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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I have no use for the theocratic and repressive government of Iran. The people who run the country are cruel at best and evil at worst. The Iranian people deserve freedom. But I have no personal quarrel with anybody in Iran. While I’m not thrilled about a future Iranian government having nuclear weapons, I’m just as concerned about nukes in the hands of politicians in Israel, Pakistan, India, China and Russia. I’m not even thrilled with the U.S., Britain and France having them, either, because I don’t trust any politicians to be responsible with such terrible weapons. All I can say with certainty is that American taxpayers have no business attacking Iran, especially since we’re being forced to pay for this attack in order to benefit the politicians of Israel — and nobody else. If Middle Eastern countries want to fight among themselves, that’s none of my business. It’s not the business of the U.S. government, either. I have no quarrel with anybody in Iran — and having the government which claims to represent me launch an unprovoked attack against a sovereign country will only make all Americans less safe in the near future. This attack is poorly conceived and morally unjustified. Remember that when the Iranians launch attacks that we will then condemn as “terrorism.” What the U.S. is doing right now looks like terrorism to me. And let’s not forget that the attack is the latest in a long line of unconstitutional wars by various U.S. presidents — who have no legal power to declare war on their own, according to the U.S. Constitution.

A child having a tantrum understands only one thing: Did I get my way or not? He doesn’t understand the issues involved. He doesn’t understand the reasons that went into a decision. He doesn’t understand any of the things that mature and reasonable adults have to understand in order to live healthy lives. By his reaction to the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling to strike down his disastrous tariff scheme, Donald Trump shows himself to be — once more — a screaming child having a tantrum. Outside the world of mob bosses who expect to get their way every time, normal adults don’t act this way, but Trump isn’t normal. He’s an angry and vengeful man who has narcissistic personality disorder. And we are in danger as a result. Trump doesn’t understand the legal issues involved in this ruling. He doesn’t understand economics. He doesn’t understand rule of law. He doesn’t understand that he can ever be wrong. All he understands is that he didn’t get his way. And he is now a narcissistic and raging little boy who also happens to hold life-and-death power over most humans on this planet. He’s dangerous — and the system which gives him that power is even more dangerous.

Is it an attempt to blur the gender line between men and women? Or is it some weird tribute to the traditional Scottish kilt? It’s hard to say, but fashion designers keep pushing for men to wear skirts in the last few years. Both men and women in modern fashion seem oddly androgynous, as though it would be offensive for a man to look manly or for a woman to look feminine. A CNN article about the latest fashions from Paris caught my attention Monday and left me wondering about the ugly clothes the designers are hawking. If a man wants to wear a skirt — or a kilt — that’s OK with me, but I’ll stick with a traditional dark suit with a white shirt and tie. (Well, when I’m not wearing t-shirts and sweats, of course.) I always wonder who actually buys the outlandish garb from fashion designers anyway. I would be humiliated to be seen in any of this stuff, but I obviously have no sense of high fashion.

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.

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