcing the will of one group on another.

So when someone asks me whether I support Second Amendment rights, for instance, I’m not sure how to respond. Yes, I believe that every human being has natural rights and that includes the right to own whatever he can morally acquire — including weapons. But I don’t believe that right comes from the Second Amendment. The amendment merely recognizes that the U.S. government has no power to infringe on one particular natural right. So the right to own a gun isn’t really a “Second Amendment right.” The Second Amendment is merely a prohibition on the U.S. government stepping on that right, even though it’s regularly ignored in various ways.

You have the right to live without interference from me, just as long as you leave me alone. This seems obvious to those of us who believe in natural rights. It’s hard for me to see how people who don’t believe in natural rights can say they believe in any rights at all, because “rights” are merely the whims of whoever has political power if they’re not natural and universal.

I’m not really interested in convincing someone that natural rights exist. There are plenty of philosophers who are far more qualified to do that than I ever will be. I’m just trying to differentiate between natural rights and “constitutional rights.”

Under the current legal system in place in this country, lawyers see rights coming from the Constitution. Pragmatically, it’s good for us when those who defend a right with a line from the document are successful in courts. But I hope I never unthinkingly say or imply that our rights come from the Constitution or any amendment or any government.

If a right comes from a government document, that right can be changed at the will of whoever holds enough power. If you believe in individual liberty, a natural rights orientation is the place from which to put forward a moral position about rights, not faith in a document that is effectively dead.

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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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