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Our public conversation these days is thick with heated references to Rights — rights denied, rights claimed, rights deserved. We have a Constitutional right, it is proclaimed, to ignore public health restrictions and refuse vaccinations; we have an unlimited right to possess guns; we have a right to health care and a living wage (the latter two being described as human, not Constitutional, rights). We really need to talk about this.
One way to begin is with our Declaration of Independence, which declares life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness to be “inalienable” rights. And then of course there’s our Constitution, whose Bill of Rights conveys ten additional “rights,” such as freedom of speech, assembly, worship, etc.
The word “right” in this context has three elements. Think of it like the word “gift,” which requires 1) a thing to be given, 2)a giver, and 3) a recipient; without any of those elements, it cannot be a gift. Similarly, “right” must have three elements in order to mean anything: a conveyor of the right, the right itself, and the recipient.
In the Declaration, the inalienable rights are conveyed by “their Creator” to all men. In writing this, Mr. Jefferson presumed to know the mind of God, and opened himself to the problem that other people, also privy to God’s thinking, might disagree, and there is no appeals court. The Constitution, being the foundation document of our Republic, conveys rights by its own authority, or more accurately by the authority of the people who wrote, ratified, and now preserve, protect and defend it.
Another thing we must recognize about rights is their limited nature. I’m speaking logically here, not ideologically. Rights are by their nature, by immutable logical deduction, limited. This principle has seen many famous iterations in the Supreme Court and elsewhere: you have a right to free speech, but you may not falsely shout “Fire!” in a crowded theater; your right to swing your arm ends at my nose; and so on. To put it another way, every right, however conveyed, comes with a set of responsibilities.
We all have the right to drive, conveyed by the government subject to our good behavior; we must get a license and insurance, drive a safe car under the speed limit, etcetera. Regulating the behavior of people hurling themselves about at 60 mph in two-ton steel capsules is not to diminish the right to drive, but to enhance the ability of the human race to survive.
Even the hallowed Second Amendment, conveying the right to keep and bear arms, does so in order to maintain a citizen militia and stipulates that that militia — composed of the people to whom the right to bear arms attaches — shall be “well-regulated.”
In addition to the people who inflate the reach of existing rights, there are those who lay claim to rights that simply do not exist. No right to health care, or a living wage, or education, has been conveyed, and thus they do not exist as rights. People who assert basic human rights that are not conveyed, but just are, seem to be in Mr. Jefferson’s camp, willing to explain to us what God intends.
Think of it this way: we might want a pony for Christmas, with all our might, we might feel entitled to a pony for Christmas, we might believe it is God’s will that we get a pony for Christmas, but until someone comes up with the pony….
But the agencies capable of conveying rights surely have responsibilities as well. Health care is not a right in this country because our government has not conveyed it, while the governments of almost every other developed country in the world have done so. Surely it is time to make that conveyance, if not as a right of the received then as a responsibility of the donor?
It is increasingly popular right now for people to scream epithets and brandish weapons at civil authority because they are convinced that their rights have been violated. (It is also true that it has become almost commonplace for civil authority to overreact to any and all challenges, however minor or imagined.) Unless people do some hard and accurate thinking about the nature of the rights they want to exercise, and their responsibilities while doing so, the next thing they hear may well be: “You have the right to remain silent. You have the right to an attorney….”
“Rights aren’t rights if someone can take them away. They’re privileges. That’s all we’ve ever had in this country, is a bill of temporary privileges. And if you read the news even badly, you know that every year the list gets shorter and shorter.” – George Carlin
https://youtu.be/3gkjWxCl6zE
“The right to a speedy … trial.”
That one’s my favorite.
Still waiting for someone to be tried and convicted for the Twin Tower attacks. We’ve got some perps, 5 of them in fact, all awaiting due process. So let’s put on them trial and then process the hell-out-of-em.
I don’t care that these nefarious cretins have been languishing in a prison cell for almost 20 years, or that they received waterboarding treatments – and what not – while languishing. That’s irrelevant.
A speedy trial in this particular instance is a requirement for my own personal mental health, and the mental health of many other troubled Americans I would add, including the families of the victims, because we all need 9/11 closure!
Answer what caused Building 7 to collapse and the reason for not conducting trials will be evident.
Wrong villains.
Didn’t WTC 7 drop on its own volition?
A good friend of mine believes that the building was simply tired that day, and so it fell.
That is the second best explanation I have encountered so far, the third best is that the building committed seppuku, to honor the Towers.
Either way, I believe We the People have a “right” to hear all the possible explanations for why the 47 story steel structure no longer stands.
Aw, come on, guys…..
“A well regulated Militia” – the forgotten passage of the Second Amendment.
And what, exactly, is a ‘well regulated militia’? In short, it’s an organization authorized to carry out militant activities in order to achieve certain ends: the national armed forces, state national guards, state and local police departments, corrections departments, etc…
And who authorizes and regulates such organizations? Well, in a democratic republic, that would be the people. They do this thru their elected representatives, be they county commissioners, city council members, mayors, governors, state reps, congressmen, senators or presidents. In this manner, militant organizations – militias – are empowered to carry out their often grim tasks…Such power is not guaranteed under any other circumstances. Therefore, while the ‘bearing of arms’, under certain conditions and with reasonable restraints, might be granted as a privilege, it would not seem to be a cast-in-stone Constitutional right.
I’m no lawyer, but I can read!
Nicely said! This essay made me imagine who was going to tell those folks in Idaho and the Upper Peninsula that they were going to have to come into the National Guard armory one weekend a month and two weeks in summer if they wanted to keep their guns…
George Washington’s first public position was as adjutant for the southern district of Virginia. His job was to see to it that the regulations of the militia — that is, every able-bodied resident male — were observed. The regs required that every member maintain at hand a firearm in good condition, with a stipulated amount of ammunition and powder. No one would do it. The Indians had been driven from the area, there was no more threat, and no one saw the point of having a gun. They were rusting down in outbuildings. Drove the authorities crazy. I am not making this up.
Interesting, Tom. On this topic, you might like to look at the historian Roxanne Dunbar Ortiz’s book _Loaded: a Disarming History of the Second Amendment_. She argues that the Indian-killing (land-stealing) militias that Washington oversaw were indeed based on individual gun-ownership rights. So were the vigilante slave patrols in the plantation South; and both types of group continued their activities in divers places long after young George’s adjutancy ended, and after the Constitution was signed. Thus today’s right-wing, gun-loving interpretation of the Second Amendment is correct. It simply points up the violent settler-colonial nature of the whole American project. The white-guy gun fetish is pure nostalgia (and perhaps a fantasy of white-nationalist adventures to come).
Good article, Tom. The whole business of “our rights” is very rarely examined, questioned, if at all. When I look at it, I myself have no idea what my “rights” are,if I have any at all in fact. other than what have already been defined in law as ‘my rights’.
Do I have a right to be treated in the way I might want to be treated? Is there any real reason my expectations should be met by others?