Paul Ryan tore up the Constitution and ground it

[Raven]

into the dirt with his muddy heel. On Saturday, he did just that. Our rights come from Nature and God, not from the Government, he said: it was, to me, the most chilling thing he said and the one that got screams of approval from his audience. It certainly sent a chill up my spine as I listened to him and then I recalled a conversation I had just last week with a young college student who had never read the Constitution much less studied it in school. This is very dangerous because I think there are many people out there like this college student who assume that their elected officials will honor and abide by our founding document. The ignorance and apathy in this country is stunning and very frightening.

I hope that someone with a brain in the media or at the debates or from the Obama Campaign will bring this up.

[Igel]

1. So read the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution.

You'll find that in the Constitution, the 9th Amendment says that the rights in the Constitution are enumerated. It doesn't say "granted" or "bestowed." They're just enumerated. It also says that there are others--somehow not granted or bestowed by the federal government, and not enumerated.

Even more damning is the Declaration of Independence.

"WHEN in the Course of human Events, it becomes necessary for one People to dissolve the Political Bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the Powers of the Earth, the separate and equal Station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle them, a decent Respect to the Opinions of Mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the Separation. WE hold these Truths to be self-evident, that all Men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness—That to secure these Rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just Powers from the Consent of the Governed, that whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these Ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its Foundation on such Principles, and organizing its Powers in such Form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness."

This was pretty much a commonplace in Enlightenment thought. You have rights because you're human. You're not given rights. Rights inhere in you because of nature and the way nature was made. They can be denied. They cannot be granted. What can be granted is the freedom to enjoy the rights you have--rather like the distinction of having a car and being allowed to drive.

The purpose of government is to make these rights safe, to ensure them. As soon as a government stops ensuring them and starts denying them, then it's existence is up to the people. They can overturn it. Or they can tolerate it. In any event, the government that you think "bestows rights" exists by the consent of the people. If it abridges the enjoyment of their rights, that's their choice.

Everything else is to say that the state is all and you are nothing. You have things you call "rights" simply because somebody else decided that they'd be nice and consider it to be your right. You have no right or reason to fight for your rights, because well, you simply have no more rights than a piece of celery.

However, this view is becoming more common in the US as awareness of what the founding documents say and their background becomes, well, "antiquated" and "quaint." It's a view widely held elsewhere where monarchy held sway or where the struggle for power wasn't about ideals but about land and food. It blurs the distinction between government-granted entitlements and inalienable rights, and that's sad. Perjudicious, even. We become grateful to usurpers for giving us what we already had. It's a case of a dog being grateful for food, when the "food" is actually the dog's tail, cut off and stewed.

It also allows "rights" to be seen as based not on human dignity and worth, but on greed and lust for power. That was the battle fought in the Constitutional Convention between those who disapproved of slavery and those who wanted to keep it. Greed and lust for power won. The slaves' enjoyment of their rights was denied. Abolitionists viewed this as the denial of an inalienable right to people; slavers tended to either demote slaves to "not human" (because then they didn't have rights) or think that rights were bestowed by superiors upon lessers. And that since rights were bestowed, they had a right to enjoy the fruits of others' work.

[Raven]

2. You've got me thinking on this lazy Sunday

afternoon. I read the 9th Amendment's use of the word "enumerated" to underline the authors' intent to make clear that there are other human rights other than those "enumerated" in the first 8...sort of a safety against limiting rights. I have always thought that the authors were smart enough to know that they might not cover everything.

My question to the likes of Paul Ryan is: whose God came down (as with Moses and the tablets) with the 15th and 19th Amendments? No God did that. The people through their government did that. Paul Ryan's God might very well think women have no status in society and his vision of Nature might consider them inferior in intelligence and strength. The Church he belongs to certainly took that position for centuries and in many ways still does today. (I was born and brought up a Catholic so I think I can say that.) He seems to be advocating a form of mysticism.

This country was not founded by God, anybody's God. It was founded by men many of whom believed in God. Big difference, I think.