The Government Exists To Protect Our Rights

Hopefully you are all familiar with the founding documents of this nation: the Constitution, the Bill of Rights and particularly today the Declaration of Independence.  When I was in college, I was mortified when in literature class, the students were required to read the Declaration and most of them expressed surprise about what was actually in it.  So I am not sure I can expect you to know that it says the following:

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.

To break it down a little bit, we start with the idea that these are self-evident truths.  Of course when they said it the overwhelming majority of the world’s governments did not recognize these “truths” and even today I am not sure a majority of the world’s population lives under a government that respects those truths.  I think the best way to understand those words, then, is that to all good people, these were self-evident truths.  There will always be tyrants, great and petty, and their Brownshirts, who do not believe that these are self-evident truths, but there is a point where you just say, “you know what?  If you can’t even agree on this, then it is not a reflection on the truth of the sentiment, so much as a reflection on your character.”  If these truths are not self-evident to you, it’s an indictment on you.

And then the Declaration says that all men are created equal.  Again, this is not literally true.  Some of us are born smarter than others, and some of us are not.  I, for instance, was born with a disability that makes it hard for me to write by hand (but my typing skills are unaffected, thank God).  I am objectively born unequal to most other people in this fashion.  But what Jefferson and company were saying was not that we were all born equal in talent, etc. but that we were born equal in our rights—that is, generally the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.  I would only quibble with the implied sexism of that phrase (although sometimes in law a reference to “men” actually includes women, too); I think all persons are created equal, not just all men, especially when it comes to human rights.

And equal in what rights?  The right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

There are those among us who argue that the chief duty of the government is to avoid the violation of those rights.  They cite the quote, misattributed to Jefferson, that “government is best which governs least” and argue that the only threat to our rights is the government.

But common experience teaches us otherwise.

On September 11, 2001, thousands of Americans (and indeed people from other counties) had their sacred right to life violated, not by the government but by a shadowy network of terrorists.  And since then another sacred right, our freedom of expression, has been under attack.

For instance, it wasn’t the government that accomplished what we see on the left...

That is a reference to the infamous incident where Comedy Central censored the show South Park so that they couldn’t show Mohammed, explicitly citing fears of terrorism in their decision.  Indeed Comedy Central not only censored out images of Mohammed, and the word Mohammed, but even a speech on the need to stand up to censorship.  The government didn’t accomplish this; private (and unlawful) action did.

But people who can recite much of the Declaration ignore a phrase that comes just after the one I quoted above: “That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men[.]”  In other words, governments do not exist for their own benefit: they exist for the purpose of protecting our right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.  That means the government has more than just a legal obligation to avoid the active violation of our rights.  Instead, it has a positive duty to take active steps to defend us against all threats to our rights, whether it is a foreign country, a group of scummy Islamofascist terrorists or whatever.  And indeed our Federal Government has a duty to correct the violation of our rights by the states, and our state governments have a duty to resist the violation of our rights by the Federal Government when that happens.

So when any person is censored, by a flagrantly unconstitutional act of the government or by the threats of common Islamofascist terrorists, and it is not stopped by other organs of government, then government fails in its most basic mission.

And that is self-evidently wrong.

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