On Liberty

 

Is your first thought really to have sex wth her?

We are all endowed by our creator, say the US Declaration of Independence, with inalienable rights to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”

Have you ever wondered why there are three items in that list, and not two? Doesn’t liberty mean liberty to pursue happiness? Was Jefferson only padding his list?

No; we misunderstand what liberty means. Liberty means, and meant to the founders, liberty to obey one’s conscience. The right to act as a moral being, exercising our free will, without which we have no chance at salvation. Genesis tells us this is the reason we are here. This is why the first words of the first amendment to the Constitution are “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.” After life itself, this is the most essential right.

This has been lost in recent years, as our devotion to religion has waned. Now we think liberty means doing whatever we want to do.

But liberty does not imply the right to pornography, for example, or gay sex, or alcohol, or recreational drugs, or abortion. Which is why, until recent years, no legislature or court thought there was a problem with laws against them. For nobody feels obliged by their conscience to make or view pornography, or to have sex with someone to whom they are not married, or get drunk, or to abort their child. All are only pursuing pleasure. Religious liberty also need not extend to any faith that does not impose demands on one’s conscience: it does not require respect in law for atheists, or satanists, or pagans who worship their gods only out of fear or hope for favour. Nobody until recently thought it did.

These can, on the other hand, be understood to be covered by “pursuit of happiness.” Although until recently, courts and legislatures have not taken this right seriously. Pursuit of happiness indeed seems to imply one has a right to anything that in your own opinion makes you feel good, so long as it does not harm your neighbour.

The classic source for the idea of these inalienable human rights, although they have earlier antecedents in the Christian tradition, is John Locke. But his triad was “life, liberty, and possession of property.” Jefferson and his committee changed the third right. I think Locke’s formulation makes better sense. 

For one thing, protection of property from theft is in practical terms one of the primary reasons to institute government among men. One does not need government to pursue happiness. Property ownership is also essential to a functioning democracy. It can allow for self-sufficiency, and so one can, if necessary, stand up to government in a crisis.

Perhaps more importantly, one can never achieve happiness by pursuing it. That leads too many down a primrose path to addictions and ennui and ruin; we are seeing this more and more today. Simply having this so famously in the Declaration may have misguided many.

All Men Are Created Equal

 

This essay from AP seems to deliberately obscure the plain sense of the simple passage from the Declaration of Independence that “all men are created equal.”

“Those words say to me, ‘Do better, America.’ And what I mean by that is we have never been a country where people were truly equal,” Jennings says. “It’s an aspiration to continue to work towards, and we’re not there yet.”

“We say ‘All men are created equal’ but does that mean we need to make everyone entirely equal at all times…?’”

“Robin Marty, author of ‘Handbook for a Post-Roe America,’ calls the phrase a ‘bromide’ for those ‘who ignore how unequal our lives truly are.’”

But if men are created equal, it cannot be the business of government to make them equal. The duty of government is to treat them equally; to value them for their own deeds, as opposed to valuing them for how they were created.

The author then suggests that unless we recognize gay marriage, we are denying gays the right to marry, hence treating them unequally. But we are not—gays always had equal rights to marry; just not to marry men. Is it discriminatory if we still do not allow people to legally marry animals, their grown children, themselves, or multiple partners? No, so long as the same law applies to all for the same act.

Nor is there any question that the term “all men” always referred to black men. There is no way to twist it so that it does not. 

I fear this essay is an example of the postmodern spirit, which insists that we can twist words to mean whatever we want, making them endlessly debatable, and, ultimately, meaningless.

The essay concludes with Ibram Kendi explaining “The anti-racist idea suggests that all racial groups are biologically, inherently equal.”

This is self-evidently false. Racial groups are not biologically equal, because they are not biologically identical. It is the human soul that is equal; in moral worth, because equal in the eyes of the Creator. Not everyone has the mental or physical capacity to be a doctor, or a star athlete, and it is not discrimination if you are not. One gets into these confusions when one gets materialist, and denies the soul of man.

Kendi of course goes further, and insists that all cultures must also be accepted as equal. This is nonsensical. A culture is a set of ideas; this is tantamount to insisting that all ideas are equally true.

Including things like apartheid, genocide, caste, and child sacrifice.

One Nation under God No More

Shameful bunch of religious fundamentalists.

I recently got involved in a discussion on Facebook that suggests to me just how divided politics is now in the US. The wife of an old friend posted Paul Ryan saying in his acceptance speech as VP candidate, “Our rights come from nature and God, not from government.” And then her terse comment: “That just doesn't make sense!”

Whoops! It's a pretty close paraphrase of the Declaration of Independence. I would have thought simply pointing that out would reconcile her to Ryan's comment, though I cannot guess what did not make sense to her about the reference.

So I did.

At this point, three women and one man piled in with protesting posts. Apparently, the Declaration of Independence is highly controversial. One wrote, “What happened to separation of state and religion?” The man wrote “Canada grants the right to healthcare and equal rights to homosexuals. I wonder if Mr. Ryan believes that these rights also come from God and Nature. Pretty sure both countries follow the same God...” [Note the phrase “grants the right.” Not inalienable, then.] Another woman responded “And some of us don't believe in god! But Canada is looking better all the time!” Another wrote “The declaration of independence was a document that justified the colonies separation from the monarchy and the british parliament [sic]. ... most of America has moved on from 19th century liberalism.” And one wrote “Stephen Roney you are so misguided. If you are a US citizen go talk among your right wing friends, if you are a Canadian, shame on you!”

So there you are. Not only is the Declaration of Independence and the doctrine of inalienable human rights no longer in force, not only is it now controversial, but it is actually shameful to bring it up. And bringing up God seems to be even worse.

The frightening thing to me about this is that there are apparently no longer any shared values to appeal to among Americans—not liberalism, not the Constitution, not human rights, not the Judeo-Christian tradition, not conventional morality. There is no longer any possibility of reasoned discourse. It is war; really, with or without the actual shooting.