Last year, I wrote a column rebutting Sen. Tim Kaine’s (D., Va.) attack on a nominee for expressing his belief in natural rights that derive from God, not the government. (He later backtracked after a public outcry). Now, MSNOW host Katy Tur seems to be echoing the same concern over Speaker Mike Johnson expressing his faith in natural rights at the “Rededicate 250” rally on the mall in Washington, DC.
Those voices have seeked to distort the self-evident truth that we know so well, that our founders boldly proclaimed in the Declaration: That our rights do not derive from the government. They come from you, our creator and heavenly father.
The line clearly caused Tur some alarm. The host raised it with the show’s panelists:
What about this passage from Mike Johnson declaring that our rights do not derive from government? They come from you, our creator and heavenly father. Is this him putting God over the Declaration of Independence?
It is an astonishing question given that express reliance on God as the source for the rights declared in that document.
In my new book, Rage and the Republic: The Unfinished Story of the American Revolution, I detail how the Declaration of Independence (and our nation as a whole) was founded on a deep belief in natural laws coming from our Creator, not government. Ours was the world’s first major Enlightenment revolution based on those very natural rights.
That view is captured in the Declaration, which states, “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.”
The view stated by Kaine did exist at the founding — and it was rejected. Alexander Hamilton wrote that “The sacred rights of mankind are not to be rummaged for among old parchments or musty records. They are written, as with a sunbeam, in the whole volume of human nature, by the hand of the Divinity itself, and can never be erased or obscured by mortal power.”
The irony is that the acknowledgment of natural rights does not “put God over the Declaration of Independence.” It is the very premise of that Declaration.
As I discuss in the book, the right of the colonists to rebel was a major question debated before the Revolution. Loyalists would often cite Romans 13, in which Paul the Apostle reminds Christians that they must obey civil authorities and be loyal subjects. It would be Reverend Jonathan Mayhew to put this argument to bed, using his pulpit at Boston’s Old West Church to explore the moral foundations for both fealty and rebellion for citizens:
“His published sermon “A Discourse Concerning Unlimited Submission and Non-Resistance to the Higher Powers” was given on January 30, 1750, and proved to be one of the most significant publications leading up to the Revolution. Paine’s Common Sense would not be published for twenty-five years, and it was Mayhew who would lay out the moral right, if not obligation, to rebel when natural rights are denied. Mayhew gave the lecture on the one hundredth anniversary of the execution of Charles I, who was experiencing a revival in the minds of many as a martyr.
Mayhew would have none of it and laid out the “general nature and end of magistracy” for a people denied the rights given to them by the Creator. He directly took on the oft-cited biblical authority for those demanding blind loyalty to the King: Romans 13. In the chapter, Paul the Apostle reminds Christians that they must obey the civil authorities and be loyal subjects. The use of this passage, he argued, was a blasphemy in suggesting that a tyrant violating the very natural laws set by God could be treated as “God’s Minister.” To the contrary, there is a moral obligation to oppose such tyrants in defense of God-given rights.”
The Revolution was fought over natural rights that belonged to colonists as human beings, bestowed by God and defended by the American Revolution. The Constitution created a system that guaranteed the protection of those rights contained in the Declaration of Independence.
Speaker Johnson was speaking directly to the foundation of this Republic in reaffirming his faith in natural rights. Of course, the rejection of natural rights in academia and politics is consistent with the view that our rights evolve with a “living Constitution.” What the government giveth, the government may taketh away.
The debate reflected in Tur’s comments could not be more timely or elemental on our 250th anniversary. We must again decide not just who we were then but who we are now as Americans. There are many who want to decouple our system from natural rights as they “reimagine” American democracy and “trash” the American Constitution. It is the same Siren’s Call heard at the founding. That is precisely why Franklin was right that this remains our Republic “if [we] can keep it.”
With all the news of Trump creating a slush fund to pay reparations to criminals, his AG declaring he and his family free from IRS audits forever, and the news that he conducted close to 4000 stock trades in the first quarter of 2026 involving companies that he oversees legislation on, Turley chooses to talk about what now?…..(checks notes)…..what an MSNOW reporter said about Mike Johnson? Yeah, man – way to stay on top of the most pressing legal news stories…..
The Founding fathers were primarily mainline Protestants. They weren’t Southern evangelicals.
Here is the most important thought experiment in political philosophy and you don’t need a single philosopher to run it. Erase Locke. Erase Cicero. Erase the entire natural rights tradition. Start from scratch. You are designing a government for a free people. First question. What is government for? Protection of the people. Second question. Protection from what? From each other and external threats. Third question. Who protects the people from the government itself?
And there it is. The moment you ask that third question seriously you have independently invented the concept of rights that precede and supersede government authority. Not because any philosopher told you to. Because logic demands it. Any government powerful enough to protect you is powerful enough to destroy you. The only rational constraint on that power is an authority the government itself cannot override. That’s the root. Everything else is branches. Separation of powers. Bill of Rights. Federalism. Independent judiciary. Free press. All of it grows from that single question.
A citizenry that only understands the branches and never examined the root doesn’t actually understand the system at all. They just inhabit it. And an inhabited republic is not the same as a kept one. The Founders asked that root question obsessively. It’s on virtually every page of the Federalist Papers. It’s in the bones of the Constitution. Anyone who argues that government should decide what rights you have never asked the third question. That’s not sophisticated political thinking. That’s not even pragmatism. That’s a child’s understanding of power dressed up as constitutional theory. And every tyrant in human history has depended on exactly that assumption in the population he governed.
Now run the second thought experiment. You are a rational historically knowledgeable political actor and your entire project depends on expansive unlimited government. You have three problems. A natural rights tradition going back two thousand years to Cicero. A founding architecture built entirely on that tradition. And a citizenry that understands both. You cannot rewrite Cicero. You cannot burn the Federalist Papers. You cannot erase the Declaration.
So what do you do. You don’t attack the texts directly. You attack the formation. You go to work on the curriculum. You hollow out classical education. You replace civic literacy with social grievance. You teach students what the country did wrong and never why it was built the way it was. You produce citizens who inhabit the republic without understanding it. And here is the payoff. Citizens who never asked the third question never find the root. They see government as the source of their benefits their protections their rights their identity. A citizenry that looks to government as the source of its rights will never seriously constrain that government. You don’t have to rewrite history if you can produce a generation that never read it. You don’t have to defeat the founding philosophy in open debate if you can simply make it invisible. That’s not a conspiracy theory. That’s a curriculum. And it has been working for fifty years.
Saw a meme not long ago that said, “Not trusting the government doesn’t make you a conspiracy theorist … it makes you a history buff.”
The Far Left does not like history buffs. So they either rewrite history or, as you point out, they do not teach it at all.
Good meme. The Founders didn’t distrust government because they were paranoid. They distrusted it because they had read history and then lived under a government that proved every lesson personally. That distrust wasn’t a bug in the founding architecture. It was the entire design principle. Separation of powers. Bill of Rights. Federalism. All of it is institutionalized distrust of concentrated power. A citizenry that loses that distrust doesn’t need to be conquered. It just needs to stop reading.
This is an excellent thought experiment, and you are entirely right about the core problem: Any government powerful enough to protect you is powerful enough to destroy you.But the conclusion you draw from that third question—that rights must therefore ‘precede and supersede government authority’—is a logical leap. If we actually run your thought experiment from scratch, logic doesn’t invent natural rights. It invents the Social Contract.
Here is why the ‘root’ of our system is actually human agreement, not divine right,
Your thought experiment claims the only constraint on government power is ‘an authority the government itself cannot override.’ But think about that practically. What earthly authority can a tyrannical government not physically override? A tyrant doesn’t care if a right is written ‘by the hand of Divinity.’ History shows that tyrants routinely crush ‘natural rights’ with absolute impunity unless they are stopped by a stronger human force.
A ‘pre-existing right’ provides zero physical protection. Therefore, the constraint cannot be an abstract cosmic authority; it must be a practical, legal one.
Who protects the people from the government itself? The people do, by binding the government to a contract. In your case that contract is the constitution.
When you design a government from scratch, you don’t discover magical rights floating in the ether. Instead, you—the people—sit down and write a contract (a Constitution). You say: ‘We are giving you, the government, the power to protect us. But in exchange, you agree to these strict rules and boundaries. If you break them, the contract is void.’The power to limit the government doesn’t come from a ‘Creator’ before the government existed; it comes from the mutual consent of the governed right now.
You claim the Separation of Powers, the Bill of Rights, and the Judiciary as mere ‘branches.’ In reality, those branches are the root.
Without a system of checks and balances, an independent judiciary, and an armed or voting public to enforce the contract, ‘natural rights’ are just wishful thinking. The Founders didn’t just obsess over the third question; they obsessed over the mechanics of the answer. They knew that a piece of paper claiming God gave you freedom means nothing without a court system and a separation of powers to back it up.
A kept Republic doesn’t rely on the assumption that our rights are safely stored in heaven; it relies on the citizens understanding that we wrote the contract, we enforce the rules, and we are the ultimate authority.
Esquire, that’s the best counterargument on this thread and it deserves a straight answer. You are right that tyrants physically override natural rights with impunity. History is unambiguous on that point. But you have actually proven my argument not yours.
Your social contract requires the parties to bring something to the table before they sit down to write it. What did they bring. They brought the claim that no government may legitimately do certain things to them. Where did that claim come from. Not from the contract. The contract didn’t exist yet. They brought it from nature. From what they carried into civil society before any government existed. Call it divine endowment. Call it natural law. Call it the observable facts of living beings defending their lives and liberty before any legislature ever convened. The label doesn’t matter. The logic does. You cannot write a contract limiting government power without first asserting that government power has limits that precede the contract. Otherwise you are just asking a government to voluntarily constrain itself. Every tyrant in history has shown us exactly how that works out.
But your social contract argument skips an even more fundamental problem. Before you can write the contract you have to establish your legitimacy to write it at all. That is not a small problem. That is the whole problem. A group of colonists declaring independence from the most powerful empire on earth needed more than a good argument. They needed a claim that transcended British law. Parliamentary authority. Royal decree. They needed an authority that no earthly power could invalidate.
That is exactly what Jefferson gave them. The Declaration wasn’t a philosophical essay. It was a legal brief addressed not just to the colonists but to all of humanity and to every government on earth that would decide whether to recognize this new nation. Jefferson had to set the table before anyone could sit down to write your social contract. He did that by grounding the entire case in laws of nature and nature’s God. Rights that precede Parliament. Rights that precede the Crown. Rights that precede any government anywhere.
Without that foundation the colonists were just rebels. With it they were the legitimate representatives of a free people reclaiming what was always theirs. The Declaration didn’t follow the Constitution. It made the Constitution possible. You cannot get to your social contract without first passing through Jefferson’s legal brief. The root comes before the table. Your branches are critical. But they grow from a root you haven’t accounted for.
@ Olly,
This is good writing, and you’ve hit the nail on the head regarding the revolutionary strategy of 1776. You are 100% correct. Jefferson wrote the Declaration as a legal brief to the world, and he needed a moral authority that transcended King George III. Without the ‘laws of nature’ argument, they were legally just treasonous rebels.
But here is where the logic breaks down when we move from fighting a revolution to governing a republic. A claim used to smash an old government is not the same thing as the foundation used to build a stable one.
By confusing Jefferson’s revolutionary tool with our constitutional reality, this argument overlooks three critical flaws,
1. The Power Claim Comes from Leverage, Not Nature. They didn’t bring a claim from ‘nature.’ They brought a claim backed by collective human leverage.
If a lone individual walked up to King George and claimed ‘nature’ gave him rights, the King would have executed him. The colonists’ claim had teeth because they brought unified economic power, local militias, and a willingness to fight. What ‘sets the table’ for a contract isn’t an abstract discovery of natural law; it is the physical and political reality that a group of people have gathered enough collective power to say to a ruler: ‘You can no longer govern us without our consent.’ The root is human solidarity, not cosmic endowment.
2. You argue that you cannot write a contract limiting government power without an authority that precedes the contract, otherwise the government is just voluntarily constraining itself.
But history shows that the U.S. Constitution did exactly that, and it worked.
When the Framers wrote the Constitution in 1787, they deliberately left out a Bill of Rights. Federalists like Alexander Hamilton argued that a list of ‘natural rights’ was unnecessary and dangerous because the government’s power was already strictly limited by the explicit terms of the contract itself. The government doesn’t ‘voluntarily constrain itself’; it is mechanically constrained by the architecture of the contract—separation of powers, checks and balances, and regular elections. The constraints are structural, not theological.
3. This brings us right back to Speaker Johnson and Katy Tur.
The ‘root’ Jefferson used in 1776 was a wrecking ball designed to shatter a monarch’s legitimacy. It had to be absolute, divine, and unyielding.
But you cannot build a stable, pluralistic society out of wrecking balls. When modern politicians try to dig up that revolutionary, absolute ‘divine right’ framework and plant it inside our current legal system, they threaten the stable table of the Constitution. If a modern leader believes their rights and laws come directly from ‘Our Heavenly Father’ rather than the human text of the Constitution, they are claiming an authority that bypasses Congress, the courts, and the voters.
Jefferson’s legal brief was brilliant for 1776, but it was a declaration of war, not a blueprint for peace.
To keep a Republic, we must stop looking backward at the theological weapons used to burn down the old British house, and start fiercely defending the secular, human-made contract that keeps our current house standing. The table isn’t supported by the root of 1776; the table stands because ‘We the People’ choose to hold it up every single day.”
Esquire, best argument yet. Still doesn’t hold up.
You say the colonists’ claim had teeth because of militias and economic power and human solidarity. Not natural law. But you’ve just described every successful coup in human history. Plenty of groups assembled enough leverage to overthrow a government. What made America different wasn’t the muskets. It was the claim that this wasn’t a power grab. It was a restoration of rights the Crown had violated. Remove that foundation and you have a successful rebellion with no legitimate authority to build anything afterward. The legitimacy of the Constitution you’re defending sits entirely on the root you’re trying to cut off.
Your Hamilton point actually destroys your own argument. Hamilton said a Bill of Rights was unnecessary because the government’s enumerated powers already excluded the authority to violate them. That’s not a rejection of natural rights. That’s the strongest possible natural rights argument. The government can’t violate what it was never granted power to touch. You can’t use Hamilton to undermine the foundation Hamilton was standing on.
Here is where the whole thing collapses. You say the natural rights framework was a wrecking ball for 1776 but is too dangerous for a modern pluralistic republic. The Constitution you’re holding up as the stable alternative was written by the exact same men eleven years later. They didn’t swap out the philosophy when they picked up the pen in Philadelphia. Madison didn’t stop believing in natural rights when he designed the architecture to protect them. You want to keep the house and remove the foundation because the foundation makes you uncomfortable. That’s not defending the republic. That’s hollowing it out from the inside.
And Johnson at a prayer rally is your evidence of this threat. A man of faith praying in Christian language on the National Day of Prayer to a Christian audience. That’s the wrecking ball you’re worried about. If the republic can’t survive that it was already gone.
@ Olly,
Good defense of the founding philosophy, and I give you credit for the Hamilton nuance—you are right that his argument in Federalist No. 84 was built on the idea that the government simply lacked the authorization to touch inherent human freedoms.
However, your argument still collapses because it relies on a fundamental historical mischaracterization of what the colonists brought to the table, and it completely misreads the mechanics of the U.S. Constitution.
The Colonists Claimed “British Rights,” Not Universal Natural Rights.
Your argument hinges on the idea that the colonists derived their legitimacy from universal, abstract natural law floating in the ether. But actual history completely contradicts this.
Before 1776, the colonists did not march around demanding ‘universal human rights.’ They spent over a decade explicitly demanding the constitutional rights of Englishmen. They argued that they were entitled to the protections of the Magna Carta, the English Bill of Rights of 1689, and British common law. They revolted because Parliament was denying them the statutory, human-codified legal rights they already possessed as British subjects. They only pivoted to the abstract ‘laws of nature’ at the final hour because they needed an international legal loophole to secure a French alliance. The foundation of American liberty was built on concrete English legal precedents, not abstract mysticism.
You claim the Founders didn’t swap out the philosophy when they wrote the Constitution eleven years later. But they did.
The Declaration of Independence relies on a vertical, top-down source of power: rights descending from a Creator. The U.S. Constitution flips this completely upside down, establishing a horizontal, bottom-up source of power: ‘We the People.’
The Constitution does not look to heaven for its legitimacy; it looks to the consent of the citizens standing in the room. If the foundation of our government was intended to be natural law or a divine Creator, the Framers would have said so. Instead, they built a purely secular legal machine. They didn’t hollow out the foundation; they replaced a temporary wartime scaffolding with a permanent, human-made concrete floor.
This is when we can circle back to Speaker Johnson. Nobody is saying the Republic will collapse because a man prays. The threat is that Johnson is using his immense public platform to explicitly re-write this history.
By framing American rights as uniquely derived from ‘Our Heavenly Father,’ he is subtly trying to retroactively convert a secular, pluralistic legal contract (‘We the People’) into a sectarian covenant. If our rights are merely a human contract, they can expand to protect everyone equally. If our rights are a divine gift from a specific deity, then whoever controls the interpretation of that deity controls the rights of the citizenry. That isn’t hollowing out the Republic; that is protecting it from becoming a text-driven theocracy.
Since your argument rests entirely on the idea that the Constitution cannot be severed from the ‘Creator’ foundation of the Declaration, I have one question for you,
If the Framers believed that acknowledging a divine source of natural rights was the indispensable ‘root’ required to keep the house standing, why did they purposefully and completely omit any mention of God, Jesus, a Creator, or Natural Law from the text of the U.S. Constitution?
If it was the most important question in human history, why did the smartest political architects in history leave it out of the legal blueprint?
Esquire let’s cut to the core of your entire thesis because every argument you’ve made circles back to it. You are arguing that the Constitution replaced the Declaration’s natural rights foundation with a purely secular human contract. That We the People is the ultimate source of authority. Not nature. Not a Creator. Just human consensus.
Follow that to the end. If human consensus is the ultimate source of authority then a consensus can vote away any right it chooses. A majority can enslave a minority. A majority can silence dissent. A majority can eliminate any protection it finds inconvenient. You have no philosophical ground to stand on to say they cannot because on your theory the majority consensus IS the authority. There is no appeal beyond it. That is precisely the world the Declaration was written to prevent. That is precisely why Jefferson grounded rights in something no human consensus could override. Not to establish a theocracy. To put individual liberty beyond the reach of majorities. Beyond the reach of any government anywhere.
But here is what you’ve gotten wrong about my argument from the beginning. You’ve aimed your entire counter argument at a theological target I never set up. Natural rights are understandable by reason alone without any reference to a Creator whatsoever. Here is the simplest proof available. One person alone in a state of nature. He has a life he will defend. He has liberty he will exercise. He has the ability to pursue his own sustenance and happiness. No government exists. No consensus exists. No contract exists. Those rights exist because he exists. Now bring other people into that picture. His rights haven’t changed. Now move him into civil society. They still haven’t changed. The only thing that changed is he accepted a social compact to better secure what he already possessed.
The Creator language in the Declaration is Jefferson’s expression of where those rights ultimately originate. But the rights themselves are observable and demonstrable by pure reason before you ever open a Bible or invoke a deity. Knock down the theological argument all you want. The natural rights are still standing there waiting for you grounded in nothing more than the observable fact that human beings possess life liberty and agency before any government ever shows up to acknowledge it.
Your secular human contract doesn’t protect those rights. It just redistributes the power to violate them. The only thing standing between the individual and the majority on your theory is the goodwill of the majority. History has a very clear verdict on how reliable that is. The Declaration isn’t wartime scaffolding. It’s the only answer to the question your theory cannot survive. Who protects the individual from the consensus itself.
@ Olly,
You are accusing my thesis of circling back to a single point, while your entire defense relies on a textbook circular argument that relies on its own unproven conclusion to prove itself.
Here is why your argument is running in circles and why it fails the test of pure reason,
Your argument is circular because your proof for ‘natural rights’ relies entirely on assuming they already exist.You say: ‘A person alone in a state of nature has a life he will defend and a liberty he will exercise… Those rights exist because he exists.’This is a logical fallacy. You are confusing a biological capability with a legal right.
An animal alone in the woods has a life it will defend and a liberty to run around. Does the animal have ‘natural rights’? No. It has biological agency and the instinct to survive.
A ‘right’ is not an individual cell; it is an interpersonal agreement. A right only exists when a second human enters the picture and you both agree to respect each other’s boundaries.
By claiming that a lone individual ‘possesses rights’ simply because they are breathing, you are assuming your conclusion at the very start of your premise. That is the definition of a circular argument.
You claim that I have ‘aimed my entire counterargument at a theological target you never set up.’ But you are forgetting the entire reason this debate started.
We are not in an 18th-century philosophy seminar debating a lone man in the woods. We are debating Speaker Mike Johnson’s actual words on the National Mall.
Speaker Johnson did not use your secular ‘pure reason’ argument. He explicitly set up a theological target by swapping the text of the Declaration to claim our rights come from ‘Our Heavenly Father.’ By continually circling back to protect an abstract, secular version of natural rights, you are abandoning the very politician you set out to defend. You are fixing his argument for him because his actual, theological argument is indefensible in a secular republic.
You ask the ultimate question: ‘Who protects the individual from the consensus itself?’
You claim a secular contract cannot survive this question because a majority could just vote to enslave a minority.
But look at your own logic. You claim the answer is ‘Natural Rights.’So let’s run your experiment. The majority consensus decides to enslave a minority. The minority screams, ‘You can’t do this! Pure reason and natural law say we are free!’ The majority says, ‘We don’t care,’ and puts them in chains anyway.
What happens next? Does ‘Natural Law’ step in and break the chains? Does the ‘state of nature’ manifest and strike down the majority? No.An abstract right cannot protect you from a tyrannical majority. The only thing that has ever successfully protected an individual from a tyrannical consensus is a better-designed human contract.
The U.S. Constitution protects the individual from the majority not by magic, but by architecture: the Bill of Rights, a two-thirds requirement for amendments, an independent judiciary, and explicit structural limits on majority rule. We are protected by a contract that the majority agreed not to change easily.
Olly,
By continually circling back to the fantasy of a lone man in the woods, you are proving that your argument cannot survive the reality of modern governance.
A right is not a biological fact observable by science. A right is a sacred, human-made legal promise. Believing that your rights are safely floating in ‘nature’ makes a citizenry passive. Recognizing that our rights are nothing more than a fragile human contract means we have to stand up, look at the consensus, and fiercely enforce the rules of the contract every single day.
Good discussion Olly, you made some very good points and counter arguments, but the obvious loop you’re stuck on is evidence your argument is not holding up.
I enjoyed the discussion and I hope you did as well. Until another time perhaps.
“Your argument hinges on the idea that the colonists derived their legitimacy from universal, abstract natural law floating in the ether. But actual history completely contradicts this.”
You are profoundly mistaken.
The Founders’ writings are ripe with direct quotes from and paraphrases of John Locke’s theory of “universal, natural law.” Here are just two examples from the DoI:
Locke: Individuals have a natural right to “Life, Liberty, and Estate Property.”
DoI: A universal right to “Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”
Locke argued for a natural right to overthrow a government that usurps those rights.
Which becomes in the DoI: a “long train of abuses.”
“. . . floating in the ether.”
That is a strawman and a smear.
Though not consistent, both Locke and the Founders argue that natural law and the natural rights that flow from that law are this-worldly principles used to secure liberty, and are discoverable by reason.
“Natural Rights” do not need to be sourced to a Divinity. They can be based on human nature as shown in the most humane and successful traditions in human history.
But it should be added that basing our freedom on an ever-expanding laundry list of rights is wrong- headed to begin with. The starting point is complete freedom of society (consensual arrangements developed through time) as to which government must acquire “rights” to interfere. Social man has freedom, for which no justification is required , with which the government can interfere only with justification (“rights”).
Exactly correct. “Natural rights” emanate from whatever source an individual recognizing that they exist believes is the source of Nature. It also bears mention that the Founders were largely Unitarian believers. It is interesting that Articles I II and III specifically enumerate the sole powers that were to be entrusted in the Federal government, excluding all others. I suspect the most important impetus for the Bill of Rights was that it became obvious that some of those holding government power were ignorant of, or deliberately oblivious to, the concept of structurally limited government.
they were not “largely unitarian.” many were Deists but many were Presbyterians too.
“they were not “largely unitarian.” many were Deists but many were Presbyterians too.”
I was generalizing. In the broad scheme of Western religions, Deism and Unitarianism are not that divergent. But fine. Deism is even further removed from the concept of a hands-on God interacting with his creation than is Unitarianism. Jefferson and Franklin were Deists. The Adamses (distant cousins of mine, btw) were initially Presbyterian, but later largely embraced Unitarianism. Hamilton and Madison are a bit more ambiguous, but neither seemed to think that religious orthodoxy was the proper source for determining moral behavior. None of which detracts at all from the point I was making.
Doesn’t take away from your point? Few have heard of Deism and fewer still have heard of Unitarianism and moreover you’re glossing over non-Christian Unitarianism versus Christian Unitarianism.
Many were Presbyterians because they were Scottish. Hamilton for example, was born in Nevis but his father was a Scot. His mother was half British and half Hugenot ie Calvinist French. He was a mostly secular person there is no doubt however he was affiliated with Presbyterian churches his whole life, even if the last time he took communion he had to get it from an Episcopalian because the Presbyterians denied him. He certainly was not a Unitarian heretic. LOL
July 4 is 250 years of our experiment to come together for governance. What brought it together? Natural rights. They are what gives us the concept of a bounded government. Does the Bill of Rights lock and freeze those rights? Not exactly. The Ninth Amendment says the other Amendments are not necessarily exhaustive of natural rights. From a social contract standpoint the Bill of Rights imposes both a condition precedent and condition subsequent as bounds. It follows that what we use to form a more perfect union is the consensus we may have of natural rights outside the Constitution. When the Tim Kaines and the Katy Turs question natural rights, what are they trying to not say about unbounding the government?
I would offer that ALL of us go back a minute and stop defining natural rights, but rather begin with defining our concept of God or a higher power. Of course, primitive man, with original lack of specie-driven intelligence later borne of memory and experience, has evolved with a brain that has increased in size and complexity; -so has the human understanding of a God or Higher Power.
If we look to a God or a Divine Being as the ultimate, omniscient, omnipotent, collective POWER (think Carl Jung’s collective unconscious /unconsciousness) that evolves INNATELY over time, -instructing our shared notions and understanding of survival, protection, comity, etc.,–we can bridge the gap between natural rights and foundational, God-given rights, and I find little to no disparity.
Second, I find it amazing that we, as human species, have ceded so much power to MEDIA’s control and manipulation of public sentiment and opinion.
(p.s., I am reminded of a joke my father used to tell about the little boy who thought God lived in the family bathroom, because his father was pounding on the door, going, “God, are you still in there?!”
lin
Great point, I agree.
We need to clearly define the concept of the higher power or creator.
As a Pastafarian I believe that the universe and everything in it was created by the Flying Spaghetti Monster.
This is unequivocally the correct and only true concept of a higher power.
Nonsense.
We all know that Odin created the universe.
You are wrong.
The universe and mankind were created by Brahma.
Rubbish.
We Mayans know that the creators were Tepeu and Gucumatz.
False.
Janus was the creator.
Wrong.
There is no question that Ōmeteōtl is the creator.
I can’t believe this nonsense.
Viracocha was the creator god who rose from Lake Titicaca to fashion the sun, moon, stars, and humans out of stone.
This is unquestionably true.
You are all wrong
Bunjil was the creator spirit, responsible for shaping the landscape and establishing human tribal laws during the Dreamtime.
We Zoroastrians know the real truth of the creator.
Ahura Mazda is the supreme spirit who fashioned all things good, beautiful, and orderly in the universe.
One of these Anonymouses doesn’t have a reply link, why is that?
It’s turtles all the way down.
Oh, how original.
Rights are not granted by governments. They are either recognized or not.
I would offer that ALL of us go back a minute and stop defining natural rights, but rather begin with defining our concept of God or a higher power
Do you own a Bible? Ever come across one? Have you heard of the Book of Genesis, the first book of the Bible? first verse?
In the beginning, when God created the heavens and the earth…
Genesis 1:1
Your dissembling set aside, God is not defined by “our concept” never mind a 12 Step Alcoholics Anonymous “higher power”.
ENCYCLICAL LETTER
DEUS CARITAS EST
OF THE SUPREME PONTIFF
BENEDICT XVI
INTRODUCTION
1. “God is love, and he who abides in love abides in God, and God abides in him” (1 Jn 4:16). These words from the First Letter of John express with remarkable clarity the heart of the Christian faith: the Christian image of God and the resulting image of mankind and its destiny. In the same verse, Saint John also offers a kind of summary of the Christian life: “We have come to know and to believe in the love God has for us”.
We have come to believe in God’s love: in these words the Christian can express the fundamental decision of his life. Being Christian is not the result of an ethical choice or a lofty idea, but the encounter with an event, a person, which gives life a new horizon and a decisive direction. Saint John’s Gospel describes that event in these words: “God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him should … have eternal life” (3:16). In acknowledging the centrality of love, Christian faith has retained the core of Israel’s faith, while at the same time giving it new depth and breadth. The pious Jew prayed daily the words of the Book of Deuteronomy which expressed the heart of his existence: “Hear, O Israel: the Lord our God is one Lord, and you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul and with all your might” (6:4-5). Jesus united into a single precept this commandment of love for God and the commandment of love for neighbour found in the Book of Leviticus: “You shall love your neighbour as yourself” (19:18; cf. Mk 12:29-31). Since God has first loved us (cf. 1 Jn 4:10), love is now no longer a mere “command”; it is the response to the gift of love with which God draws near to us.
https://www.vatican.va/content/benedict-xvi/en/encyclicals/documents/hf_ben-xvi_enc_20051225_deus-caritas-est.html
The bible is a work of fiction created by committees centuries after the alleged events it seeks to portray.
The god of the Old Testament is arguably the most unpleasant character in all fiction: jealous and proud of it; a petty, unjust, unforgiving control-freak; a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser; a misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent bully.
^ Now there is a person who has never been educated ^
That is a poetic way of looking at the definition of God, and in my mind diminishes God’s greatness. God cannot be love, for God created love and everything else. God is the ultimate cause and architect of everything existing, not just love.
Lin;
A significant portion of people do not beleive in God.
But you can get to natural rights entirely without god.
While I beleive in a god, it does not matter if Nature is the creation of the God of Moses or it created itself out of nothingness.
It still exists – it has properties, and humans exist within that nature and though similar to all other creatures humans are unarguably unique is ways that not other creature approximates.
It is that uniqueness that is the foundation of the unique rights of humans – other creatures actually have
“natural rights” also – though none to the extent humans do.
I start with Free will – because it is the philosophical foundation of pretty much everything – morality, law, government – and natural rights.
While everyone does not agree that humans have free will – the ideology of the left falls apart completely without it – if you are a left wing nut, you must either accept free will – and from there natural rights, or you must accpect an entire universe of things that are at odds with core values of left wing nuts. You can not have any choices at all – without free will, you can not choose your gender. Nor do you have any protection rooted in principle for anything else left wing nuts value.
Further the discussion of Free will significantly predates the scottish enlightenment – though the scottish enlightenment like the entirety or modernity rests on free will.
@ John say,
You do not need an abstract, philosophical concept of absolute free will to believe in human rights. You just need to look at a suffering human being and decide, as a society, to create laws that protect them.
The left doesn’t rely on the illusion that humans are completely unconstrained spirits capable of choosing anything; the left focuses on changing the actual material conditions of the world so that the choices people do have are meaningful.
Your transgender issue actually disproves your point. Transgender and queer people generally do not describe their identity as a casual ‘free will choice’ they made one morning. Instead, they describe it as an innate, deeply felt aspect of their biological and psychological reality that they are discovering and realizing.The ‘choice’ isn’t in creating the identity out of nothingness; the choice is in having the courage to live authentically despite social pressures.
Left-wing and progressive philosophy is largely rooted in materialism and social construction—the understanding that humans do not exist in a vacuum.Our choices, identities, and opportunities are profoundly shaped by our biology, our psychology, our economics, and our culture. Recognizing that a person’s life outcomes are heavily influenced by their environment isn’t ‘rejecting choice’—it is simply refusing to ignore reality. A person cannot simply ‘will’ themselves out of poverty or ‘will’ systemic barriers to disappear.
“decide, as a society, to create laws that protect them.”
“Society” is an abstraction. Abstractions are incapable of thought, decision, or creation. You are rationalizing using government to get everyone else to do what you want them to do by force. That is regrettably far from unusual, but that doesn’t make it any more admirable.
Esquire
You do not want a legal system based on “human suffering” – that will lead you straight to the left.
Meeting peoples wants and needs – including eliviating suffering is precisely what people interacting privately do all the time. Whether it is the doctor curing your cold or the lawn service mowing your law, or the grocery providing you cereal. The purpose of private interactions is to meet peoples needs and wants – including aleivating suffering.
This is explicitly NOT the domain of govenrment.
It is NOT a task for government – because there is no limit to human wants and needs and no objective defintion of “suffering”.
People on public assistance in the US today have better lives than most of the world.
They have better lives than the wealthy a few centuries ago – are they “suffering”
Alleviating suffering is the domain of “positive rights” – Government is the domain of the protection of negative rights.
Government does not guarantee you liberty – it merely punishes the use of force to contrain liberty.
Government does not give you free speech – it is precluded from restricting your speech and it precludes others from using FORCE to thwart your speech.
The alleviation of suffering is about as abstract as you can get.
We debate “free will abstractly – philosophy can not even agree if it exists.
But outside of philosophical debate it is very concrete.
You may not use force to limit the freedom of another – except their use of force to limit the freedom of another.
You may not “INITIATE” the use of force.
That is pretty simple and not abstract at all.
Because humans have free will – you can not enslave them.
The left loves to rant about slavery and discrimination and all kinds of other things,.
But the left CONSTANTLY presumes what is right and what is wrong – without any consideration for WHY something is wrong.
That is actually quite important.
Much of the world is facing some form of demographic collapse. So far nations are trying to use incentives to stem that.
But in a left wing nut world where the good of society takes precedence over the individual, that means that if the negative impacts of population collapse become sufficient – that FORCE can be used.
That abortion can be outlawed, that all sexuality that is not reproductive can be outlawed. That birth control can be outlawed, that if necessary reproduction can be forced.
Every value the left holds to fervently – can be flipped if the circumstances change what is good for society as a whole.
Free Will rather than the common good, provides a moral foundation that is not built on shifting sands.
Slavery has been the norm for most of human existance. It was not considered immoral – not until the concept of individual rights became foundational.
“Your transgender issue actually disproves your point. Transgender and queer people generally do not describe their identity as a casual ‘free will choice’ they made one morning. Instead, they describe it as an innate, deeply felt aspect of their biological and psychological reality that they are discovering and realizing.The ‘choice’ isn’t in creating the identity out of nothingness; the choice is in having the courage to live authentically despite social pressures.”
The left wing nut position on issues of gender and sexuality is NOT so concrete as you assert above.
The gender and sexuality framework of the left tries to make sex and gender concurrently a choice and innate.
Reality requires it is one or the other.
We have found no biological foundation for homosexuality or gender dysphoria.
More importantly – we are not even permitted to LOOK for one.
We are required to assume concurrently that sexual orientation and gender are fluid and innate.
It is possible that if we are ever allowed to – we may find some biological driver of sexual orientation or gender.
But like massive numbers of human traits that not uniform and are at least partly fluid – we have no biological foundation for them – maybe someday we will.
Regardless – what someone FEELS about whether some trait is innate or not is irrelevant with respect to whether it is entitled to special legal protection.
There is no special legal protection for athletic ability, or musical ability, or intelligence or any of myriads of other human traits that we have far more evidence are innate than sexual orientation of gender identity.
Regardless – I have ZERO problem with differing sexual orientation and gender identity – just as I have no problem with people who have more or less athletic ability.
We provide the same exact rights to everyone – regardless of intelligence, height, musical ability. …
That includes sexual orientation and gender identity.
“Left-wing and progressive philosophy is largely rooted in materialism and social construction”
If by “social construction” you mean made up – I agree. There is no cohesive underpinnings to the left.
It is an almost random collection of values with no thread connecting them.
Which is very dangerous – it means that they can change as the wind blows.
“Our choices, identities, and opportunities are profoundly shaped by our biology, our psychology, our economics, and our culture.”
Aside from “profoundly” I would agree. Myriads of studies confirm today that factors like race, sex, culture, even economic origin point, have only limited impact on individual outcomes.
Conversely CHOICES – have massive impacts.
“Recognizing that a person’s life outcomes are heavily influenced by their environment isn’t ‘rejecting choice’”
Again – the data does NOT support the claim that any factors beyond Choice “heavily” influence outcomes.
Once other factors were more critical – not today.
That does not mean those factors no longer exist, racism is still real.
But with rare exceptions it is an occasional annoyance NOT outcome determinative.
“A person cannot simply ‘will’ themselves out of poverty ”
Correct – they have to CHOOSE to exit poverty.
Absent bad choices – nearly everyone of us – without regard to race, sex, …. will; see out economic class rise by 2 quintiles in our lifetime – so long as we avoid making Bad Choices.
This improvement does not even require making truly good choices – only avoiding bad ones.
“‘will’ systemic barriers to disappear.”
There are virtually no “systemic” barriers in the US.
All the problems that the left seeks to fix that were once systemic, today are vestigial.
Jim Crow laws are gone. Consequential prejudice is uncommon and individual.
Inconsequential prejudices are more common – also individual and of small impact.
Further ALL of these things will be better in a decade than today, and none of them will be gone EVER.
That is how the human world works – humanity improves itteratively.
It “improves” it does not “fix” problems. They get gradually better over time.
this is true of pretty much all human issues. Whether it is standard of living.
prejudice, or name your favorite choice.
It is extremely rare – and usually localized for anything to get worse over a decade.
This tends to be true whether the left or the right is in charge.
The growth rate in Europe over the past 50 years is HALF that of the US due to the weak socialism of Europe.
But Europe still grew.
Even the USSR which ultimately collapsed, still had a net improvement from 1917-1989.
It just lagged far behind the rest of the world.
The difference between right and left is not whether things will improve – but how rapidly.
Further NEITHER can deliver “utopia”.
The left CONSTANTLY tries to deliver utopian solutions – and obviously fails.
Healthcare became the huge issue in the 60’s – medicare and medicaid were supposed to fix that – they only made things worse. Hillery worked hard to fix/take over healthcare in the 90’s and fortunately failed.
Healthcare actually improved. As one pundit observed – the thing about things that can not continue to get worse is THEY DONT. Obamacare fixed problems that did not exist . It was supposed to fix everything.
Inarguably things are worse and Democrats are now pi$$ing over republicans for not fixing a mess democrats made. Regardless Healthcare is once again purportedly a huge problem.
Yet in reality it is not.
Define god?
What crap.
“Natural Rights” Each Man knows his own Truth
i.e.: ‘To Each His Own Pleasure’ | ‘Jedem Tierchen sein Pläsierchen’ : r/German
1 Corinthians 2:11
For who knows a person’s thoughts except his spirit within him? In the same way, no one knows the thoughts of God except the Spirit of God.
https://www.biblegateway.com/verse/en/1%20Corinthians%202%3A11
“I think therefore I am” -Rene Descartes
Read Tur’s question one more time. Is Johnson putting God over the Declaration of Independence? The Declaration literally says rights are endowed by our Creator. That’s not a passage from the Declaration. That IS the Declaration. Johnson didn’t put God over the Declaration. He quoted it.
The question isn’t whether Tur is biased or uninformed. The real question is how does a credentialed journalist on a national platform not know this? Same answer as always. You can get a journalism degree, a law degree, a political science degree in this country right now and never once be required to actually read the documents you’re paid to comment on.
The Founders assumed a baseline of civic literacy that we no longer require of anyone. Especially the people paid to inform the rest of us.
It is a bit much to swallow that the creator endowed rights only to white men.
Sally the Framers knew they were hypocrites. They said so. Jefferson called slavery a moral and political depravity. Madison called it the most oppressive dominion ever exercised by man. They built a framework they knew they weren’t living up to and future generations used that same framework to end slavery and expand freedom.
The principle was always bigger than the men. Douglass proved it. King proved it. You don’t fix the hypocrisy by burning down the principle. You hold the country to it.
The “principle” of natural rights does not exist. Never has.
Then slavery is moral. Then misogyny is moral. Then racial discrimination is moral.
Then any government sufficiently oppressive to prevent its citizens from revolting is moral and legitimate.
Your argument is LITERALLY Fascism.
As Musolini said
“everything in the state
nothing outside the state
nothing against the state”
In fascism – like all forms of communism and socialism – man is subservient to government.
You exist to serve the state.
Marx’s infamous “from each according to his ability, to each according to his need”
Makes YOU subservient to the state and others.
You should think about the implications of what you write before you write them
You should especially do so with respect to principles that humanity has been working on for as long as man existed.
While you are correct that the scottish enlightenment drove the american revolution, you fail to grasp that it has also driven everything that has resulted in the modern world.
That the alternatives have FAILED – Fascism – which though you are too stupid to grasp it, is what you are actually selling – FAILED, Communism failed, socialism failed.
But even the Scottish enlightenment did not burst out of nowhere.
it derives from the Magna Carte, the Bible, Martin Luthers thesis, the romnan republic, the greek democracies. All of prior human history.
Morality is created by people, just like rights. The absence of natural rights does not mean morally does not exist.
So I, as a person, can create and define my own “morality”? and my own “rights”? and even if my self-created, self-defined “morality” and “rights” are opposite to yours, each is equally valid?
@Jack
Yes. As autonomous people we can create anything we like, and hopefully we do it with consciousness – our country was founded with that in spades. You are being intentionally obtuse, and it’s annoying. If your ‘natural inclination’ in establishing your own moral base is to harm others, you have already lost the plot.
The original post was about a commentator’s ignorance of the 2nd sentence of the Declaration, but the answer to your question is in the 1st.
“Morality is created by people, just like rights. The absence of natural rights does not mean morally does not exist.”
Is it created by individuals or by governments ?
If it is created by individuals – you are back to free will and nature rights.
If you reject free will – than slavery is moral – as is the obliteration of everything you hold dear.
If it is created by individuals – are we each entitled to our own morality independent of that of others ?
Then you have anarchy.
Conversely is it created by government – then you have fascism.
I would ask you to THINK about what I wrote above – I am not just tossing terms like anarchy and fascism – they are LITERALLY the ends that each claim leads to.
In the REAL world – morality is not created by governments – nor is it really created by individuals.
It is a part of human nature – that is why nearly all humans share a common morality.
And again – you now have natural law and natural rights.
I
@ John say,
You do not need anarchy, fascism, or a mystical natural law to explain morality. You just need to look at how humans actually live.
We don’t need a Creator to tell us that slavery or oppression is wrong. We know it is wrong because we can look at the suffering of another human being, empathize with it, and collectively agree to write laws—a social contract—that forbid it. Morality isn’t stored in nature; it is actively maintained by human beings choosing to cooperate for the common good.
If morality is an inherent, objective part of ‘human nature’ that gives us natural rights, why did it take thousands of years of human struggle, wars, and explicitly written human laws to decide that slavery, segregation, and denying women the vote were immoral?
If natural law was already there, why did human governments have to write the laws to stop humans from violating it?
For thousands of years, “human nature” across global civilisations accepted slavery, royal bloodlines, and the total subjugation of women as completely moral.
Today, we collectively recognize those things as abhorrent.
If morality were a fixed “natural law” written into human biology, it would be static. The fact that morality changes proves it is a learned social framework that expands as human empathy and understanding grow.
An individual can have the capacity to make choices (free will) without those choices being backed by a mystical cosmic insurance policy (natural rights). A person can choose to be kind to their neighbor simply because they possess empathy and want to live in a peaceful neighborhood, not because an abstract ‘natural law’ told them to.
“We know it is wrong because we can look at the suffering of another human being, empathize with it, and collectively agree to write laws—a social contract—that forbid it. Morality isn’t stored in nature; it is actively maintained by human beings choosing to cooperate for the common good.”
Absolutely FALSE.
You are litterally constructing morality from “feelings” – and guaranteed that is the road to h311.
Every toitalitarian system ever conceived promised what you want, and when they attained power – they did so exactly as you suggest – by appeals to emotion.
The social contract is NOT our agreement to write laws driven by empathy or feelings.
Yes, actually morality is a direct consequence of the laws of nature.
The core to the ACTUAL social contract is that as humans we ceed the right to initiate force against others in return for the protection of government against others initiating the use of force against us.
It is a relatively simple concept. Yet, in practive often sorting out the details can be very difficult – hence the complexity of law – even without the nonsense the left has done to our law.
But add emotion in as a factor – and you will inevitably create a massive self contradictory MESS.
NEVER forget – Government is FORCE.
And it is dangerous stupid and inefficient to use FORCE to solve ANY problem that can be solved without FORCE. And there are very very very few problems that actually require FORCE.
Madison notes in federalist 51 that government exists because “men are not angels” – yet government is made of men.
Or as Lord Acton notes
Power corrupts
absolute power corrupts absolutely.
Your emotion driven conception of government will ALWAYS result in creating unnecessary power, and that will ALWAYS draw those who will seek to abuse it.
Your emotional basis for morality confuses charity with the legitimate role of government.
Further it is by its very nature infinite.
As an example – I adopted my Daughter from an orphanage in China.
Adds from places like Save the Children or Oxfam or …. get me right in the gut.
I have to be very careful to avoid them – or I would give everything I own to groups that purport to make life better for children in conditions similar to my daughter.
But most of those on the left fixate their good will on those here in the US – that is natural.
As they say “charity begins at home”.
I personally oppose spending on things like school lunch programs for poor kids – because no child in the US is poor in the way children in chinese orphanage are.
To be clear my point is not that we should spend more on chinese orphanages and less on school lunch programs, it is that the demands of charity are INFINITE.
There is absolutely no limit to the ability to find reasons for charity.
And as utopia is a complete myth there never will be a limit to the demands for charity.
You can not as the foundation for morality, the social contract or govenrment use something that is infinite in scope and demand.
If empathy is your basis for morality and govenrment and the social contract – then what is the limit ?
There are very few people in the entire world right now who are not doing better than almost all 19th century americans.
There are few if any in the US that are not better off that the extremely wealthy in 19th century america.
Why should we be crying and using the FORCE of government to address the problems of people whose lives are better than John D Rockefeller ?
You do not think this is true ?
Rockefeller had no antibiotics, no antiseptics, no IV fluids – these 3 things alone doubled life expectance.
Rockefeller had no car, no smart phone, no internet, no google.
If Rockefeller wanted to eat Strawberries in February he was $hit Out of Luck – today even poor americans can eat most anything they want regardless of whether it is in season or not.
Rockefeller had no refrigeration, no amazon, no overnight delivery.
The lavish bathrooms of the time were crap compared to most today.
Showers and baths were rare luxuries. Running water was a luxury in much of the 19th century.
Rockefeller could not order “a double decaf non-fat latte with medium foam, dusted with just the faintest whisper of cinnamon.”
Poverty still exists and will always exist – because it will always be defined on relative terms.
Two left wing nuts atleast died trying to protect illegal immigrants in the US.
The left today is fixated on the plight of illegal immigrants.
It pays NO HEED to the plight of the people in those countries that chose to stay.
Being deported to Venzeulla is being sent to h311 – but there is no sense from the left that those who never left venzuella live in h311 or need help..
My point is that empathy is fine as the basis for your individual choices – as individualks there is very little we are not free to do.
But empathy is a disasterous and immoral foundation for govenrment or the social contract.
And by that I mean it is guaranteed to lead to disaster.
2 + 2 = 4 without man just like our inalienable rights do.
@ John Say,
What you stated is literally a classic example of a false dichotomy. You assume that if you don’t believe rights are floating in the ether, you must therefore worship Mussolini. That is a wild logical leap that completely misunderstands the history of constitutional democracy.
A human-made contract is not fascism; it is the literal opposite of fascism. Here is why,
Mussolini and Adolf Hitler both argued that their regimes were justified by the ‘natural laws’ of strength, racial hierarchy, and historical destiny. They claimed their authority bypassed human-made legal systems because they were fulfilling a higher, ‘natural’ order. When you claim authority comes from a mystical source (‘Nature’ or ‘God’) rather than human consensus, you create the exact tool tyrants use to ignore constitutional checks.
In the American South, defenders of slavery did not argue from a secular contract framework. They argued from natural law. They claimed that God and Nature had created a natural hierarchy where Black people were meant to be enslaved. The abolition of slavery did not happen because people suddenly looked into the sky and saw natural rights; it happened because humans fought a war and amended the Constitution (the 13th Amendment) to make slavery legally forbidden. Human laws, not nature, ended slavery.
Slavery and discrimination were sustained for centuries by appealing to ‘Natural Rights’ and divine law.
In a true constitutional democracy, the citizens do not serve the state; the state is a tool created by the citizens to serve them. You’re confusing a contract with subservience.
Think of a business contract. If you hire a contractor to build a house, the contractor has to follow your rules. If they violate the contract, you fire them. A Constitution is a contract we made to govern ourselves. Acknowledging that we wrote the contract doesn’t mean we belong to the house; it means we own the house. Fascism is when you cannot change the contract. Democracy is when you can.
To say that rights are a human-made legal agreement does not make oppression moral. It means that we, as humans, are fully responsible for protecting each other.
Waiting for ‘Nature’ or a ‘Creator’ to stop a tyrant has never worked. Tyrants are stopped when a legally literate citizenry uses a human-made Constitution, human-made courts, and human-made laws to hold power accountable. That isn’t fascism—that is the very definition of a free Republic.
If the “principle” of natural rights does not exist, then you do not have the right to free speech. Nor to the right to life, liberty and pursuit of happiness.
@Upstate
Yes. We are seeing more trolls from the university environments of late it seems, and all they seem to know is what they have been told. Pardon the phrase, but everything is intellectual m*sturbation to them because they have never actually lived independently for even a second of their lives.
If I thought they offered good faith questions, I’d offer good faith answers. They do not. And when they are shut down by actual logic or ethics, they melt down and throw violent tantrums.
Sally, then you have a problem with Jefferson, Madison, Hamilton, Locke, Cicero and Aristotle. That’s a long argument to lose. Natural rights theory didn’t appear out of nowhere in 1776. Cicero argued for a universal law grounded in human nature two thousand years ago. The Founders built on two millennia of moral and philosophical tradition. Your position isn’t brave contrarianism. It’s just a gap in your reading list. And if natural rights don’t exist then neither does your argument against slavery, your argument for women’s suffrage or your argument for civil rights. Every one of those victories was won by appealing to rights that precede government. Throw out the principle and you throw out the wins.
“The “principle” of natural rights does not exist. Never has.”
So what PRINCIPLE does exist ?
Absent some shared fundimental principles – there is no framework for humans to coexist.
No basis for families, tribes, nations, government.
Men have spent all of human existance pondering these question.
The Scottish enlightenment did not just magically but from nowhere,
It is rooted in thousands of years of trying to understand the unique nature of humans and the implications of that.
While I beleive in a god, that beleif is NOT essential to not just my understanding of society, government, and law, but the shared understanding of most of the 8B people on earth today.
Humans are not identical – we do not share the same values etc. At the same time their unarguably is a core set of values that we all share – that is a necessity for organized coexistence.
And this is what you fundimentally misunderstand.
You can label that collection of shared values whatever you want – you can posit any source that you wish for it.
But without it, families are not possible, tribes are not possible, villages are not possible, government is not possible.
And clearly that shared CORE – significantly pre-exists government.
People far smarter than you and I have spent the entirety or human existance trying to understand that core, to construct a mental model of it and how it works. Free will is the term used to describe the root of the tree from which other constructs like natural rights follow.
BUT – that process is a process of DISCOVERY – not a process of creation.
Humans did not create free will – nature and or god did.
Humans did not create natural law – nature and or god did.
But humans have spent millennia DISCOVERING how nature structured humans – just as we have studied the start and tried to determine how nature structured the universe.
The Scottish enlightenment that you seek to reject is no different from astronomy and the rest of science
The Scottish enlightenment build on the models constructed by the Egyptians, Greeks, Romans, Hindu, and other Asians just as current astronomy built on prior models.
You are not required to accept all of that in its entirety – but the likelyhood of your discarding it and successfully starting from scratch without free will and natural rights is about as high has tossing out physics and starting over without gravity
OLLY,
One would think we would have the capability to know in today’s world, the Constitution applies to all men AND women no matter the color of their skin. But some people seem to lack that kind of insight. Or as you put it, the formation of a informed citizen.
Upstate exactly right. The Constitution doesn’t need to be reimagined or trashed. It needs to be read. The formation failure isn’t in the document. It’s in us. We stopped requiring citizens to actually understand the architecture of their own republic. The Founders assumed a baseline of civic literacy that we no longer demand of anyone. Not in our schools. Not in our media. Not in our political class. The document held up fine. The citizenry tasked with keeping it did not. Franklin wasn’t wrong. It’s a republic if you can keep it. Keeping it requires formed citizens who actually know what it says and why it was written. That’s not happening right now and this thread is exhibit A.
The declaration does not say that the creator only endowed rights to white men.
Ultimately it is that Scottish enlightenment conception of natural rights independent of govenrment that resulted in the abolition of slavery both in the UK, and the US and across the world.
It’s true that the Declaration mentions a ‘Creator,’ but treating Speaker Johnson’s speech as a simple history quiz misses the entire point of why journalists and constitutional scholars ask these questions. The concern isn’t about what the Declaration says; it’s about how a modern politician intends to govern. Everyone knows Johnson is a hard core Christian. Quoting a passage from the Declaration of Independence as a “true believer” fundamentally changes the context of what he meant.
But did Johnston just quote the text? The Declaration says people are endowed ‘by their Creator’ with rights. Speaker Johnson changed the wording at the rally to say: ‘They come from you, our creator and heavenly father.’
By shifting from the broad, deistic ‘Creator’ used by Jefferson to a specific, personal Christian prayer (‘our heavenly father’), Johnson moved from a shared national history into specific religious theology. That distinction is exactly what a good journalist is supposed to notice and question.
Keep in mind, the Declaration is a statement of philosophy. The Constitution is the actual law of the land, and ‘We the People’ purposefully left God out of it to ensure religious freedom for everyone.
When the Speaker of the House frames rights as strictly divine rather than constitutional, it raises legitimate questions about whether they believe their personal religious views should override secular laws passed by Congress or decided by the courts. Johnston has openly expressed that view.
True civic literacy means understanding that the Founders were deeply divided on this topic. Thomas Jefferson was a deist who literally cut the miracles out of the Bible with a razor blade. Benjamin Franklin was highly skeptical of organized religion.Asking how a politician views the intersection of church and state isn’t a sign of an uneducated journalist. It is the fundamental duty of a press corps operating in a constitutional republic that explicitly forbids the establishment of religion.
Jefferson acknowledged there was a God and mentioned this in the declaration. Adams in his review and support at the declaration was also insistent upon it. Franklin, who was skeptical, nevertheless, was supportive and acknowledged the assistance of the Almighty in the formation of the country. He even indicated this in the debates regarding the constitution itself. Johnson prayed to his heavenly father as a Christian to whom he acknowledges as the creator. There’s nothing to stop you if you want from praying to Allah as the creator if you so choose. Her question was not about Johnson’s reference to a Christian God, but to God in general. Her lack of understanding of the declaration and the fact that the rights entailed in it and in the constitution come largely from the Bible. If you read the sources and letters from the men who wrote these and approved them, you will find it is the most commonly quoted text.
“Her lack of understanding of the declaration and the fact that the rights entailed in it and in the constitution come largely from the Bible. If you read the sources and letters from the men who wrote these and approved them, you will find it is *the most commonly quoted text*.” (emphasis added)
You are not even close.
Start with Locke’s _Two Treatises of Government_, and work back from there to the ancient Greece.
Esquire that’s the most coherent version of this argument I’ve seen on this thread so credit where it’s due. But it still doesn’t hold up. Yes Jefferson was a deist. Yes Franklin was skeptical. They were also unanimous that rights precede government and come from something beyond it. Deist or Christian that was the shared premise. The specific theological vocabulary varied. The underlying structure did not. Your real argument is about Johnson’s personal Christianity coloring his public role. That’s a legitimate conversation. But context matters here.
Johnson was speaking at a National Day of Prayer rally. Addressing that specific audience in explicitly Christian language isn’t a constitutional crisis. It’s called knowing your room. Tur didn’t ask that question anyway. She asked whether affirming that rights come from a Creator puts God over the Declaration of Independence. That’s not sophisticated church and state analysis. That’s not knowing what the Declaration says. Those are two completely different questions and conflating them doesn’t make Tur look like a diligent journalist. It makes her look like someone who didn’t do the reading. Hold Johnson accountable for his specific theology in governance if you want. But don’t dress up basic civic illiteracy as constitutional vigilance.
@ Olly,
I appreciate the constructive pushback and the credit on the argument. You are completely right that the underlying structure for the Founders—Deist or Christian—was that rights precede government.
However, the reason this argument still falls short is that it gives Speaker Johnson a pass for ‘knowing the room’ while ignoring how he fundamentally altered the meaning of the Declaration to fit that room.
Here is why I think Katy Tur’s question was actually an act of constitutional vigilance, not civic illiteracy,
The Founders specifically chose the broad, non-sectarian term ‘Creator’ precisely so the Declaration would not favor any specific religion. It was designed to include Christians, Deists, and anyone else.When Speaker Johnson changed that to ‘You, our creator and heavenly father,’ he took a universal American premise and explicitly restricted it to a Christian one. At that moment, he didn’t just quote the Declaration; he sectarianized it.
When Tur asked if Johnson was ‘putting God over the Declaration,’ she wasn’t showing ignorance of the text. She was asking a fundamental question about political philosophy: Is Johnson using a specific religious doctrine to override the secular rules of our democracy?
If a politician asserts that rights come strictly from ‘Our Heavenly Father’ (the Christian God), the logical extension is that only laws matching their interpretation of that God are valid. This is not an abstract debate. It has immediate, real-world consequences for Reproductive rights, LGBTQ+, equality, religious minorities and atheists.
If the state’s laws conflict with a politician’s view of ‘God’s law,’ a leader who believes God is the ultimate source of governance will always choose their religion over the Constitution. That is exactly what ‘putting God over the Declaration’ means in modern political discourse.
Adding to the concern is the Speaker of the House is not a private citizen or a local pastor. He is second in the line of presidential succession and represent the entire United States government.
While it was a National Day of Prayer rally, the event was titled ‘Rededicate 250’—a explicit reference to the upcoming 250th anniversary of the United States. When the leader of the House uses a national anniversary event to re-frame the nation’s founding document through a strictly sectarian lens, it is a journalist’s literal job to flag it.
Katy Tur didn’t miss the day in history class where they taught the Declaration. She recognized that Speaker Johnson was using the historic phrase ‘Creator’ as a Trojan horse to inject modern Christian Nationalism into governance.
Asking a politician to clarify whether they answer to the secular Constitution or their personal interpretation of a divine authority isn’t civic illiteracy. It is the most vital question a journalist can ask in a free, pluralistic republic.
Esquire you’ve written the most coherent version of this argument possible and it still doesn’t hold up. Here’s why.
Your entire case rests on the claim that Jefferson’s use of Creator was deliberately broad and non-sectarian and that Johnson violated that by saying heavenly father. That’s a reasonable textual observation. But you’ve built an enormous constitutional superstructure on a very thin foundation. Jefferson was writing a universal legal brief to humanity. Johnson was speaking at a National Day of Prayer rally to an explicitly Christian audience. Those are not the same rhetorical act and holding them to identical linguistic standards is not constitutional vigilance. It’s a category error.
Your real argument isn’t about the Declaration at all. It’s about Christian Nationalism as a political threat. That’s a legitimate debate worth having on its own terms. But you have moved from a prayer rally speech to theocratic governance in one paragraph without a single piece of evidence connecting the two. That’s not a logical extension. That’s an assumption about intentions dressed up as deductive reasoning.
Here is the core problem with everything you’ve built. Johnson wasn’t standing in the well of the House arguing for the passage of legislation because it’s consistent with his theological viewpoint. He was praying at a prayer rally. Treating those as the same constitutional act is not journalism. It’s not vigilance. It’s not sophisticated church and state analysis. It’s taking a man’s private faith expressed in an entirely appropriate context and construing it as evidence of theocratic intent. When you have to work that hard to manufacture the threat the threat probably isn’t there.
@ Olly,
You have accurately diagnosed the core of my argument: this is a debate about the political framework of Christian Nationalism. And you make a fair point that we shouldn’t automatically assume a politician’s prayer at a rally dictates their legislative agenda.
But the reason this isn’t a ‘category error’ or a ‘manufactured threat’ is that Speaker Johnson himself has explicitly told us that his private faith and his public governance are completely inseparable.
Johnson Explicitly ties his faith to his Governance. When Johnson was elected Speaker, he stood before the entire House and the nation and said: ‘I believe that Scripture, the Bible, is very clear that God is the one that raises up those in authority… I think that God has ordained and allowed each one of us to be brought here for this specific moment.’
ABC News later asked him what his viewpoint was on major policy issues, he directly replied: ‘Go pick up a Bible off your shelf and read it. That’s my worldview.’
When the second-in-line to the presidency tells the public that the Bible is his legislative rulebook, a journalist is not ‘manufacturing a threat’ by tracking how he reframes the American founding at public rallies. They are simply taking him at his word.
This wasn’t a private church service or a quiet moment of personal devotion. The ‘Rededicate 250’ rally on the National Mall was a massive, highly synchronized political and religious event explicitly designed to merge American civic history with Christian theology ahead of the nation’s semiquincentennial.
When the Speaker of the House uses his official stature to headline a public, nationally broadcast event and swaps out the universal language of our founding document for sectarian prayer, it is a highly calculated public act. Treating it as mere ‘rhetoric’ ignores the entire purpose of political messaging.
The reality is, connecting a leader’s stated philosophical beliefs to their public actions is the very definition of journalism.
If a politician spent decades arguing that the Constitution is a secular contract, we would hold them to that standard. When a politician spends decades working with organizations (like the Alliance Defending Freedom) dedicated to erasing the separation of church and state, and then uses a public platform to Christianize the Declaration of Independence, a vigilant press must ask: ‘Does this leader view the Christian God as a higher authority than the U.S. Constitution?’
Katy Tur’s question may have been blunt, but it pointed directly at the most important constitutional tension of our time.
We do not have to guess at Speaker Johnson’s intentions or ‘work hard to manufacture a threat.’ He has spent his entire career openly working toward a society where civil law reflects biblical law.
Acknowledging that reality isn’t civic illiteracy or partisan paranoia—it is taking the Speaker of the House seriously, respecting his stated worldview, and holding him accountable to the secular Constitution he swore an oath to uphold.
Esquire fair enough. Johnson has said things that invite exactly this scrutiny and you’re right to hold him to his words. But here is where you still haven’t closed the case.
Saying your worldview is shaped by Scripture is not the same as governing outside the Constitution. Every politician in American history has brought a personal philosophical and moral framework to their office. Jefferson brought deism. Lincoln brought providential theology so deep it would make Johnson blush. FDR opened his D-Day address with a prayer broadcast to the entire nation. The question has never been whether a leader has a faith framework. The question is whether their actual exercise of power violates the Constitution they swore to uphold.
You’ve given me Johnson’s words. Now show me the actions. Show me the specific legislation he passed or blocked that crossed the constitutional line. Show me the specific exercise of his power as Speaker that deployed biblical law over constitutional law. Quoting Scripture in a speech isn’t a constitutional violation. Headlining a prayer rally isn’t a constitutional violation. Saying the Bible is his worldview isn’t a constitutional violation. Politicians say things like that every single day on both sides of the aisle.
Tur didn’t ask Johnson to account for a specific action. She asked whether affirming the Declaration’s own language puts God over the Declaration. That’s not holding Johnson accountable for his stated worldview. That’s not even journalism. You’ve constructed a sophisticated and legitimate concern about Christian Nationalism and then used it to retroactively justify a question that doesn’t reflect any of that sophistication. Tur gets credit for your argument. She didn’t make it.
@ Olly,
You are right that a politician’s moral framework is not a constitutional violation, and that FDR, Lincoln, and Jefferson all brought deep spiritual or philosophical lenses to the job.
However, you are demanding a standard of proof for a speaker’s intent that ignores how political power actually functions, and in doing so, your argument has circled right back to the very first point I already dismanteled.
You are asking for a smoking gun—a specific bill passed by Speaker Johnson that implements biblical law over the Constitution. But that misunderstands the role of the Speaker of the House.
The Speaker’s primary power is gatekeeping. They decide what bills never make it to the floor for a vote.
When Speaker Johnson uses his worldview to stall aid packages, block bipartisan border legislation, or quietly kill reproductive freedom bills behind closed doors, he isn’t writing a ‘Theocracy Act.’ He is using the secular levers of power to achieve theological goals.
To demand a piece of ‘biblical legislation’ as the only valid proof of intent is to ignore how policy is actually shaped in Washington. The absence of a bill explicitly titled ‘Biblical Law’ doesn’t mean the ideology isn’t driving the governance.
You’re reverting to the claim that Johnson was just ‘affirming the Declaration,’ you are pretending the linguistic shift didn’t happen. I showed you why that claim is wrong. A journalist asking whether a leader is putting their personal God over the universal text of our founding document is not ‘basic civic illiteracy.’ It is noticing that the Speaker is actively rewriting American history to favor his specific faith group. Speaker Johnson did not use the Declaration’s own language.
You claim I am retroactively projecting sophistication onto Katy Tur’s question. But Tur’s question was the shorthand version of this exact debate.
When a journalist asks, ‘Is he putting God over the Declaration?’, they are asking the foundational question of pluralism: Does this leader believe that the laws of a secular republic are subordinate to their personal interpretation of divine law?
When a leader has spent his entire legal career arguing that the separation of church and state is a myth, that question isn’t a ‘manufactured threat.’ It is the core duty of a free press.
You have built a very tidy loop. You claim that Johnson’s rhetoric at a prayer rally doesn’t matter because it’s just rhetoric, but when journalists ask about the underlying philosophy of that rhetoric, you claim they are being uneducated.
By constantly circling back to the false premise that Johnson was just ‘quoting the Declaration,’ you are missing the forest for the trees. The threat of Christian Nationalism isn’t a sudden, dramatic coup; it is the slow, deliberate reshaping of our national vocabulary by leaders who tell us exactly what their worldview is—and expect us not to pay attention when they use it.
The self-evident argument has always been the weak link rhetorically. Jefferson knew it. That’s why the Declaration doesn’t rest on self-evidence alone. It builds a case. But here’s the stronger answer. Look at nature before civil society. Every living creature defends its life. Every creature moves freely until something stops it. Every creature seeks its own sustenance. Those aren’t government grants. They’re observable facts about living beings.
What we call natural rights are simply what we bring with us into civil society from that prior state. Life. Liberty. The pursuit of sustenance and happiness. We didn’t acquire those in the social compact. We disabled portions of them temporarily and conditionally in exchange for order and protection of what remained. That’s the entire philosophical tradition the Founders were drawing from. The rights precede the government because we carried them in before the government existed. Self-evident isn’t the argument. That’s just Jefferson saying look around you.
The reasons that SOME jpournalists and purported scholars ask these questions is that they are idiots who reject actual history, as well as the entire foundations of philosophy, law, and government.
The fact that Johnson is a “hard core christian” is entirely irrelevant.
You are free to be “concerned” about anything you want. But that does not make your concerns rational or worthy of wasting public time in debate.
The issue here is whether natural rights – specifically “life liberty and the pursuit of happiness” exist independent of governmnent – not whether Johnson is a “hard core christian” or a hindu or a muslim.
NONE of those fundimentally change what the declaration means.
With certainty the declaration means something slightly different to me, than to you that to speaker johnson.
But the only SUBSTANTIAL differences that matter – are with those who REJECT the conception that rights pre-exist government and that governments are created by man to protect those rights.
That is the absolute total fundimental core to the declaration – and that is for some very bizzare reason when left wing nuts are taking issue with.
@ John Say,
The identity of the source absolutely changes the meaning of the document, and pretending otherwise is a massive oversight. The source of a right dictates its definition, its limits, and its application.
Here is why the distinction between a universal ‘Creator’ and a specific sectarian ‘God’ is the only thing that actually matters in this debate.
If you believe rights are abstract and inherent to human existence (a secular natural rights view), those rights apply to all humans equally, regardless of their beliefs.
But if a politician insists that rights are granted specifically by ‘Our Heavenly Father’—the Christian God—then by definition, the rules of that specific God become the boundaries of your rights.
History proves this isn’t a bizarre left-wing conspiracy theory; it is a mechanical reality of governance. When a politician claims their authority or their understanding of rights comes directly from the Christian God, they are laying the groundwork to argue that things forbidden by their religion (like reproductive freedom or LGBTQ+ rights) cannot possibly be ‘natural rights.’
Speaker Johnson has spent his career arguing against secularism. He has openly stated that our laws should align with Biblical principles. When he stands on the National Mall and swaps out the inclusive language of the Declaration for exclusive Christian prayer terminology, he is intentionally narrowing the definition of who counts as a full stakeholder in the American experiment.
The reason people question this is not because they ‘reject history,’ but because they understand how constitutional law works.You can believe your rights pre-exist the government all you want. But the moment a government official tries to codify their specific theology into law under the guise of ‘protecting natural rights,’ they are violating the U.S. Constitution.
The fundamental core of the American system is that government power is limited by a secular contract, not a divine mandate. Questioning a politician who tries to blur that line isn’t a waste of public time; it is the exact definition of constitutional vigilance.
Lets be CRYSTAL CLEAR.
The declaration of independence – and the entire modern conception of government rests on the fundimental understanding that
there are natural rights that exist independent of government, and that the purpose of government is protecting those rights.
That is what Turr is taking issue with.
And that is why she and all those of you who reject that assertion are off in looney land.
Turr did not engage in challenging Johnson on the litteral truth of the bible.
She challenged him on whether governments exist to protect natural rights or to create rights.
Those are two vastly different things and have nothing to do with Johnsons personal religious views.
@ John say,
I am going to respectfully push back on your assertion. To be crystal clear, Katy Tur was not challenging the concept of natural rights; she was challenging Speaker Johnson’s specific, public efforts to replace a universal American principle with a sectarian religious test.
The Declaration says rights are endowed by a ‘Creator’—a deliberately broad, deistic term chosen by Jefferson to encompass all faiths and none.
Speaker Johnson altered that to say rights come from ‘our creator and heavenly father.’
By substituting the broad “Creator” with a specific Christian prayer title (“heavenly father”), Johnson intentionally shifted the conversation away from the universal natural rights tradition and directly into his personal religious views. Pretending he didn’t do this is ignoring the literal words he spoke.
The idea that the source of natural rights doesn’t matter is a dangerous legal illusion. If you believe rights come from a generic state of nature, those rights belong to all humans equally and are defined by human reason.But if the Speaker of the House declares that rights come specifically from the Christian God, then by definition, his interpretation of the Bible becomes the boundary of your rights.
This has massive, immediate consequences for governance. When a leader claims rights are divine rather than secular, they are arguing that their personal religious beliefs override the laws passed by Congress, the decisions of the Supreme Court, and the will of the voters.
The biggest act of “looney land” thinking is confusing a philosophical manifesto with the supreme law of the land.The Declaration of Independence was a 1776 wartime press release explaining why the colonies were rebelling. The U.S. Constitution is the actual legal framework of this country, written over a decade later.
The Framers of the Constitution consciously and completely left God, Jesus, and the “heavenly father” out of the legal blueprint of our government. They did not build a system based on divine right; they built a secular system based on the consent of the governed.
Katy Tur didn’t look like an idiot; she looked like a journalist who knows the difference between a historical document and a modern politician using Christian nationalism to reframe American democracy.Insisting that our rights are a strict legal contract fiercely protected by “We the People” isn’t a rejection of the American founding—it is the literal definition of constitutional literacy.
This is incoherent, esquire. It disallows MONARCHY and THEOCRACY as political systems by hindrance, roadblock. I’m not going to take apart the rest of your miscomprehension.
You have an obvious problem with “creator”.
Nor is the most famous line in the declaration “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.” Is NOT the only mention of god or natural rights pre-existing govenrment.
“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,”
Say appreciated. And you just identified something most people miss. The Declaration grounds natural rights twice before you even get to the famous line. Laws of Nature and Nature’s God in the very first paragraph. The Creator endowed rights in the second. That’s not accidental repetition. The Founders were building a legal and philosophical case from the ground up. Rights that precede government. Rights that precede Parliament. Rights that precede any earthly authority. Tur’s question wasn’t just uninformed. It was asking whether Johnson was violating the document he was actually quoting. That’s not journalism. That’s not knowing the text.
The reason that Turr and Sally and X are completely wrong is that the CORE of the declaration of independence – while explictly referencing God multiple times, is that there is such a thing as natural rights and natural law and that the purpose of government is to protect those rights.
The left wing nut claim that government creates rights – beyond what are essentially procedural rights, such as trial by jury and the requirements for search warrants, is ludicrously stupid and absurd.
If governments are the font of rights, then are rights are whatever government decides and has the power to enforce. That is very literally Mussolini’s conception of fascism.
That is exactly what the right fears from the left, and what the left fears from the right.
The left is fearful beyond belief that Christians such as Johnson will somehow return the nation to pre-revolutionary times – where minorities and women had no rights and white men owned blacks as slaves.
That is not a rational fear. First it is not what most christians like Johnson want, and 2nd even if they did that particular flavor of christian is a small minority in this country today.
Abortion may remain a contentious issue for a long time to come – though I beleive that SCOTUS returning it to the states will help mitigate that.
No matter what you beleive regarding abortion – each of us must recognize that there are atleast 100M americans who do not share our view and who will fight to the bitter end against whatever it is that the other groups seeks to impose.
But that is the only consequential issue that is truly unsettled.
Absolutely no one is bringing back slavery.
Absolutely no one is taking away any citizens right to vote.
Absolutely no one is seeking to make homosexuality a crime again.
Or to deny anyone – homosexual Trans or whatever the same rights as other citizens.
That does not mean that everyone accepts these “lifestyles” though the majority actually do.
It just means that but for a tiny percent of the country – probably less than single digits, no one is going to try to restore the laws that were in place regarding private conduct when I was a teen.
And only idiots think that anyone is going to try to ban birth control – even conservative christians use birth control today.
There are areas of the so called “culture wars” where the left has gone too far that are being and will be reversed.
Whatever you wish to call it the supreme court has finally correctly confirmed – Reverse discrimination is discrimination on the basis of race. Where you can not discriminate against minorities on the basis of race you also can not discriminate FOR minorities.
The next is major area is the sexual indoctrination and particularly the sexual mutilation of children.
Barring science identifying a “trans gene” or devising a test that finds a biological root for Trans,
the very best the left can hope for nationwide – which is what I support is these decisions being left to parents.
But SCOTUS seems intent on allowing states to prohibit the sexual mutilation of non-adults entirely.
The last area of contention is Biological men participating in womens sports.
Anyone who thinks that is a good idea did not watch the match between Bobby Riggs and Billie Jean King.
The very best women’s player in the world with difficulty beat a 4th rate 55 year old male.
If you allow biological men to participate in Women’s sports – you might as well not have women’s sports.
There is no professional women players in any sport that can be moderately good male players.
Absolutely world class young women can beat very good 55 year old men.
But absent a 20 yr age difference – the men will dominate.
The left need have no fear that the Speaker Johnson’s of the world are going to make Birth Control illegal.
But they should rightly fear that they will lose on issues were 80% of the country is against them.
That is what is and will be rolled back.
Conversely the right has a great deal to fear from the left.
As is evident on these pages and by the actions of Biden and Obama as well as democrat governors and legislatures – there are no rights that will be allowed to stand in the way of anything the left thinks is a good idea.
McDonald should have ended the nonsense over gun control. Bruen was a b**ch slap to NY for not taking heed.
But we have atleast a dozen states trying to impose laws to severely restrict firearms rights that thase states KNOW are unconstitutional – and they have gone forward anyway.
There is good reason not to trust the left with power.
Contra claims by the left, President Trump has obeyed every court order that was possible to obey – Boasberg’s rhetroactic nonsense aside. DOJ has fought these court orders – and near universally WON – so the actual evidence is that it is lower left wing nut judges that are acting unconstitutionally and lawlessly.
Everyone in this country can TRUST that when those on the right do not get their way – they will follow the law and constitution until they can legitimately change it.
It is the Democrats that TWICE whittled down the fillibuster to pass legislation that did not have stgrong majority support. It is republicans that benefited from weakening the fillibuster.
Despite Trump’s demands – Senate Republicans have preserved what is left of the fillibuister.
But we already no it will be on the ash heap of history the instant that democrats gain a majority in the senate.
In everyway possible democrats have demonstrated that they will not follow the law and constitution.
John Say,
You likely were not aware, but the system trapped one of the words you used in the above comment due to being in the profantity filter, and hence shunted it into moderation. The word began with a B and preceded the word “slap”. I corrected it so that it would post. Avoiding this word will stop this from happening.
@ John Say,
Yourlong winding diatribe is irrelevant because it tries to turn a serious, structured debate about the separation of church and state into a pointless generic online version of a political shouting match.
It ignores the core critique of Speaker Johnson’s rhetoric and instead screams about gun control, the filibuster, and tennis matches to avoid answering the fundamental question: Should American rights be defined by a secular Constitution or a specific politician’s interpretation of a divine Creator?
We could debate the filibuster and sports regulations all day, but how does any of that change the fact that Speaker Johnson altered the literal text of the Declaration of Independence to fit a specific religious audience? If you have to resort to putting long rambling irrelevant diatribes you’re just conceding that you’ve lost the argument.
@ John Say,
The debate isn’t about whether the Declaration contains religious metaphors; it is about Speaker Johnson changing those specific metaphors to serve a modern theological agenda.
The Declaration uses universal terms: “Creator” and “Nature’s God.”
Speaker Johnson substituted those terms with: “Our creator and heavenly father.”
No one is denying that the Declaration references a higher power. What is being called out is the deliberate swapping of the broad, inclusive “Nature’s God” for an exclusive, personal Christian prayer title at a political rally.
“Nature’s God” is a explicitly Deist concept, not a Christian one.
In the 18th century, “the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God” referred to a rational clockmaker universe—a creator discovered through science, human reason, and natural laws, completely independent of biblical revelation.
Quoting the preamble of a 1776 document does not change the fact that when a modern Speaker of the House frames human rights through a strictly sectarian lens, it directly impacts real-world policy. Your bringing up “Nature’s God” is a textbook red herring to distract from the reality of Christian Nationalism’s absolute need to emphasize their God and the Devine mandate if Christianity overrules any secular notion of what rights are. It’s a means to justify exclusion rather than inclusion.
Well put Professor. I would point out God is mentioned four times in the Declaration.
MSNOW Host Raises Concern Over Speaker Johnson Expressing Belief in Natural Rights
jonathanturley brigaders Raises Concern Over anyone Expressing Belief in Natural Rights
Great now we need an article about the article…
Gee I wonder what threat natural rights are to leftys vision for humanity.
As I have stated before here on the good professor’s blog, I am not religious.
However, I do believe in natural rights. Do they come from God, a supreme being? I do not know. I will ask her when I meet her. 😉
The founders I believe captured the idea of natural rights with the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. One would think this was self-evident but in this day and age we have people like Katy Tur.
@Upstate
Same here. It is incredibly ignorant/myopic for people to presume inalienable rights automatically = religion (particularly given our founding’s separation of church and state).
Wish these folks would stop pretending and just admit they are communists and that the state is their god, and as ‘elites’ they consider themselves to be demigods, no different from royalty or the aristocracy of old. They are pathetic.
That’s me. Typo in email, I think.
James,
Agreed. As OLLY points out, people dont read the Declaration. They just parrot talking points. Not only does the Declaration need to be read, but also taught in the proper context of what it meant and how it applies to today’s America.
As I mentioned in a response to OLLY, the line, “all men are created equal,” those of us with a degree of common sense knows it applies to men AND women, and to all people of differing skin color other than white. We do not need it spelled out for us. But some throw hissy fits if it does not read like Green Eggs and Ham.
We have mentioned in the past when these people trash the Constitution, demand we get rid of it, they never offer what they think should replace it. I think that is done on purpose as if they did, everyone would call it absurd or laugh and dismiss it.
What they desire is a all powerful centralized government with them in charge. We know this by their own words.
The core flaw of the absolute natural rights argument is that a right does not practically exist if there is no legal mechanism to enforce it.
Turley believes freedom of speech is a natural right. But throughout history and even in the Bible no such ‘natural right’ exists.
Prior to the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, Black Americans theoretically possessed the “natural right” to equality and liberty. However, state governments routinely stripped them of these rights via Jim Crow laws. The “Creator” did not step in to restore them; the federal government had to pass legislation and deploy federal troops to enforce those rights.
When a politician claims rights come from a “Creator” and not the government, they open the door to a dangerous question: Which interpretation of the Creator’s will wins? That’s why those who usually claim such rights are almost always religious zealots.
In the 19th century, Southern theologians and politicians frequently used the Bible and “natural law” to argue that slavery was a natural, God-ordained hierarchy. Conversely, abolitionists used the exact same religious framework to argue that slavery was a sin against the Creator. When rights are tied to divine authority rather than human consensus, the group with the most political power gets to decide what God wants.
Turley argues that rejecting natural rights means believing “what the government giveth, the government may taketh away.” This is a false dichotomy. A “living Constitution” does not mean the government arbitrarily deletes your freedoms; it means our understanding of human dignity expands over time.
For example, the Fourteenth Amendment guarantees “equal protection of the laws.” In 1868, the government did not interpret this to mean women had the right to vote or that interracial couples could marry. Through decades of legal evolution and societal growth, the Supreme Court re-interpreted those words to expand freedoms (e.g., Loving v. Virginia). This expansion relied on judicial interpretation of text, not a sudden revelation from a Creator.
I call BS. Many things exist without the govt. Love exists, air exists etc. Why then can rights not exist without a govt?
Who would protect your right to exercise free speech absent a government? How would that work in your mind?
X, you just proved something bigger than you intended. A citizen who has to ask who protects your rights absent government has already surrendered the most fundamental premise of self-governance. The answer is you do. That’s not a philosophical abstraction. That’s the entire basis for the Second Amendment. That’s why the Founders were obsessed with an armed and informed citizenry. Not because they liked guns. Because they understood that a people who cannot conceive of protecting their own rights will eventually be incapable of governing themselves at all. Self-governance doesn’t start at the voting booth. It starts with the assumption that your rights are yours before any government ever showed up. A citizen who has outsourced that assumption to the government has already stopped being self-governing in any meaningful sense. He’s just a dependent waiting for the next election. That’s not a republic. That’s a managed population. And a managed population will always get exactly the government it deserves.
Olly, Self-governance doesn’t mean refusing to rely on a human contract; it means understanding that we are the authors and enforcers of that contract.
The suggestion that real citizens must constantly act as armed survivalists to be truly free is a romantic fantasy. A republic is kept not because individuals reject the state, but because a unified citizenry uses the rule of law, the courts, and the Constitution to ensure the state remains a servant of the people, rather than its master.
You might also want to read Rousseau and other Enlightenment philosophers. But I fully realize that the “religion” which is modern progressivism rejects the Enlightenment out of hand.
X, your first paragraph, A2.
I won’t waste good life on the remainder.
X, your entire argument fails at the first sentence. You say a right does not practically exist if there is no legal mechanism to enforce it. But where did the legal mechanism come from? Someone had to claim the authority to create it. Where did that authority come from? Not from a prior legal mechanism. You cannot bootstrap a legal system into existence using a legal system that doesn’t exist yet. The colonists had no legal mechanism under British law to create a new government. Parliament hadn’t granted it. The Crown hadn’t authorized it. The only authority they could appeal to was one that preceded every legal mechanism ever written. Rights that precede government are not made practical by legal mechanisms. Legal mechanisms are made legitimate by rights that precede them. Your enforcement tail does not wag the natural rights dog. The natural right to create the legal mechanism has to exist before the mechanism does. Everything you built your argument on sits on a foundation you just argued doesn’t exist. Pull that root and your legal mechanism has no legitimate authority to enforce anything at all.
The claim that ‘legal mechanisms are made legitimate by rights that precede them’ fails the test of reality. If a right exists independent of enforcement, then an enslaved person in 1775 possessed the ‘natural right’ to liberty. Yet, because there was no legal mechanism to enforce it, they remained physically enslaved. A right that cannot be enforced is just an abstract thought.
If a legal system is only made legitimate by a ‘natural right’ that precedes it, how do you resolve the conflict when two opposing groups both claim ‘natural law’ and the ‘Creator’ as the ultimate justification for their completely contradictory versions of human rights?Without a human-made, secular contract to act as the final judge, who decides which version of God’s law wins—the group with the best philosophical argument, or the group with the most power?
“The core flaw of the absolute natural rights argument is that a right does not practically exist if there is no legal mechanism to enforce it.”
So if the law and constitution allow slavery – you are OK with that ?
The American revolution and the declaration of independence IS the mechanism for enforcing natural rights.
The PLAIN TEXT says that the sole PURPOSE of government is to protect natural rights.
Immediately followed by the mechanism by which the failure to do so is remedied.
“it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it”
Whether you like it or not – the last word on our rights is NOT the government – it is NOT the Supreme court, it is THE PEOPLE. To the extent possible they are expected to use the democratic process to do so.
“Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed.”
We are NOT supposed to pitch a government that is abusive of our rights out the window at the drop of a hat.
But quite LITERALLY the declaration of independence EXISTS to assert that when all other options have been exhausted, “The People” may use FORCE to alter or abolish the government.
Apparently you can not read – because the mechanism for enforcing natural rights when the law fails to is right their in the declaration of independence.
I am CONSTANTLY appalled at you blindness to things that are right in front of your nose.
I would further note that – Violence is NOT the only mechanism to enforce natural rights.
As we saw in east Germany 40+ years ago – when enough people lose trust in government – that government ceases to exist.
Nor is it necescary to have millions of people marching on the street.
The mere FEAR in politicians that the people might be unhappy with them is often enough.
While January 6th was NOT an insurrection – it was also not much of a a “riot” – buit it was more than enough that Democrats made it perfectly clear they were terrified of their own people.
Hegseth was driven from the military – because idiots like Pelosi imposed a political litmus test on the national guard.
J6 shook democrats to the core. People in their 40’s 50’s 60’s and older protested a lawless and fraud riden election in large numbers. Current and former law enforcement, current and former military. Moms and Dad’s, Grandmothers.
NORMAL people protested. Not a bunch of pink haired left wing loons in pu$$y hats.
Quiet normally law abiding people protested.
The Democrat response to J6 was to call out the Gestapo and to make it clear that only left wing nuts are allowed to protest government.
And more so than anything else – this stupid left wing response to J6 is why Trump is president again.
And that is precisely how our founders imagined things would work.
The law and government are the NORMAL mechanism that natural rights are protected.
But the entire purpose of the declaration of independence is to assert that natural rights are so important and exist regardless of government, that the people are fully justified in using FORCE to abiolish the government if necescary to secure those rights.
John Say, When the U.S. Constitution legally allowed slavery, the absolute ‘natural rights’ of enslaved people did not practically exist. Saying they possessed rights in the abstract did not break their chains.
It took a bloody civil war, the physical power of the Union army, and the passage of the 13th Amendment—a human-made legal mechanism—to actually make those rights real. If you believe rights exist without legal mechanisms, you are the one who has to explain why ‘natural law’ let millions of people live and die in chains for generations without intervening.
You say the Declaration of Independence ‘IS the mechanism for enforcing natural rights.
This is factually and historically absurd. A piece of paper written in 1776 cannot enforce anything. The Declaration did not stop a single British soldier; the Continental Army did. The Declaration did not build a stable society; the U.S. Constitution did. Confusing a revolutionary press release with a legal system is the definition of civic illiteracy.
You claim that Jan 6th and the fear of the public are ‘precisely how our founders imagined things would work.’
Wrong.
When American citizens actually rose up in armed rebellion against the newly formed U.S. government over taxes during Shays’ Rebellion (1786) and the Whiskey Rebellion (1794), the Founders did not celebrate ‘natural rights.’ George Washington literally raised an army, marched out, and crushed the rebellions. The Founders built a republic of laws, not a playground for political riots. They explicitly designed the Constitution to replace political violence with the rule of law.
Your post is a giant red herring. It uses angry political talking points to avoid a simple, uncomfortable truth: a right is only as good as the legal mechanism that protects it.
You can shout about natural law all you want, but if you get arrested, you don’t wave the Declaration of Independence at the judge—you demand your constitutional right to an attorney. The contract is what keeps us free, and hiding behind a wall of culture-war grievances won’t change that.
England abolished Slavery through laws and a court decree.
The united states abolished Slavery through the bloodiest war in US history.
You say that free speech is not a natural right “historically”
Yet HISTORICALLY innumerable people have died and or KILLED to protect that and other rights.
What do you think the Magna Carte was about ? A giant FU to King John for abridging the rights of englishmen.
Why did Socrates die ?
What the h311 was the revolutionary war fought for – READ THE TEXT
“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, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, — That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government,”
You cite myriads of examples of the abuse of natural rights.
Please identify ONE of those examples that is NOT an abuse of rights BY THE GOVERNMENT ?
Further when Ghandi engaged in Civil Disobediance to “alter or abolish government” in order to secure the rights of indians – was that “the law” in action ?
When MLK engaged in civil disobediance to “alter or abolish government” in order to secure the rights of blacks – was that “the law” in action ?
As the declaration states – the PURPOSE of Government is to “SECURE THESE RIGHTS”
And as the declaration says – to the extent possible that should be done though the law and political process.
But Contra your B$ – it does NOT end there. Extra legal processes such as civil disobediance and outright revolution are to be used ONLY as a last resort – and contra your nonsense, Will only succeed if people BROADLY view the government as oppressing rather than securing their rights.
Will extremists – like Antifa or left wing nut protestors seek to change the government through violence ?
Absolutely. And without the support of the majority of the people – they will land in jail
Jonathan Turley’s argument conflates a philosophical foundation with a legal framework. While the Declaration of Independence uses the rhetorical framework of a “Creator” to justify rebelling against a king, the U.S. Constitution—the actual supreme law of the land—is a secular document that derives its authority strictly from “We the People,” not a deity.
By framing modern critiques of “natural rights” as an attempt to “trash” the Constitution, Turley overlooks a fundamental historical reality: the concept of natural rights has frequently been used to exclude marginalized groups, and our legal rights only became real when they were explicitly codified, interpreted, and enforced by the government.
Turley heavily relies on the Declaration of Independence to prove his point. However, he omits the fact that the Declaration is not a legal document. It holds no weight in a court of law. The U.S. Constitution, which is the law, consciously omits any mention of God, Jesus, or a Creator. The Framers explicitly rejected a divine mandate for the state, establishing instead a government built on a social contract.
To further my point, Turley praises the Founders’ vision of natural rights but leaves out how narrowly those rights were applied. If rights were truly universal, self-evident, and endowed by a Creator, they should have applied to everyone in 1776. In practice, “natural rights” only protected property-owning white men. For enslaved people, Indigenous populations, and women, “natural rights” provided zero protection until the government intervened with constitutional amendments and statutory laws.
X – absolute nonsense.
First – philosophical details are irrelevant. ONLY ONE issue matters – that is Do reights come from government.
Civil Rights do – but civil rights are fundimentally procedural – they are about the details of how a governmant can and can not infringe on your natural rights – they are procedural. The right to a trial by jury is a civil right.
Even the right to a trial is a civil right.
But your liberty is a NATURAL right – it does NOT come from government.
We can debate phoilosophy all you want – does it come from “the creator” as our founders claimed ? And what is “the creator” – all irrelevant to the FACT that natural rights DO NOT come from government.
Again READ the declaration – more than just one phrase
“That to secure these Rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just Powers from the Consent of the Governed, that whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these Ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it”
Rights PRE EXIST GOVERNMENT. And when government fails to protect their rights the people may alter and abolish it.
This is all true as a matter of FACT,
It is all true as a matter of ALL Political Philosophies except permutations of communism – such as socialism and fascism.
The philosophy and form of government in which all rights come from government is FASCISM.
As always you are completely ignorant of what you write, and of reality.
And you are ignorant of the text and ARGUMENTS of the declaration of independence.
If rights come from government – then how was the american revolution – or ANY revolution, or ANY efforet to change government every anything less that treason ? Hoew is it ever MORAL ?
If the source of your rights is government – then government can give or take away those rights as it chooses.
The reason the Declaration of independence is a RADICAL document – one that has been adopted by nearly every groups seeking to take down a tyranical government, is that it ABSOLUTELY asserts that Rights are independent of Government and that Governments are to be judged based on their protection of natural rights.
While the declaration is unequivocal that rights come from God – something it asserts many times,
That is NOT what is critical. Even an athiest can find truth in the declaration of independence.
Natural rights come inarguably from NATURE – you are free to beleive that nature was created by god or not.
Those rights still exist independent of government.
I would further note – independent of the existance of God or even natural rights – by the 18th century it was pretty well universally philosophically settled that Man has FREE WILL – while a premise that goes all the way back to atleast the book of Genesis, and is present in all religions millenia ago, by the 18th century the existance of FREE WILL was universally accepted.
If you wish to reject Free will – that is fine – you may do so, but doing so obliterates pretty much the entirety of the beleifs and values of the left.
Without free will – all forms of discrimination – sexism, mysognyny, racism, through to and including slavery are moral.
The foundation of all modern morality is the existance of free will.
And Free Will inarguably is not a gift of government – it is core to the nature of man.
Bravo Mr. Say. I rarely read extended comments. I find that they tend to consist of random bloviating. But your comment caught my interest and kept it. Well done.
John Say, you’re wrong as usual. Here’s why.
You say, “If rights come from government, how was the American Revolution anything less than treason? How is it ever moral?“
The answer is simple. It WAS legally treason.
Under British law, the American colonists were committing high treason against the Crown. If they had lost the war, George Washington and Thomas Jefferson would have been legally executed. The Revolution did not become legitimate because a mystical ‘nature’ validated it; it became legitimate because the colonists won the war.They established sovereignty by force, ended British legal authority, and created a new legal contract.
You say that believing rights are created by human consensus is ‘Fascism, Socialism, and Communism.
Wrong.
Fascism is a system where a single dictator or state claims absolute authority over the individual, often invoking ‘natural law,’ racial hierarchy, or mystical destiny to bypass legal limits.
A Constitutional Republic is a human social contract. It is built on the exact opposite of fascism: the idea that citizens sit down, write a legal text, and deliberately design a government with strict limits. Acknowledging that humans wrote the rules doesn’t make you a fascist; it means you understand how a constitutional democracy operates.
Having the biological capacity to make choices (Free Will) is a feature of human consciousness. It is not a legal system. Your internal free will does not stop a thief from stealing your property or a dictator from locking you up. Free will exists inside your mind; rights exist when a society creates laws to protect you. Free will is biological; rights are legal.
“’Read the Declaration!’”
You seem to think repeating the word ‘Declaration’ changes the supreme law of the land. Talk about illiteracy.
The Declaration of Independence was a 1776 revolutionary press release written to justify a war. It has zero legal authority in a modern court of law.
The U.S. Constitution is the actual law of the land.
You continually conflate the two as if they were one and the same.
The Constitution does not mention natural rights, nature’s God, or a Creator. It explicitly starts with ‘We the People’ to make it undeniably clear that the authority of the American legal system comes from human consensus, not the cosmos.
The rest of your post is just a mindless repetition of your failed argument. It’s a sign you lost the argument.
X The declaration of indepence is a “legal documentation” – absolutely it is also philosophical and rhetorical.
But as YOU admit its purpose is to justify a revolt against the king.
The declaration of indepence is the LEGAL argument – that “the rights of man” do NOT come from kings or government, and that MAN has the right to “alter or abolish” any government that is abusive of his rights.
The claim that the declaration of independence is not legal as well as philosophical is nonsense.
YO)UR Failure to understand this FUNDIMENTAL aspect of not just philosophy and morality and civics – but LAW is a major part of your adoption of a set of values that has no underlying principles.
Why is slavery wrong ?
Why is racism wrong ?
Why is misogyny wrong ?
Why is the use of violence to get your way wrong ?
Why are laws good or bad ?
Why do we have laws ?
Why does govenrment even exist ?
Reject free will, reject natural rights and you have no coherent answer to any of these.
All Morality, All law is based on the fact that humans are NOT free to do to other humans whatever they please,
That some RIGHTS exist – independent of any human authority, and that infringing on those rights is only very rarely justified.
John Say,
“The declaration of indepence is a “legal documentation” – absolutely it is also philosophical and rhetorical.”
Nope.
A legal document—like a statute, a treaty, or a constitution—can be cited in a court of law to enforce a right, overturn a regulation, or punish a crime.
The Declaration of Independence cannot do any of this. If you walk into a federal court today and base your lawsuit entirely on the Declaration of Independence, the judge will dismiss your case immediately. The U.S. Supreme Court has explicitly and repeatedly ruled that the Declaration has no force of law (e.g., Cotting v. Kansas City Stock Yards Co., 1901). It was a manifesto explaining a political separation, not a codification of enforceable law.
“Why is slavery wrong? Why is racism wrong? Reject natural rights and you have no coherent answer.’
There IS a coherent answer. We know they are wrong because we have seen the human suffering they cause, and we collectively chose to outlaw them.
You say ‘natural rights’ provide the ultimate foundation against these evils. But for nearly a century after the Declaration was signed, the American legal system openly protected slavery and racial oppression.
The abstract ‘natural rights’ written in the Declaration did not free a single enslaved person. Slavery was only abolished when humans actively amended the U.S. Constitution (the 13th Amendment) and passed civil rights laws.
You say rights exist ‘independent of any human authority.’ But a right that exists only in your head provides zero protection in the real world. If a tyrant locks you up, a ‘natural right’ to liberty will not open the cell door. An independent judiciary, a written Constitution, a writ of habeas corpus, and a secular legal mechanism will.
You keep making arguments that keep collapsing with the slightest application of rational thought.
“By framing modern critiques of “natural rights” as an attempt to “trash” the Constitution”
Because that is what they are.
“the concept of natural rights has frequently been used to exclude marginalized group”
False – exactly the opposite. Whether you like it or not the movement to end slavery, women’s suffrage, racial equality are all rooted in natural rights arguments. Absolutely there are always idiots who turn arguments on their head and claim up is down and left is right – YOU do that here every single day.
But your lies nor those of others do not alter reality.
In Every example you cite where peoples natural rights were abused – they were abused BY GOVERNMENT,
and in each instance though ULTIMATELY government was FORCED to capitulate, The mechanism for “altering or abolsihing government” – was NOT through the law and the courts. The FACT that Government was Altered in response to – the civil war, or civil disobediance or other means – both inside and outside the law, does not make government the mechanism.
“our rights only became real when they were explicitly codified, interpreted, and enforced by the government.”
False.
The are only SECURE when that happens. They pre-exist government.
This is an idiotic argument on your part.
Are you really this stupid ?
Absoilutely the role of Government is to Secure our natural rights – the declaration is not even slightly unclear on that.
And absolutely when Govenrment abuses our rights – we HOPE that can be remedied – and quite often it is solely THROUGH government processes – again – right their in the decalaration.
But in pretty much everyone of YOUR examples – MORE was necescary. Government refused to capitulate and extra ordinary measures needed to be taken outside the government.
In some cases those measures included VIOLENCE.
John Say, you continue to be wrong. It’s embarrassing.
When the Southern states seceded to form the Confederacy, they explicitly argued that the U.S. government was violating their natural right to property (the ‘right’ to own human beings). In his famous Cornerstone Speech of 1861, Confederate Vice President Alexander Stephens explicitly attacked Thomas Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence. Stephens argued that Jefferson’s idea of ‘natural equality’ was a massive error, and that the Confederacy was founded on a superior, truer ‘natural law’—the natural inequality of races.
The Confederate Constitution explicitly protected slavery by name. They did not view themselves as lawless tyrants; they believed they were exercising their natural right to alter or abolish a tyrannical federal government that was interfering with their natural way of life.
You say rights ‘pre-exist government’ and are merely ‘secured’ by laws.
If a Black person in Mississippi in 1850 possessed a pre-existing natural right to liberty, that right was completely imaginary in the real world. It provided zero protection. The white slaveholder also claimed a pre-existing natural right to his property.
When two human beings claim completely contradictory ‘natural rights’ from the exact same nature, nature remains completely silent. The conflict was not resolved by nature or a Creator. It was resolved when the Union Army used physical power to crush the Confederacy, and the federal government passed the 13th Amendment to legally obliterate the slaveholder’s property claim. The human law didn’t just ‘secure’ a right that was already there; the human law created the legal reality of freedom where it did not exist before.
You claim that because the Civil War involved violence outside the normal legal process, the government was not the mechanism of change. This is a total misunderstanding of the conflict.
The Civil War was fought by the United States government to enforce the U.S. Constitution as a binding legal contract. President Abraham Lincoln did not march troops south to enforce abstract natural laws; he marched troops south to put down an illegal insurrection and defend the legal supremacy of the Union. The ultimate victory was cemented not by a philosophical treatise, but by changing the written text of the Constitution.
Clearly your historical illiteracy is proving to be problem. You keep getting trapped in your own contradictions and when you resort to hurling insults you effectively concede that you lost the argument.
The concept of natural rights is absurd. They do not come from the bible. They did not appear until the late 1700s. Rights exist because people fight for them.
It’s sad that the Enlightenment seems to have eluded Sally. It’s sad that Sally doesn’t support the Declaration of Independence. It’s sad being Sally. Don’t be Sally.
How about a debate, John Locke vs Sally. Well actually almost any sentient being against Sally would be a rout.
Not fair Sally would be brining a knife to a gunfight.
I bring an short barrel AR to a gun fight.
No you would not. If you do not believe in natural rights, then you do not have 2ndA rights.
Ya, but ventner is bringing an automatic. 😏
Hullbobby, it’s sad that you think the Declaration of Independence has any legal weight. It was a statement against a monarchy who ironically claimed Devine right to be king. A ‘natural right’ determined by the church.
The founders created their own ‘natural rights’ that applied largely to land owners and the wealthiest.
Locke was the one on the fringe in his time. The majority of the founders were deists who didn’t believe in the concept of ‘natural rights’ as extreme as many zealots want it to be.
Unlike you I have a law degree and I understand the difference between the Declaration and “legal weight”, your odd term. What you don’t understand is that the same people that wrote the CONSTITUTION believed in natural rights even if you don’t…for some odd reason.
Hullbobby, then if you did ‘earn’ a law degree you would understand that the Declaration and the Constitution are two very different things in the legal world. Just because those who wrote the Declaration are the same people who wrote the constitution still does not mean the declaration is a legal document. Remember, the constitution was written a decade later. A lot can change in ten years. They didn’t believe in natural rights literally, they used the rhetoric, as a declaration, challenging the crown. The evidence is right there in the constitution. They left out everything the declaration mentioned. A God, and natural rights. They started with “We the People”. Not “these natural rights.”
Of course the declaration of independence has “legal weight”
Absolutely it is a statement – it is also exactly as it says it is a “declaration of indepence”.
It specifically asserts – the Colonies are no longer the sovereign territory of the UK – they are free and independent and are sovereign on their own. That is a LEGAL claim.
The entire declaration of independence is a LEGAL claim that severing the legal authority of GB and establishing independent legal authority is legally justified.
Even Ho Chi Minh cited the US declaration of indepence when he declared Vietnam independent of France.
Myriads of nations have used the Declaration of independence to declare their independence – because it is pretty much he universally accept argument for independence.
No Natural rights are NOT determined by a church. Nor is the “devine right of Kings” a natural right.
Recognition by a church does not make it a natural right.
“The founders created their own ‘natural rights’ that applied largely to land owners and the wealthiest.”
False. Natural rights existed before the founders.
The Founders created a government that protected SOME natural rights of SOME people, and over time has often through extra legal measures been FORCED to protect more natural rights
“Locke was the one on the fringe in his time.”
Absolutely, So were Ghandi, and MLK in their times.
But not merely Locke – but the entire Scottish enlightenment – which Locke,
Joseph Black, James Boswell, Robert Burns, William Cullen, Adam Ferguson, David Hume, Francis Hutcheson, James Hutton, Lord Monboddo, John Playfair, Thomas Reid, Adam Smith, and Dugald Stewart, James Watt and even Benjamin Franklin as well as The colleges St Andrews, Glasgow, Edinburgh, King’s College, and Marischal College were all part of the scottish enlightenment.
“The majority of the founders were deists”
Absolutely FALSE. At most a handful of our founders were “diests” the vast majority were more christian fundimentalist than the religious right today.
Thoimas Paine is the ONLY founder explicitly identified with Deism at the time of the revolution ,
Jefforson loosely identified himself as a diest later in life and Franklin wrote somethings that MIGHT allow you to conclude he was a diest.
But the Founders were puritans, Quakers, Catholics, Episcopalians. Unitarians.
There is not a single US president those far that has not atleast nominally identified as Christian.
Adam’s specifically denounced Paine’s deistic criticisms of Christianity.
“Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.”
John Adams.
“who didn’t believe in the concept of ‘natural rights’ ”
Thomas Paine the one founder whoe was INARGUAABLY a diest was also one of the STRONGEST proponents of “NATURAL RIGHTS”
You can read Paines other great work “T\he rights of man” Here
https://oll-resources.s3.us-east-2.amazonaws.com/oll3/store/titles/798/Paine_0174_EBk_v6.0.pdf
“Thomas Paine argued that natural rights originate in human nature and that governments exist to protect those rights, rejecting traditional structures like aristocracy as unjustifiable privilege”
X – iot is clear that you are blowing smoike out your a$$.
That you know absolutely nothing about what you write.
That you are completely unfamiliar with pretty much everything you write about.
That you have no clue of anything the founders thought.
That you have read little or nothing by them.
The primary author of the constitution is Jefferson – with assisstance by Adams and Franklin.
Jefferson, Franklin and Adams are the principle founders noted in reverence to Diesm, though not ONE of them ever formally identified as a diest. And these are the people who wrote the text that you claim diests were violently opposed to,
As always – you do not know what you are talking about.
John Say,
Wow. You claim with absolute certainty: ‘The primary author of the constitution is Jefferson – with assistance by Adams and Franklin.’
This is flatly, historically fictional. Thomas Jefferson did not write the U.S. Constitution, nor was he even in the country when it was drafted.In the summer of 1787, when the Constitutional Convention took place in Philadelphia, Thomas Jefferson was serving as the American Minister to France, living in Paris.
John Adams was also out of the country, serving as the Minister to Great Britain in London.The actual ‘Father of the Constitution’ was James Madison.
To accuse others of ‘knowing absolutely nothing’ while committing the ultimate historical gaffe of confusing the Declaration of Independence (1776) with the U.S. Constitution (1787) is the definition of intellectual collapse.
You proudly link Thomas Paine’s The Rights of Man as proof that Deists supported your view of a divine framework. But you clearly haven’t read the text you linked.
If you actually open the document, Paine explicitly uses ‘Natural Rights’ to shatter, mock, and reject the traditional structures of government, religion, and church-and-state that Speaker Johnson and modern social conservatives worship.
Paine used natural rights to defend the French Revolution, demolish the concept of aristocracy, and argue that the living have absolutely no obligation to follow the traditions or religious frameworks of the dead.
Paine’s version of natural rights is a secular, radical tool of human liberation, not a conservative mandate to justify embedding biblical worldview into modern law. You are holding up a book that explicitly defeats your own political worldview.
You cling to the idea that because the Declaration made a ‘legal claim’ of independence, it is a functional legal document. You are confusing a political manifesto with codified law.
The Declaration declared a separation from Britain. It did not create a court system, it did not define a single crime, and it holds zero law-making authority in American jurisprudence.
When the Founders actually sat down to create the legal blueprint for the nation in 1787, they explicitly rejected a vertical, top-down divine authority. They didn’t start the law with ‘By Decree of the Creator.’ They started it with ‘We the People.’ The authority of American law is horizontal, contract-based, and entirely secular.
How much wrong can you be? Let’s continue,
claim that the vast majority of the Founders were ‘more christian fundamentalist than the religious right today.’ This is pure historical revisionism.
The primary intellectual drivers of the American experiment—Jefferson, Franklin, Washington, Madison, and Monroe—were deeply influenced by the Enlightenment and rejected fundamentalist Christian dogmas like the Trinity, biblical inerrancy, and divine revelation.
Furthermore, you quote John Adams’s ‘moral and religious people’ line while ignoring that Adams himself signed the Treaty of Tripoli, which explicitly told the world that ‘the government of the United States of America is not in any sense founded on the Christian Religion.’
You have completely trapped yourself. You have spent thousands of words arguing about constitutional intent while explicitly revealing that you do not even know who wrote the U.S. Constitution.
You are weaponizing a radical, anti-religious text by Thomas Paine to defend modern theological conservatism, and you are confusing a 1776 wartime press release with the supreme law of the land.
Your entire argument has devolved into a circular loop of historical fiction and personal insults. The debate is over. You cannot lecture a nation on constitutional literacy when you don’t even know who was in the room when it was written.
“They do not come from the bible”??? Nobody claims such. You miss the entire point. Sad.
Ok, so where do they come from?
As stated in the article, they are “natural rights”. They come with the turf of existence. They are either voluntarily given up or, more commonly, they are seized by governments/hoods.
Where does the universe come from ?
You are asking the typical stupid question – what was before there was anything ?
Different groups answer that different ways – but ultimately something came before everything.
With respect to human natural rights – Paine stated they came from the very nature of man.
Nature. Natural rights are self-evident, just look at nature. Use your Natural right to think with your brain.
Whatever you want to call it, nature, creation, god, etc. It’s natural , inherent, built-in like a tigers teeth.
A tiger has a RIGHT to eat you if you threaten it and you have a right to protect yourself from tigers as best you can.
You cannot take away the tigers right to eat you, only it’s ability to eat you. It still wants to eat you so don’t mess with tigers’ rights.
So if people do not fight for their freedom – their right to freedom does not exist ?
Sally – this is one of the stupidest arguments ever.
You are essentially saying that one person or group or government can do anything they wish to others – so long as those others do not take up arms against them.
Slavery is therfore moral, mysogyny is moral, racism is moral. So long as sufficient force is used that those being opressed are unwilling to rise up.
Your claim degenerates logically to “might makes right”
Sally – the concept of free will – which is the foundation of god given rights is found in the book of Genesis – as well as pretty much every other founding religious text in existance.
The concept of free will – and therefore god given rights predates the 1700’s by thousands of years.
The Magna Carte is 500 years older than the Declaration of independence and it is an asserttion that Englishmen have rights the King can not infringe upon.
Absolutely the modern conception of Natural rights – that is the foundation for ALL Government, that is at the core of organizations such as the UN is the pinacle acheivement of the enlightment,
and its broad acceptance within the colonies is the root cause of the american revolution.
The scottish enlightenment concpetion of natural rights is also the root cause of English and than American rejection of slavery – and later the global elimination of slavery.
It is also the foundation for the immorality and illegality of religious, racial and sexual discrimination.
Obliterate the scottish enlightenment conception of natural rights – and the entire modern world – and everything that left wing nuts hold precious disappears.
Sally,
I would like to ask you a simple question. Were you able to do anything, walk, talk, think, fall down, read, obtain food, mate and even dispose of your waste without the governments approval? If so, then you had natural rights that the government did not give to you. You can chose to bring these natural rights into society or not, that is your choice not the governments. If you chose, you can also be a hermit without the governments approval.
It is sad that today we have to explain that we are and were animals at one time, as was mentioned in one of the post already. Is it because the people that scream for the preservation of nature, fail to go out into nature and observe where we came from?
Simply this: Katy Tur=moron
A perfect example of the cultural divide that will eventually lead to an uncivil War. If these Marxists do not win control of the Legislative Branch in November, watch the level of violence and bizarre behavior increase….. Time will tell.
Professor Turley, So what did the panelists say and what was Tur’s reaction?
The rejection of natural rights is a thinking distortion. You cannot reject reality. The rejection is necessary only for their lame communist revolution to proceed through the legal sytem.
Equality under the law is not the same as equality in general as there’s always someone smarter or better than you in some way and leftys like to confuse the two to capture the simple minded.
Equity eliminates human self-determination as there no up anymore so why try at all. It’s the reason communist systems fail, they decimate human greatness.
Our natural rights are in writing and that one trick ruins all their anti-human schemes.
Where are natural rights written down? Who wrote them?
Wow, Sally is mining the depths of stupidity today. She wants to know who wrote down that human beings have natural rights?!?!?!? Well I guess it isn’t as well documented as let’s see… The Communist Manifesto, Mein Kampf or Mao’s little Red Book. All three of which assisted in the killing of about 100 million people.
You didn’t answer her question. Who decides what are natural rights? Where are they codified? Is free speech a natural right?
They’re self-evident, pinhead.
HullBobby,
Great examples!
Sally could learning something.
Are you even paying attention?
We can start with the declaration of independence – “Life liberty and the pursuit of happiness”
Then there is Article IV S2 of the constitution.
“The Citizens of each State shall be entitled to all Privileges and Immunities of Citizens in the several States.”
The 9th amendment
“The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.”
The 14th Amendment
“No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States.”
Regardless why does something have to be written down in a list to exist ?
Did the sun not exist before there were men to write about it ?
Do youy think before you post ?
John Say, how do you keep embarrassing yourself?
Rights are not physical matter floating in outer space. Rights are a purely human, social, and legal construct. They are promises that human beings make to one another to regulate behavior in a society. Comparing a legal guarantee to a star is philosophically absurd.
Then there is this gem, you the 9th Amendment proves natural law. It doesn’t.
The 9th Amendment was added precisely because the Founders were writing a legal contract. Federalists worried that listing specific rights might imply the government had the power to violate unlisted ones. The 9th Amendment is a legal rule of interpretation inside a human contract; it ensures the government stays within its strictly delegated boundaries.
Furthermore, the 14th Amendment explicitly protects the ‘privileges or immunities of citizens.’ A citizen is a legal status created by a human government.
Since you linked Thomas Paine’s The Rights of Man, let’s look at what he actually wrote on the pages you provided:
Paine explicitly states that a constitution is not an abstract concept; it must be a visible, written thing produced article by article.
Paine explicitly argues that when men enter society, they deposit their individual power into a common stock to create civil power.
Paine knew that a right doesn’t protect you just because you exist; it protects you because a society has built a written contract to enforce it.
Asking ‘Do you think before you post?’ while comparing the Bill of Rights to the sun is a stunning display of intellectual arrogance.
The sun does not care about human justice. Tyrants can torture individuals under the open sun, and nature will not intervene. Humans keep humans free by writing down rules, enforcing contracts, and holding power accountable. Your rights do not exist in the sky—they exist because we wrote them down and choose to defend them every single day.
Clearly John, you have the absolute worst take on American history and reality. Good grief.
The fact that a right is natural – comes from nature – means that it has existed long before humans could write.
If rights exist independent of human agreement or writing, then how do you know what they are?
If a tyrant claims it is a ‘natural law’ that the strong rule the weak, and you claim it is a ‘natural law’ that all men are equal, how do you resolve the dispute without writing a contract?
If you rely on an unwritten, invisible right, you are giving whoever has the biggest muscles or the most weapons the power to declare what ‘nature’ wants.
Insisting that rights exist in nature like rocks or trees is a fairy tale. Nature gives you lungs, a brain, and free will. But society gives you rights. Jonn Say is fundamentally refusing to acknowledge that human progress is built on human contracts. Which is ironic because he’s a big fan of contracts.
Spot on professor. My highest regards.
“Under the law of nature, all men are born free, every one comes into the world with a right to his own person, which includes the liberty of moving and using it at his own will. This is what is called personal liberty, and is given him by the Author of nature, because necessary for his own sustenance.” –Thomas Jefferson: Legal Argument, 1770. FE 1:376
“A free people [claim] their rights as derived from the laws of nature, and not as the gift of their chief magistrate.” –Thomas Jefferson: Rights of British America, 1774. ME 1:209, Papers 1:134
“The evidence of [the] natural right [of expatriation], like that of our right to life, liberty, the use of our faculties, the pursuit of happiness, is not left to the feeble and sophistical investigations of reason, but is impressed on the sense of every man. We do not claim these under the charters of kings or legislators, but under the King of Kings.” –Thomas Jefferson to John Manners, 1817. ME 15:124
Maybe those people should do some more reading on the subject
More reading? They have and conclude that natural rights do not exist in reality. Suggest you should do more reading.
Ok guys, Wayne N. says it’s not true, wrap it up, close it down, we are done here, the idiot king has made a declaration needing no analysis.
One needs only to corner or threaten a powerful undomesticated free animal to discover natural laws.
His logic threw you for a loop eh whig? Kept you from showing off here. Too bad. BTW, what about property, land rights? All natural you think? Gov. giveth, gov taketh away. One comment and you throw a tantrum…. you child.
Gov doesn’t “giveth”, Gov only takes away.
Are you Wayne N.’s lawyer?
The right to private property exists as a natural right. Govt exists to secure that right against those who would violate it. This concept is the core of the D of I and of the evolution of human freedom.
Try this
https://www.perlego.com/book/1851154/natural-right-and-history-pdf
So quoting just Jerrerson makes you a believer in natural rights? Then how come a driver’s license is considered a privilege and revoked by humans?
Because the unalienable rights with which we are endowed by our Creator do not include a right to operate a motor vehicle on a road owned and maintained by the government. On your own property you can drive to your heart’s content and you don’t need any sort of license, registration, or insurance.
What is a creator?
Ever talk to a Muslim about those inalienable rights? An atheist?
Own property you say, drive without gov. approval? Try it and let me know how that works out for you.
“drive without gov. approval?” Sorry no one is suppressing your rights or the rights of the blind to drive undisciplined. you can go do it far away from civilization all you want.
It is irrelevant what you think a creator is.
Regardless everything was created – except whatever was here before anything else – some of us beleive that was god – but no one actually knows what pre-exists everything else.
What has muslim or athiest got to do with it.
Thomas Paine described natural rights as flowing from the nature of man.
The entire foundation of the modern world – including that of left wing nuts rests on the concept of free will.
You can build the entirety of natural rights from free will.
And before you go arguing against free will – without free will – slavery is moral.
And yes, you can drive around on your own property however you please in all 50 states.
I don’t particularly care what Moslems or atheists might think about it. Neither were involved in establishing the USA.
And yes, no government approval of any kind is required to drive a car on your own property. Or on someone else’s property, with their permission. I don’t have to try it, it’s the law.
Milhouse, Muslims were present before and during the creation of this country.
Morocco was the very first nation in the world to recognize the newly independent United States. The Treaty of Peace and Friendship, signed by Thomas Jefferson and John Adams, explicitly solidified this relationship.
Scholars estimate that up to 15% of enslaved Africans brought to the colonies were Muslim. Records show that men with distinct Muslim names—such as Bampett Muhamed and Yusuf Ben Ali (Joseph Benhaley)—fought directly in the Continental Army for American independence.
They also joined in the building of the building of the nations’s capital.
You have a fantastic ability to whitewash evil.
The Islamic state of Morocco was a massive slave state. It hunted black slaves in Africa, enslaved white Europeans, and hosted the region’s slave market.
As with today’s Iran, Morocco was a pirate state, which is why we twice fought the Barbary Wars.
Not every person has the discrimination skills driving requires so we regulate it for everyone’s safety; the reason for government.
Driving without those skills is not a right because you do not possess those natural skills, that’s natural law. We are not letting you perform brain surgery either unless you are qualified.
are not letting you perform brain surgery either unless you are qualified…. an still humans do it.
Ah, finally an argument worthy of intellectual debate and the leftys are stuck on “the natural right to drive a car doesn’t exist which proves natural rights don’t exist.”
So sad. OK, OK, you have the natural right to drive a car without the requisite skills to do so, BUT WE have the natural right to lock you up for it. OK???
Ya see, anon’s point point is made. No one here can beat anon’s simple arguments. Instead resort to childish attacks.
Game, set and match for anon.
Driving if it is a right isnt a natural right. It is one of many rights we surrender to the govt in exchange for health, safety and an orderly society. Our Natural Rights cannot be taken or surrendered. ( See Rousseau ‘s Social Contract.)
This is getting hilarious… you fools think tossing out names make for a definitive argument?
Natural right? Whatabout suicide? How natural can that be eh?
Anonymous is mad because he never read Locke, Rousseau, Hobbs, Aristotle, the Founders or anything other than Salon and the Guardian.
and his acne is inflammed too.
And neither have you. You spelt 2 of the names wrong.
And yet here you are without, as usual, coherent critique.
Ironic coming from a lemming…
Obviously suicide is a natural right.
Are you planing on exhuming the body and sending it to prison ?
Do we have laws barring suicide – absolutely – but you can only punish people for attempting suicide and failing.
“Driving if it is a right isnt a natural right.”
Correct – Traveling without tresspass within a nation is a natural right.
“It is one of many rights we surrender to the govt in exchange for health, safety and an orderly society.”
False – as the declaration says – the purpose of government is to protect our rights.
There is no right to good health or healthcare.
There is no right to anything that places a positive demand on others.
We surrender out right to initiate violence against others in return for govenrment.
If you are going to make social contract based arguments – learn what the social contract is and what it is not.
The social contract is the govenrment protection of our “negative rights” – that is government precluding others from taking our liberty, property, etc.
Any claim to a positive right – something that requires others to ACT in order to have falls outside the domain of government, and is in the domain of charity and religion.
Ball four, wide left!
The Supreme Court believed in natural rights as late as 1875 (US v. Cruikshank).
“The right to bear arms is not granted by the Constitution; neither is it in any manner dependent upon that instrument for its existence.”
We have a Constitutional right to travel, even if we are demied the privilege of steering any particular conveyance.
(The right is specifically to travel interstate, but to be effective there must be a right to travel intrastate.)
Once the guy down the street lost his drivers license, he could still ride his bike to the liquor store. Until that one morning when the ambulance came, sirens wailing, and left with lights and sirens off
A drivers license is a civil right – while the right to travel is a natural right.
I would note however that driving is NOT considered a legal priviledge – it is considered a right – just one that government has come power to limit.
ALL speech is not protected by the first amendment – if you order a persons assassination – you are guilty of murder – there is no free speech defense.
Some rights enjoy more protection than others – free speech is the most protected right – but not absolute.
Driving is a right with poor protection.
Driving on a government road is not a right, any more than driving on someone else’s property. The government has the right to decide who may and may not operate a motor vehicle on its property. It has no right to do so on your property, and it doesn’t try.
John Say,
“A drivers license is a civil right – while the right to travel is a natural right.”
WRONG.
Every single state department of motor vehicles (DMV) and every state supreme court in the country has established that operating a motor vehicle on public roads is a regulated privilege, not an inherent right or ‘natural right’.
Civil rights are core constitutional protections against discrimination and unfair treatment (such as the right to vote, the right to equal protection under the law, and freedom from racial discrimination). An administrative permit issued by a state government to operate heavy machinery on public infrastructure is an administrative license, not a civil right. You do not have a ‘civil right’ to a piece of plastic from the DMV.
Courts have also explicitly ruled that the right to travel is not the right to use a specific mode of transportation. You have the right to move across state lines by walking, riding a bicycle, taking a bus, or riding a train. You do not have an inherent ‘natural right’ to operate a 2-ton, gas-powered vehicle on a multi-billion-dollar public highway system that you didn’t build, without a license.
Driving is a human-invented activity, on human-invented roads, governed by human-invented laws. It is a social privilege maintained by a collective contract, and no amount of philosophical gymnastics will turn a driver’s license into a gift from a Creator.
As should you:
“[S]hake off all the fears & servile prejudices under which weak minds are servilely crouched. Fix reason firmly in her seat, and call to her tribunal every fact, every opinion. Question with boldness even the existence of a god; because, if there be one, he must more approve the homage of reason, than that of blindfolded fear . . .” (Jefferson)