Whether a politician's words constitute a flagrant faux pas
or innocent slip of the tongue often depends on the offender's party
affiliation. Democrats can commit untimely gaffes with relative impunity. But
for Republicans to utter supposed misstatements is proof-positive that
conservatives are knuckle-draggers. By some opinions Rick Santorum committed
such a verbal error while countering claims that government mandated healthcare
is a fundamental right.
"Rights come from our creator," Santorum declared.
"They are protected by the Constitution of this country. Rights should not
and cannot be created by a government because any time a government creates a
right, they can take that right away."
Think what you will about Rick Santorum, his record, and his
future prospects. But his transgression wasn't inaccuracy. His sin was daring
to challenge the fundamental leftist idea that rights originate in government.
To assume human liberties, defined as rights, are products
of government is illogical. Since government produces nothing of its own
accord, and therefore possesses nothing, it can only distribute what it first
takes. Government can bestow retractable privileges but not inalienable rights.
For example, governments issue the driver's license, which is considered a
privilege. As such, governments can disperse the driver's license on their
terms, according to their will, or revoke the privilege altogether. A veritable
right is quite different.
Genuine rights are inalienable and self-evident. A right
exists without government permission and no expert translation is necessary to
understand its presence. Rational people instinctively understand their rights
and how government incursions weaken their liberties. So to recognize the
Creator as the source of liberty is entirely sensible. What a Creator has
granted no government can retract. Government may ignore a right, a too common
occurrence, but the right still exists for those who will undergo the fatigues of supporting it.
The media is government's willing accomplice in undermining
rights and liberties. In fact, the two are working overtime to subvert our
natural right to determine our own happiness, and they're rewriting our
foundational history in the process. In the news story on Santorum's supposed
misstatement, the reporter promotes the idea that
government can bestow rights, claiming that men placed our rights in our
Constitution. That reporter is either ignorant or an ideological puppet.
The Founders never claimed to have invented or granted the
rights in the Constitution; they wrote so as to recognize preexisting rights
and to protect them from government abuse. The Constitution's purpose wasn't to
enumerate each individual liberty common to free people.
Rather it was to restrain government from trampling not only identified rights
but any others that naturally exist. In order to establish a workable
government while maintaining inalienable rights and liberties, the Founders had
to recognize the source of rights as beyond government's ability.
While big government advocates often belittle the idea that
rights are natural, dismissing it as the
theocratic ramblings of Christian fundamentalists, their argument is not with
our Creator alone. It's also with the Founding Fathers, especially Thomas
Jefferson. The man most credited with resisting an American theocracy also
believed rights emanated from a higher source than human government. In his
most obvious reference, found in the Declaration of Independence,
Jefferson readily acknowledged the Creator's work in mankind's inalienable
rights. Furthermore, and equally damaging to big government proponents,
Jefferson recognized this truth as "self-evident." He obviously
believed basic rights originated outside of human government and were
recognizable without its bureaucratic analysis. And lest we assume Jefferson's
positions in the Declaration were isolated, he left other references to confirm
his view.
In A View on the Rights of British America Jefferson
again declared rights as self-evident and outside the so-called generosity of
governments. Jefferson knew that a free people would recognize rights as coming
from nature's laws, "and not as the gift of their
chief magistrate." As in the Declaration, Jefferson confirmed his belief
that the principles of right and wrong were obvious to any reasonable observer:
"to pursue them requires not the aid
of many counselors."
Jefferson believed people instinctively understood their
rights and the roots thereof. However, to remove any lingering concerns about
government's authority to grant or revoke rights let's again seek guidance from
Rights: "The God, who
gave us life, gave us liberty at the same time; the hand of force may destroy,
but cannot disjoin them."
Possessing our rights is as natural as taking our next
breaths. To have life is to possess rights. Government, Jefferson's "hand
of force", can refuse to acknowledge our rights even to the point of
destroying both us and our ability to exercise liberty. But it cannot separate
one from the other; life and liberty are mutually inclusive. To take one is to
take both.
Rights exist whether or not a standing government is
sympathetic to their presence. Santorum's critics should then save their
breath. The idea of a Creator granting our liberty is radical only in the minds
of tyrants and slaves. It is, however, well within the Founding Father's
thoughts on the relationship between life and liberty, between citizens and
governments.
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