A question on unalienable rights…

[Zippyjuan]

You miss the whole point, it said "endowed by their CREATOR with certain unailianable Rights"
and the right to priviacy was not one of them. The Supreme Court established the right to privicy in a case dealing with the right for birth control, that was then expanded to cover abortion in Roe vs Wade.
The founding father believed your God gave you the rights not your goverment

Unless you have laws to protect the rights, then anybody can take them from you. Even if they are "endowed by the Creator" as the Declaration of Independence says. Did slaves have the right to Liberty or the Persuit of Happiness?

 

[LookingForward]

Unless you have laws to protect the rights, then anybody can take them from you. Even if they are "endowed by the Creator" as the Declaration of Independence says. Did slaves have the right to Liberty or the Persuit of Happiness?

Slaves had rights to Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness but their rights were violated.

 

[Voltaire]

Unless you have laws to protect the rights, then anybody can take them from you.

I probably would've fell in league with those who opposed the bill of rights, on the grounds that a bill of rights limits my rights rather than expands them. If my rights are enumerated, then my government can simply deny the rights that are not enumerated.

Left to the 9th and 10th amendments, the non-enumerated rights have been completely trampled.

Better to have no enumerated rights and then all rights are equally inviolable.

 

[Live_Free_Or_Die]

nt

 

[Zippyjuan]

Which would mean that if an unalienable right is one which is available to everybody and cannot be taken away then that is death. Unless you believe in what Jean Paul Sartre says:

Freedom is what you do with what's been done to you

then you can find freedom in whatever situation you are in and that cannot be truely taken from you. Freedom is a state of mind. If you feel oppressed, you are.

Rights are what you exercise. They are not given to you. If they are given then they can also be taken away.

Do two wrongs make a right?

Are there inalienable wrongs?

OK- getting a little silly now.

 

[osan]

Rights are what we agree to bestow on ourselves and each other.

Categorically incorrect. Were this so, then a right would be a fluid thing. It is not. You are confusing a right and a privilege. These are mutually exclusive concepts, having absolutely nothing to do with each other.

The only truely inalienable right to a living being is the right to die.

Oh dear... methinks you need to sit alone in a quiet, dark room, preferably in a comfortable chair and think on this for as long as it takes to become apparent to you just how mind numbingly wrong this is. It may take hours. Or years. Keep at it because if you really believe what you wrote, you're in a lot of trouble.

Some people will argue that people should have certain rights but they are not guaranteed unless people create an enforcement mechanism of those rights.

No. There is no such thing as rights that one should or should not have. Rights are facts. We determine privileges. Rights follow from the acceptance of the premise that we are each born as free beings, which in turn follows from an acceptance of the notion of equality (or more precisely, equivalence) between us all. If these two conditions are accepted as true, the rest follows axiomatically and apodictically. That much I can promise you.

You may think you have the right to an apple growing on a tree in your yard but if a person or animal takes and eats that apple before you get to it, you do not have the rights to that apple.

What you are describing has nothing to do with rights per se, but rather the violation of them. If an apple is growing on a tree on YOUR PROPERTY, you hold the right to dispose of that apple as you see fit. If someone else takes it before you can get to it and they do so without your consent, that is theft, which is a crime. That one commits a crime against you, it does not follow that the rights they violated in so doing did not exist. For example, by your reasoning you hold no right to your own life. I may therefore murder you with impunity because crimes are necessarily defined (albeit indirectly in some cases) as violations of the rights of others. If you have no rights to violate, then I can commit no crime against you no matter what I do. If you redefine "right" to be synonymous with privilege, then you are opening a huge can of worms because then one's rights are necessarily arbitrary and may be redefined at whim. How happy would you be if your right to life were legislated away? Not very, I would bet.

We can agree to enact laws to protect your right to that apple- it does not mean you will not lose that apple but if somebody takes it away they can be punished. This is also true of personal liberty. You may think you have the right to move freely but that can be taken away and again we can enact laws to punish people taking away your liberty but they are not truely inalienable since it is impossible to stop somebody from taking them from you.

You do NOT understand rights or the concept of inalienability.

 

[osan]

Rights can be taken away with, and only with, due process, but should only be taken away for infringing on the rights of others.

Not quite there. Rights can never be taken away - they may in this case be abridged, presumably for some limited time, until whatever debt is satisfied, after which the abridgement is lifted. Placing one in ptison upon due conviction of a crime abridges one's right to move freely about to a great extent. One's right to life, however, is not abridged, save in capital cases where a sentence of death has been duly imposed.

These differences can be subtle, but they are fundamental and must be apprehended and understood lest all proper understanding wash away in the endless torrent of ignorance that threatens us all.

Endeavor to understand with propriety and correctness. Endeavor to be particular and impeccable in your intellectual habtis. It is, I promise you, important to the quality of your life, as well as those of the people around you.

 

[Legend1104]

I see the Bill of Rights as the way our founders attempted to determine what restrictions to place on the government in order to protect our rights. The declaration says that " amoung them were the right to life, liberty, and the persute of happiness." So, I kinda saw the "rights" enumerated in the BoRs as the attempt to protect us from attacks upon our rights. True rights should be those that existed in all men everywhere through all time given by God. So the right the bear arms, for example, is not an actual inalienable right because guns have not always existed, but the right to protect oneself and ones rights is inalienable. I also agree that inalienable rights can not be taken away. Since they are given by God, to do so would be to wrestle them from God himself. Although, people can infringe upon us. Maybe it is kinda like owning a tv when the power company has turned off your power. They may have stopped you from being able to watch tv, but they have not actually taken away your tv set.

 

[therepublic]

People are free to do whatever they want. What you articulate as rights from the constitution are only limitations of federal government.

True. The Constitution was written to limit the powers of the government. However we are free to do as we please as long as we do not harm another person, and if our actions harm others, it becomes a legal matter for the courts. Example: what two consenting adults do is none of the Government's business. however if if it is not mutually consenting adults, a crime may have been committed...a matter for the courts.