Cite?
We dont need to do anything.
We have had our government since 1791. Unalienable rights have been a resolved issue for over 200 years. I am an American! My mindset is exactly the same as all of the founding fathers. I have no conflicts, and no unanswered questions. They left a ton of letters, documents, writings, and papers for all to see and for all to understand. There are no inconsistencies.
If those other people you mention want to come here and if they want to become citizens of our country and if they agree to and pledge to follow our form of government, then there isnt any problem, nor any conflicts.
I’d have to do the research but I vaguely remember reading an article about societies struggle for an understanding of human rights and how different documents appeared at certain points in history that probably influenced the understanding of the societies and documents that followed
Then, again, you aren’t talking about rights anymore.
And, again, the fact that rights are violated somewhere doesn’t make them any less rights. If they can’t be violated then they aren’t rights in the first place and no one would bother writing them into the law any more than they do the conservation of energy.
But you want and have benefited from government services that need to be paid for, and everyone wants other people to pay what they owe. The people who deny that they need to pay taxes are thieves and hypocrites.
Once again, can you quote the section that “explicitly” says that?
I never said it does and don’t think there is. The Founders did not put anything in the constitution about what they thought was the the source of rights.
Remember that Bill of Rights thingy? That’s what was needed for the states to ratify the Constitution. That’s what counts. Not what you think the founders thought.
Again, what you think. Not what the Constitution says. Please give me an example where someones rights were provided or removed by anything but the people.
So, you’re OK with slavery. I assume you’re a woman, so I guess you’re also OK with women not having the right to vote.
Well, what if they don’t “come here”, but are from here, like most of the Mormons? But you’re missing the point. You claim that it’s self-evident what the unalienable rights are. If so, it should be self-evident to everyone. But it clearly isn’t.
So what Glenn Beck is saying is that he does not believe that we have any rights since rights are God given and Glenn Beck is pretty clearly lying when he claims to believe in God, because no one who believed in God would be a malicious propagandist for evil for a living. In short, this is more of Glenn Beck blabbing authoritative about the fictions he makes up on the spot and contradicts minutes or days later. Beck is willfully ignorant and appealing to the willfully ignorant. And he is blathering about God to cover up the lifetime of scholarship that he can’t be bothered to learn and make his audience feel good about also never having bothered to learn it and despise the people that have.
Nuff said about that.
Where do our rights come from?
Locke, Rousseau, Montesquieu, Paine, the Magna Carta, common law, experience and history were the sources that the men at the constitutional convention looked to when they were sent to Philadelphia to fix the failed Articles of Confederation. They looked at the workings of churches, Indian tribes, monarchies and republics throughout history back to ancient Athens, etc. There were compacts and charters of the colonies.
From history they looked at what problems they were trying to fix and avoid. Yes, the had the Dec of Indp and it was important to them. But remember that it was also a document that was plagiarized from history and political philosophy.
Read the Federalist Papers and the various collections of Anti-Federalist papers which were written at the time of the ratification debate and you will see a lot of what their concerns were. Madison originally strongly believed that no bill of rights was needed and proposed at the constitutional convention a template that did not include a written bill of rights. That template was modified, but by the end of the convention the changes were mostly about the power of the Senate and the counting of slaves for electoral college purposes as 3/5ths of a person. In short, Madison wrote the draft of what became the constitution. That does not make him God. By the time the Constitution was finally ratified, the one thing Madison was convinced he had done wrong was not to include a bill of rights, and he set about drafting a proposed bill of rights. With minor changes, it was adopted.
Why these particular rights were chosen and then statements added that all rights not specifically mentioned were reserved by the people means that these rights come from the people, not God. The people specifically stated they were doing that when they enacted the constitution and when their legislatures approved the amendments. Sure, God was working through the people and James Madison and history, but don’t be ignorant and substitute an understanding of Western civilization with religious conviction.
We may or may not assume that rights are universal and as unchangable as the law of gravity, but we still left with our sometimes varying understanding what they actually are, and agreeing to some common enough understanding when each of us may come from different religious belief systems, or none at all.
The problem with using religions and “God” as the source of the postulates, as the basis for the unalienable rights, is that different religions have had, and continue to have different revealed truths about rights, along with a wide variety of other things. Those who believed that human sacrifice was demanded by God or gods were just as sure of that as some here are of what they claim God says are human rights.
The key is to make belief in any particular version of God or in God or gods at all irrelevant to the issue: the rights just are. If you want to be part of this society you accept them with no further justification needed than that - they are. The UN document is an attempt to define a broad basis for the global community so that we can all function together. It may have no teeth, but it defines what we have mutually agreed is self-evident, and that is a major start.
No. Inalienable rights are by definition rights that cannot rightfully be taken away, even by a majority vote. They are a concept of what it means to be human. That concept cannot be destroyed by vote or tyranny in the same way that outlawing the use, teaching and existence of calculus cannot strike that discipline from having existed. Inalienable rights are an idea. Good luck on snuffing an idea out. It can always be reinvented even if you manage to succeed for a time.
When you say that there is no legal nexus between the Dec of Indp and the Cons, you are espousing the legal doctrine of the strict constructionist school of jurisprudence. There are other philosophies of jurisprudence in this country that do look to the Dec of Indp.
As for the Dec of Indp, it pretty strongly supports a natural rights interpretation as God’s regime:
*When, in the course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the laws of nature and of nature’s God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.
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. That to secure these rights…*
The constitution at no point in it refers to God or a creator in any way.
But it WAS! self evident to the Founding Fathers…to everyone at the time, and to everyone else who bothers to take the time to learn. The Founding Fathers just zipped right thru that since everyone pretty much agreed right away was unalienable rights were, and nobody argued against or questioned unalienable rights. If you dont believe it, or if youdont understand it, then go to a government depository library which has all of the papers, letters, notes, and debates of all the Founding Fathers - there are hundreds of thousands of pages that make it very clear.
What took some time, and some debates, were HOW to ensure those rights, how to set up the government, and how to deal with, and phase out, and set procedures, and try to get agreements of how to deal with the already existing hot potato problem of slavery that we inherited from the British.
The Founding Fathers did not create what America looked like in 1775, we inherited it from how the British made it. The Founding Fathers did not create/invent slavery, nor did they create/invent Connestoga wagons, spinning wheels, or candle wax.
However, “Unalienable rights” of a free people were not something that we “struggled with”, it was self evident to everyone and pretty darn clear to everyone what they were.
The Constitution and the Bill of Rights were meant to create a self government to takeover the country from British rule, and to PROTECT the rights of our people. The Bill of Rights did not “give” any unalienable rights to anybody.
Actually, I think that many of them pretty much are self evident; as said, no one wants to have their free speech or freedom of religion taken away. What doesn’t appear to be self evident is that those rights should be universal, that they should be written into law and enforced as rights; instead for most of history people tried operating on a model that can be simply be described as “I have rights and you don’t” which fails due to in large part its internal contradictions. If I try to oppress you and you try to oppress me and the guy over there is trying to oppress both of us, the odds are that all of us will end up oppressed. But everyone thinks that they will be the guy who gets to do the oppressing and not the one being oppressed.
Again, it really is a lot like laws against murder. Nobody wants to be murdered, so we outlaw it for everyone; even though that means you can’t just kill that annoying neighbor of yours, it’s worth it because it also means he can’t kill you. It just took a lot longer for people to realize the same principle applied to concepts like speech as well as ones like theft and murder.
I wasn’t talking about what the Founders thought in those sentences. I was talking about what they explicitly wrote in the 9th amendment. The people retain all rights, even those not listed in the BoR.
Fine. But the constitution still doesn’t say what the the source of rights is.
Well, the SCOTUS provides and removes rights all the time. Often contrary to the will of “the people”.
Susanann – why do you assume the word “creator” refers to a god?
The entire document.
The Constitution says it’s the people.
No, I’m not going to go to a “government depository library”. Why don’t you just end this debate by giving us a cite that “everyone at the time” agreed on what the unalienable rights were.
And don’t pretend that they all wanted to free the slaves, but just couldn’t because of what they inherited from the British. There were plenty who had absolutely no desire to free any slaves. Those who fiercely defended the institution of slavery.
So, to the extent that it was self evident that at least “freedom” was unalienable, their concept of freedom was something that would make us in the 21st century shudder. Except for you. You think just like the Founders, so you’re perfectly OK with slavery.
IOW, you can’t.
Then simply quote the part that says that.
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I don’t “assume” anything. I know. I also read thru, and understood, most of the detailed exact sources of papers, letters, notes, debates, etc. of many of the Founding Fathers. Try it sometime.
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It is Creator…not creator. Creator is capitalized by the Founding Fathers since the statement refers to God.
“We hold these truths to be self-evident…all men are…
endowed by their** Creator** with certain unalienable rights. That to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men.”
The Hammurabi Code held a basis for a legal system 4000 years ago, protecting against arbitrary persecution and punishment.
The Ancient Greeks agreed and codified them as “rights that spring from nature”.
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If you refuse to learn and refuse to find out, then I am not going to do your homework for you. The compete documents of so many of the Founding Fathers are Massive!!! …that is what makes it so clear, so comprehensive, so all encompasing, and so self-evident. YOu are not going to get an understanding of what the Founding Fathers did, said, and thought from an internet cite. Go do the real thing, go find out the truth, or just forget it.
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I never said that! Also, I ain’t pretending nothing! Why are you trying to change my words, or **make up stuff **that I never said, and give false implications? Since you refuse to learn about the founding and creating of our government, you also will never have any understanding as to what our Founding Fathers had to deal with in trying to set up a brand new government our of the mess that the British left us with. You gotta do 1. before you do 2. , and since you wont do 1. then you aint never going to understand this topic.