Apparently.
Sorry, W.E.B….
1. Politico national investigative correspondent Heidi Przybyla went on MSNBC (where reality goes to die) and smugly stated that an “extremist element” of Christian nationalists hold the nutty belief that rights “come from God” rather than the government. “They believe that our rights as Americans, as all human beings, don’t come from any earthly authority, Przybyla said during her appearance on MSNBC’s “All In With Chris Hayes.” “They don’t come from Congress. They don’t come from the Supreme Court. They come from God.”
This woman presumes to interpret political news for the public, and she doesn’t comprehend the Declaration of Independence or its activating document, the Constitution. Both are built on the philosophy of Locke and Rousseau that humans beings, by virtue of being alive, have intrinsic “unalienable rights,” and that governments may not take away those rights or infringe on them. It matters not whether “God,” “the Creator,” “Nature,” “Providence” or some other designation is used to describe the origin of those intrinsic rights, because the United States of America accepts the bedrock belief that government is limited in its ability to dictate to its constituents. Przybyla’s position, in addition to being stunningly ignorant, is the rejected concept that underlies monarchies and other totalitarian systems. Naturally Chris Hayes, poor man’s Rachel Maddow that he is, didn’t have the wit, guts or professionalism to point out to the reporter that she sounded like a complete ignoramus.
As an aside, I should probably post one of the “My Biases” essays about how quickly my respect for anyone plummets when they tell me that they watch MSNBC. The network will literally make you dumber the as you watch it. How anyone qualified to do something more challenging in life than running a bait shop could be so naive as to trust an alleged news source that employs Al Sharpton and Joy Reid is a constant mystery to me.
The question is, how many journalists, prominent pundits and U.S. citizens are just as addled as Przybyla? Remember, these are the people who are screaming about wanting to save democracy from Donald Trump, but they embrace Przybyla’s anti-democratic concept of human rights.
2. The lack of Constitutional literacy is not the sole domain of the political Left. Florida’s GOP-dominated Legislature just passed a bill that would make the state the first in the nation to bar children under 16 from using social media platforms like TikTok and Instagram.
It’s a First Amendment violation. Of course it is. Federal courts in Arkansas and Ohio have previously struck down less-extreme restrictions on children’s use of social media . Those laws violated social media companies’ free speech rights and young citizens’ rights to read and participate in those company’s exchanges of information. This is an integrity test for Gov. Ron DeSantis, who should veto the bill.
Various legislators have made rationalization-filled statements justifying their votes for the thing, all of which boil down to “We have to do something!” and “Won’t somebody pleas think of the children?” Many of the bill’s supporters probably know the law is illegal, but want to grandstand for their ignorant constituents and are happy to let the courts take the heat when their bill is shot down, which it will be.
Dumb or cynical legislators have been playing this game for many decades, as they tried to ban comic books, Elvis, demon rock ‘n roll, rap lyrics and anything else the free expression culture generated that some children could handle less rationally than others. These Florida legislators don’t merely not understand the Constitution, they don’t know American cultural history either.
3. Meanwhile, in Florida and elsewhere, public school teachers—we’re back on the far left side of the political divide now—are claiming that regulations on what teachers can and cannot teach is “government censorship” and infringes on their rights to free speech. Morons. Teachers are employees of the government, which gets to define their job, which includes what they may teach to children. A new report from PEN America, the writers advocacy group, misleadingly claims that 1.3 million teachers, are unconstitutionally subject to “educational gag orders,” PEN’s description of educational standards. The forty pieces of legislation PEN condemns were all made necessary by decades of unethical abuse of teacher authority in public schools by using public education as a tool of political and cultural indoctrination.
PEN warns that conservatives “have learned from past mistakes and have new and more insidious strategies for silencing America’s educators.” They aren’t “silenced.” Educators can still say and write whatever they choose, as long as they can be trusted to teach their students basic skills and critical thinking without attempting to ensure that they grow up to be their ideological clones.
Ethics Alarms 
I heard the comment by Przbyla and went ballistic. The only way a right is unalienable is if it originates outside human control.
Such a comment undermines the right to bodily autonomy pushed by so many. You would think that the abortion rights advocates would be up in arms with comments like that.
The Left tends to have this bizarre concept that both constitutional freedoms and constitutional powers belong properly to unelected government employees. Private individual’s freedom of speech is subject to veto by bureaucrats if they feel that speech is “harmful”, but those same bureaucrats may push their agenda using the power of the state, and no elected officials may rein them in.
That is how elitists have always felt. Communism is the ultimate elitism. Under communism, you are a member of the elite (communist party member) or you are a state slave (proletariat). The state owns all the labor and rights of the proletariat.
As an atheist existentialist, I don’t believe rights come from an external source, either. Rights are part of implementing the constructive principle of ethics. The implementation of constructive principles is semi-objective. Once we choose a subjective goal, like living in a pleasant and harmonious society, there are objectively more effective and less effective ways to achieve that goal.
I believe we can derive human rights by asking ourselves what rights would lead to a world we want to live in. The answer depends on how much trust we can build that people will exercise their rights responsibly and how much trust we can build that the government and its agents will not abuse their power in situations that are not covered by people’s rights.
The framers of the Constitution may not have gone through this exact line of reasoning, but I figure they did an excellent job with enumerating rights, and we can critically assess their work without having to accept it on faith.
Right now, I agree with the libertarians that the government cannot be trusted, but I also agree with the authoritarians that the people cannot be trusted. There are those of us working to make the situation better.
EC, I appreciate your good thoughts, but the one above is one with which I struggle mightily. I think it’s almost impossible to derive human rights by human consensus. We have seen how human thinking – consider just the last 40 years as an example – changes over time. Give thought to obvious things like gay rights and gay marriage, opinions on college campuses regarding free speech and affirmative action, opinions in high schools concerning free speech…cultural opinions about church, God, and religion in general…gender identity issues, gun control, discrimination, etc.
Given today’s environment and social morays, let’s say there was no existing Bill of Rights. Now let’s say we set up a group of people largely modeled after Sen. Bernie Sanders and Rep. Ocasio-Cortez to fashion a set of “human rights”. What kind of world do they want to live in?
Then go back to the late 1940s (right after WWII and creation of the Communist Bloc). Have some people there that look like Gen. MacArthur and Sen. McCarthy fashion your Bill of Rights. What kind of world do they want to live in?
You could do this little exercise ad nauseum. Human rights that are decided by humans are completely subjective to the times, the societal pressures, and the whims of human thinking. Your “right” today could likely be your “path to prison” in a generation. What’s more, while a group of people could maybe come up with some agreed-upon rights, what makes those rights better than mine? How is your right to greet your neighbor in the morning any better than might perceived right to kill, cut up, and eat my neighbor in the morning if I so choose? If man is the ultimate authority, then my thinking is just as viable as any other human. Subjective rights, even those agreed up, are still subjective, and no better or worse than my subjective rights, whatever I think them to be. In that world, “rights” become little more than tests of power and will…and who has the most of each to enforce his/her/their subjective rights on others.
Like it or not, human consensus is the only method that we have to work with. You said it yourself: opinions about religion change over time. Even if there was an external moral agent, and even if it decided to intervene in human affairs, humans would still have to figure out for themselves what it represented and whether it was good or not.
However, that doesn’t mean that there aren’t objective principles of ethics. (The Rawlsian Veil of Ignorance is one of my favorites. What kind of societal order would you design if you had no idea what position you would occupy in it?) Just because human paradigms of morality vary across societies and across history, that doesn’t mean they’re all equally good. Although our goals in life are subjective, there are objective principles for how to most effectively accomplish any given goal.
Sure, different societies have different environments to put up with, and people are used to different conventions for living life, but there are still ways that people could have done better at building a happy, healthy society, and ways that they can do better still. Part of the trick is to keep looking for ways to make things better, but not to be foolish about it.
In other words, we need better humans. No system will work if it’s run by idiots. That’s why bringing clarity of understanding is part of my approach.
A hypothetical perceived right to kill people on a whim is neither constructive nor sustainable. It destroys trust. A society needs trust in order for people to get what they want and live pleasant, healthy lives with whatever meaning they choose to find or make. Objectively, a society in which murder is permitted will not accomplish very much. If most people are fine with the risks of turmoil, the rule by the strong, then that could be considered an ethical (but disappointing) society. However, if anyone objects, they should be escorted safely out, ideally into a more constructive society. That’s Rawls again: How do we improve the situation for the people the worst off, within reason?
Since the vast majority of humans prefer being left alive over any benefits that they could get from the right to kill at will, we can say that allowing murder is objectively not an effective way to get the society that we subjectively want.
Does that make sense?
Yet all abstract moral systems seem eventually embrace to the idea that the young and powerless and the elderly are expendable and CAN be murdered. We get MAID in Canada, euthanasia being forcibly suggested in the Pacific Northwest and Europe, etc.
There is no logical reason that human life has inherent value beyond the price of the organs on the black market.
“The lack of Constitutional literacy is not the sole domain of the political Left. Florida’s GOP-dominated Legislature just passed a bill that would make the state the first in the nation to bar children under 16 from using social media platforms like TikTok and Instagram.
It’s a First Amendment violation. Of course it is. Federal courts in Arkansas and Ohio have previously struck down less-extreme restrictions on children’s use of social media”
Regardless of what Federal courts have decided, there are all kinds of rights minors do not have. It isn’t clear to me why minors have an unfettered right to free speech, but no 2A rights whatsoever.
In re Gault, 387 U.S. 1 (1967)is the landmark case establishing the basic principle that Constitutional Rights apply to minors. The Second? Good question. I’m sure there’s a case.
Minors are also currently prohibited from purchasing pornography – and shops cannot sell it to them, either. Online websites are supposed to weed out minors as well. These are limits on both minors’ rights as well as the shopkeeps’. Adult materials are plenty enough reason to limit minors’ use of the website, aside from the rapidly growing collection of evidence that it and other social media are functionally rotting brains and generating anxiety and depression.
Any right that society decides is inalienable is not a right if it can be rescinded by society. The whole point of a right being inalienable means that society cannot take it away.
If atheists choose not to believe in a creator they have that inalienable right. However, that does not mean the atheist has the right to determine from whom others believe their rights are derived.
The idea that society determines what rights we have is impractical because society is fickle. Furthermore, you will get neither consensus let alone agreement on some particular rights. That means that the majority will dictate what rights any particular group has.
We can see what rights other societies choose to grant. Gays and Jews have few if any rights in Muslim countries. In South Africa, whites can be murdered without reprisal from government. In England you can be jailed for hate speech and Germany bans forms of political expression. All of these rules negatively impact one’s ability to pursue life, liberty, and happiness which is what is referenced as inalienable. The Bill of Rights are those rights that work to guarantee that which is inalienable.
Human being are unfit to determine who is entitled to what rights. Human beings must be able to be free to think for themselves and be able to communicate their ideas. Without that ability, we are mere subjects to the majority. We are seeing first hand what happens when parts of society decide what others are permitted to think or say. For that reason, the idea that rights are assigned by society puts society itself at risk. The framers identified some particular issues that would guarantee the inalienable right to life liberty and pursuit of happiness. They were foresighted enough to allow additions to guaranteed liberties but they made it so that it takes a super majority to effect even the smallest change.
Rights are rights, not revocable benefits. in the United States a founding principle is that we have rights just because we are alive, not because the government grants them to us. Another founding principle is that we have a government of enumerated powers that derives those powers from the consent of the governed. This is not some grand new idea. Democracy goes as far back as the Greek polis, and the concept of republican government goes back as far as Rome. The idea of governments deriving their power from the consent of the governed and there being certain rights and freedoms that even the government cannot take away goes back to the Magna Carta in 1216 and the Renaissance and the enlightenment.
Europe had started to forget a lot of that after it colonized America. The French and Spanish colonists here had few if any rights, and the viceroys were probably more powerful in their assigned viceroyalties than the kings were back home. The British Parliament and aristocracy decided after they defeated the French menace to their colonies that the colonists owed them and owed them on a permanent basis. They were going to decide how things would be done in the colonists, and if the colonists didn’t like it, then it was their ill fortune. If the UK wanted to limit freedom of speech or of the press because it didn’t like what was being said, it was going to do it. If the UK wanted to remove the colonists’ ability to defend themselves by swiping the powder from the public magazine under cover of night, it would do it. If the UK wanted to force the colonists to provide for its garrison, the colonists better pony up. If the UK decided it was going to tear your house apart to find what might or might not be there, it was going to do it. If the UK decided it was going to take your property, your freedom, or your life without fussing much about due process, too bad. And yes, that included telling the colonists they were going to be limited to east of the Appalachians and that eventually, when slavery was abolished (although that was 60 years down the road in the UK at the time of the Revolution), it was going to be abolished here too, maybe with, quite possibly without compensation.
The colonists decided that was unacceptable, and you know what followed. After the failed experiment that was the Articles of Confederation, the Constitution was written to create a government that would be effective, but limited, and whose job would be to protect the citizens and deliver the services it was charged with delivering, not run every aspect of their lives.
There were a few aspects of this government that had to be hashed out and refined as things progressed. The question of individual rights was one of the first, which is where the Bill of Rights comes in. Slavery was another, and state vs. Federal authority was another. As things have moved forward, this country has always moved toward the expansion of individual rights, and very rarely toward the taking away of individual rights. Like it or not, it has also moved increasingly toward giving the Federal government more and more power. Some of those increases had good intentions, but unintended side effects, like the Volstead Act and concurrent legislation, designed to stop gangsterism associated with illegal liquor, and the Civil Rights Act, which was created to stop violence against minorities from going unpunished due to local good old boy networks. However, both led to expansions of Federal power by creating a much more expanded law enforcement apparatus the Feds could use and allowing the Federal government, via the doctrine of double sovereignty, to take a second crack at jailing you if, in its opinion, the state had reached the wrong conclusion. You realize that before 1934 FBI agents had no authorization to carry weapons or make arrests? All they could do was create a report, and then the Federal marshals had to take it from there. That’s a far cry from today, when they have pretty much carte blanche to shoot you dead or lock you up and lying to them is itself a crime that can get you hard time.
Now we are reaching a point where the question of expanding individual rights vs. expanding governmental power is resulting in a clash. Eventually it’s going to have to be decided whether individual rights or government power are paramount. In other countries we can see what happens when you allow government power to be paramount. Eventually the government starts to run every aspect of people’s lives. In Turkey you can be thrown in jail for 2 years if you say anything bad about Ataturk. In Germany possessing an AMERICAN 45th infantry Division patch from before 1939 will get you jailed (they used the swastika in tribute to the Native American population of Oklahoma). In New Zealand one vote in Parliament pushed by Prime Minister Horse-Face made criminals out of law-abiding gun owners who hadn’t done a damn thing except own a perfectly legal weapon when one guy went nuts against Muslims. In Canada, one pretty boy prime minister who’s been in power way too long could strip you of everything necessary to function including your bank account and your insurance, because he wanted you to stop protesting and you wouldn’t. There’s only one party here that’s ok with all of that, and you shouldn’t have to ask yourself if you’re ok with all of that.