Originally Posted by
fisharmor
But that is exactly what I am saying. Those people had - have - a right to life, liberty, and property. They have, and had, a right to travel. They have, and had, a right to bear arms, a right to free speech, a right to worship as they choose.
The fact that the state sanctioned some people curtailing the rights of other people doesn't negate the fact that those people had rights.
Everyone has the same rights, or nobody does. If that's not the case, then no, you're not talking about rights, you're talking about privileges.
I think I'm agreeing with you more than you're comfortable with. Life was not better in the past - it was decidedly worse in some respects, but in ways you're not getting.
It was worse because society had taken concepts that we are supposed to have based our state on, and turned them upside-down, so that they were the exact opposite of what was intended.
When TJ wrote that we are all endowed by our creator with inalienable rights, he was choosing his words carefully.
If we are endowed with those rights by our creator, that means that the state is very much not the entity which endows us with our rights. Unless we can show that the state is our creator, then the document we founded this whole thing on - the document we used as justification for killing a whole lot of folk - denies the idea that the state is where we get our rights from.
If our rights are inalienable, then that means the state is very much incapable of taking our rights away from us.
Sure, the state can trample on them, the state can pretend they don't exist, but the state can't take them away.
I am very much not arguing over angels dancing on a pinhead. This is a very important distinction, and like I said, I'm not working toward a future that doesn't include this.
If your rights are not inherent to your humanity and inalienable, then they are not rights. They are privileges.
And if they're privileges, then the immediate question becomes who is it who gives you those privileges.
Because whereas rights are assumed to belong to every human being, privileges are not.
Privileges assume that you have nothing, you start with nothing, and you're given what someone else assumes you're going to need.
Rights assume that you start with your rights.
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