Can you name all your human rights?
It’s hard. I know. The list keeps growing.
And that should make you very suspicious.
And what makes the task all the more difficult is that the
idea of a human right has changed as well.
Things that had never been thought of as a right before have now become
rights. And that should also make you
very suspicious.
Something is changing, and we need to know who is doing the
changing and why.
Our country is based on the idea of human rights. They were unique among the nations of the
world, but now not so much. Yes, some nations copied us, but lately we
have been copying other nations. That too
should make you suspicious.
And what is even more suspicious is that rights that had
existed from the founding of our country are now being called into question,
and demands are being made to limit, restrict, and even abolish them.
And things that were never considered to be
rights, in fact they were often found to be morally wrong and offensive, are
now given full right status with the full legal backing of the government.
The genius of our country is that God gave unalienable rights
to people, rights that precede and supersede government. Government did not give them, and government
cannot take them away.
The Founders debated whether to put a list of them into the Constitution. They were concerned that people might think
that these rights came from the government.
They were concerned too that people might think that these were the only
rights God had given them, and they were concerned that people might think that
the government had the power to limit, change, or revoke them.
It is important too to ask how they came to believe that God
had given them rights, and what God were they talking about. Every nation at that time believed in a god
of some sort, but they were the only ones who believed in these unalienable
human rights.
The short answer is that they believed in the God of the
Bible and that the Bible showed humans His plans for how life is to be
lived.
Somewhere between our founding and today, with the help of
the court called supreme, the idea took hold that our nation, as in our
government and our public life, must be neutral toward all religions. It must not favor one over another. All are equal.
In practice, this came to mean that government and public
life must be conducted apart from religion, as if there were no such thing as
religion. Religion came to be seen as people’s
personal views, like their preferences in books or movies or food. But no religion was seen as being true, as in
describing how life really is.
But all this cannot be true, if our nation’s founding was
based on one particular religion, namely, Christianity. If
that religion is not true in a sense different from how any other religion might
be considered true, then our country was founded on a myth, a lie, a false
belief, and as such it has no basis in reality.
Along with this neutrality toward any or all religion, it
was concluded that our nation was intended to be and always was a secular
nation. God had no place in our
government or our public life. Religion
was entirely a private matter best kept to oneself.
Prior to this time, the Ten Commandments formed the moral
values of our country. But as a secular
country, there was no pre-made moral system to resort to. A new one had to be made up as they went
along, from the ground up.
So if our rights don’t come from God, then they must come
from the government. This is what is commonly
known as a perfect storm.
People in government like to stay in government. One reason is that they get to make the
rules, including the ones that affect them.
Who else gets to do that?
Another reason is that government has access to seemingly
unlimited amounts of money. You can get
very rich being an elected official in our federal government. And one of the best ways to get elected is by
what you offer the people who can vote for you.
And, of course, the government has no money of its own, only
what it gets from the people who pay taxes.
Which leads to the point about the meaning of rights being changed.
The rights that our Founders listed in the Bill of Rights
all have to do with individual freedoms, things that people could do without government
interference, restriction, or supervision.
People were, well, free. The government
was created, added, to help keep it that way.
Other countries often liked to impose their will on other nations, so a
national government was the best way to defend our nation from them.
There were also rights that protected people from the
government, like the right to a jury or legal defense.
When God, and Christianity, were part of the fabric of our
country, people didn’t look to the government to solve every problem or to meet
every need. But now that God has been
removed from public life and government, problems arise, and there is nobody
else to look to for help but the government.
When the government starts giving out, or recognizing, new
rights, they will generally fall into two categories.
The first category is the establishment of a new moral standard
that supersedes the old one and compels everyone to follow the new one.
The First Amendment guaranteed the free exercise of religion.
It couldn’t do that unless religion was
consistent with the moral values of our country. This shows that our country was a Christian
nation, because some well-known religions of that time burned widows alive with
their dead husbands or constantly waged war on those who did not practice their
religion.
Two recent examples today are abortion and gay marriage. Obviously if you don’t believe in abortion,
you don’t have to have one. But you do
have to subsidize those who do.
The Founders would have found that highly offensive, and so
do a very large number of people today.
The idea of freedom of conscience, which is how the Founders often
referred to this right of free exercise of religion, is trampled on as people are
forced to have their money spent on something they find abhorrent.
It’s true that God, or evolution if you prefer, gave
incredible responsibility to mothers by this whole pregnancy, birth, and very
intense raising process, but our society used to value the life and birth of
every child, and it used to be common to be able to raise a large family on one
income. Now that has been made difficult
for many families due to inflation and the loss of millions of good paying jobs
due to other government policies.
Gay marriage is another example. It was touted before it became a right as
simply letting people love who they want.
Nothing else would change. But you
can’t believe what people say about the long-term effects of new things.
Now people of conscience are being forced to give up their businesses
and their jobs if they do not enthusiastically embrace something that was
unknown throughout all of human history until a few years ago. Your freedom of conscience and religion mean
nothing to the government if their new secular values differ from the old religious
ones.
The second category of rights that government gives is that
it requires the compliance of everybody else to meet the rights of other
people.
Again, this has two forms.
One is the right to be protected from the free speech of
other people. The Founders would have
highly objected to this. If you read a
lot in the early writings of our country, you will see that much of what was said,
particularly about public figures, was very crude and often far from the truth.
But more particularly these new rights put the burden of deciding
what speech is acceptable on the hearer rather than the speaker. And the government, the media, and the public
will use every means they have to shame, shut down, or prosecute violators of
this policy. And because the hearers now
determine the validity of the speech, free speech is being highly restricted, a
large part because people are afraid to speak freely. Free speech has now become very costly.
This is simply wrong.
But it is the natural result when a government establishes a new moral
order (secularism) over a country’s original moral order (religious, or Christian).
The other form of government rights requires other people to
pay for them. If a person has a right to
low cost medical insurance, for example, then everybody else, at least those who
pay taxes, is paying toward it. If a person
has a right, not a full right yet, to own a home, everybody else has to pay to make
that possible, often in indirect ways like shifting tax or loan costs.
What happens is that, in a secular world where God has no
place, rights are viewed collectively instead of individually. Charity was voluntary, and by the way it was
considerable. Read de Tocqueville’s
Democracy in America. There used to be voluntary
organizations aimed at every possible societal problem to be found at the
time. Now government has taken that
over, and your freedom of choice to participate has gone.
Some people have described this as a form of slavery:
forcing people to work for other people against their will. But just saying that, many people will find
offensive, because those who might say that are not usually of the same race of
some other people who were slaves here 150 years ago.
This whole new value system of secularism is fundamentally changing
our country. It’s happening slowly, over
generations, so that younger people start out with new normals, and nobody is teaching
them the original ones.
This goes the same for the millions of people who have been
coming into our country over the last few decades. We don’t teach them the founding principles
of our country either. They might get
the new watered-down simplified version, but, being far from the original, over
time, when they vote, run for office, and make new laws, it turns our country
in a very different direction from where it was intended to go.
It’s like we are being taken over by a foreign power; but because
it is gradual and the military is not involved, nobody is paying attention, or
they are too busy to interrupt their lives to be involved themselves.
Does anybody remember the story about the camel’s foot in
the tent? It hasn’t been used in years. It starts with the foot, but eventually the
whole camel got into the tent, and, well, there’s not much room left for anything
else with a camel in a tent.
The fact is that this is a war for the soul and life of our
nation. And wars require sacrifices and disruptions
of our normal lives to do whatever we can to regain and preserve our
freedoms. Those who want to change our
country in these ways will tell you that you got the original story wrong or
that our country has been wrong all along.
Most people are probably not prepared to answer those views,
but we need to get prepared. That’s part
of the sacrifice, and then we need to get involved. The first way to get involved is to talk
about these things, in conversations and then to the media and the people in government,
and certainly to become active in every election and to know where the candidates
stand on the principles that define them and not just the positions they publicly
run on.
Wars used to be three or four years, and then they were
over. This war has been going on for
generations and will last for, well, we don’t have no idea. If you don’t want to do it for yourself, then
do it for your children and your grandchildren.
