Rights

Naomi Hunt is Puzzled

The term "unalienable rights" has always been a puzzle to me. I feel strongly that unalienable rights are neither endowed by our Creator nor by our Government. We must earn them!

The concept that we can take them for granted is irresponsible, and the concept that rights are a reward for effort causes (me) inertia and despair. I hear so often here in southern Ohio, "It's God's will!" and\or "It's all the Government's fault!" This is in reference to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

How can I correct my thinking? How can one person turn this around so that there is domestic Tranquility in our time, right here in Waverly, Ohio?"

...Naomi Hunt...
Waverly, Ohio

Sudia Replies

You are endowed by your Creator with certain unalienable rights. The rights are not things, they are access to ecological processes of society. You have no right to the good life, or a job, or to be free from paying taxes. You have no right to own a car, or a home, or to send your kids to Harvard. Even though the Constitution says, "Life, liberty, and property," through a 5th Amendment taking, the Federal government can take your property, however, it must give you a fair market price for it. What you have a right to is the unalienable rights as access to process, access to health, education, privacy, participation in free enterprise etc. Even with life, you have to want to live. The death penalty is a crime against humanity; it is inhumane, not because society cannot exact retribution, but because society in the instance of the death penalty is acting under animal morality, not human let alone humane morality.

Unalienable Rights not Rewards

You have the right to education, but no one can make you study if you don't want to. You have a right to participate in free enterprise, but you also have the right to fail. Rights are an endowment, i.e. access to process; the fruits of the rights educational diplomas, a home, car, good job have to be earned.

Ecological Equity

All "men" (humans) are created equal, i.e. no one human life is worth more or less than any other human life, and we are endowed by our Creator with certain "rights". The fact that we are human, and that we are endowed with rights, assures us a share of the good(s) of the society. Our share is our ecological equity and our ecological equity is what we can earn through our exercise of our un alienable rights.

If you are a child of a wealthy family you don't have to earn much of anything unless your family wants you to. If you are a child of the middle class you know you will have to go to school to get a good job, and after you get a good job you are going to have to save to buy a house. If you are among the disadvantaged poor, the chances are you will not have much knowledge of what your rights are, your access to education will be limited, and you are going to live where the schools are bad, where they deal drugs, and where no one has much money, or anything else for that matter. Your failure as a poor person will be your own, but you will fail because you did not have access to your unalienable rights. It's not enough to have them; you have to know you have them and what they mean. And more importantly the society has to know you have them and the government has to provide an environment where they can be exercised.

We, the people, have a contract with our government: we give our consent to be governed in exchange for the government securing to us our unalienable rights. That's what the Declaration of Independence says, "That to secure these rights (the unalienable rights) governments are instituted among men (humans) deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed." Nothing could be more clear than the Declaration. Your rights are Creator-given and your government is obligated to secure them for you. Your part of the bargain is to use your rights to become a productive member of the ecosystem and to perform your civic obligations as a citizen sovereign. You became a citizen sovereign when you were born. From that moment on your rights existed and they are unalienable, no one can take them away from you.

Rights Denied, Rights Violated

You may have the rights, but by default, you may not have access to them. The fact that rights are violated, as in capital punishment, or access denied (as the right to vote) simply means that the system is corrupted. The government is forever violating someone's rights, but that doesn't mean it's proper. It means that the government has not yet been disciplined to be responsive to the rights of humans living in a humane ecosystem.

Obligations of the Citizen Sovereign

We, the citizens sovereign, of the United States must be the prime mover of our humane ecosystem. We, the citizens sovereign, of the United States need to elect representatives who will carry out the will of the citizens sovereign and not their own by default. We need a government that knows for whom it works and we need leaders who unite us in our moral and ethical life, not who divide us on the basis of race, creed, and patriotism. We need to live in an environment where genetic potential is not limited arbitrarily, but where all of us can be all that we can be. We need to understand and our government needs to understand what the unalienable rights are and why it is necessary that we have access to them and why we must be free to exercise them. That is the quid pro quo for our consent to be governed. It's our part of the action, it's part of our contract, it's our deal with our republic, it's our God-given right, and its unalienable—thank God!

...Ted Sudia...
Washington, DC

What's in a name? Sometimes everything.

Language is the peculiarly human tool that enables us to think—to formulate opinions, to follow those opinions through rational investigative thought processes to conclusions, and upon those conclusions to cast votes and take stands. If the beings thus engaged are truly and wisely human, they continue to question, to investigate, and sometimes even to engage in that most painful of peculiarly human activities known as changing their minds.

Without correct nomenclature, however, this process can only take place at a snail's pace and along a maddeningly circuitous pathway. Something like this has been happening in recent years. A failure to correctly perceive and define the unfolding political realities has hobbled our public ability to think about how we are lining up politically, and this, in turn, has hampered our recognition of who we are, where our roots lie, and in what directions we are drifting. Clarification of our political nomenclature could dramatically clear our thought processes and perhaps deal a body blow to those who have the most to gain from false and emotional labels and the fuzzy wrongheadedness that results.

...Jean Matthews...

© Copyright 1991
Institute for domestic Tranquility