The Beginning of the Potential End

Starting with the Left and the Press (again, bemoan the redundancy).

And here we go again (and again and again). We focused yesterday on this, but the latest example of the assertion of whole cloth, stifling "rights", to the detriment of our actual expansive and liberating Rights.

The fact that any avermention of someone's "rights" can be this repressive to those of Others is the quintessential exhibition of the warped point we have reached in the misunderstanding of our Founding.

This is not unlike High-Chair President Bill Clinton's description of the practice of the "right" to abortion: "safe, legal and rare".

What legitimate Right would anyone seek to put into practice "rarely"?

Furthermore, why would an inherent Right endowed upon us by our Creator need to be "legalized" by any convene of mere Man?

At the Very Least

And Rights are preeminently about freedom, which is often rife with conditionalities that are anything but "safe".

The Ex-'s 1,354,845,464th attempt at splitting the collective infinitive is a paradigmatic illustration of the attempted piecemeal dispatchment of the Constitution by those who find repeated annoyances in the strict adherence thereto.

Which led us to look back at our original analysis of this Constitutional devolution, posited on October 20th, 2004, and reproffered here for your reperusal.

The Left’s Distorted View of Rights Rights versus “rights”

Perhaps because it is no longer a part of the curriculum in government schools, the Constitution is now second only to the Bible as the most incorrectly cited tome in the Western world.

We have a variety of atheists, unbelievers in either God or America’s Noble Experiment or both, suing to remove “under God” from the Pledge of Allegiance, and the Ten Commandments from everywhere on the planet except churches (and they’re next, just wait; I will explain this in greater detail in a bit).

All in an effort to more rigorously adhere to the Constitution’s “separation of church and state” clause.

The problem is there is no such clause. The “wall of separation” they are trying to build into the Constitution was actually a phrase culled from the writings of Thomas Jefferson, who was pontificating about what he thought should be a part of our founding document.

His proposal did not win the day at the Constitutional Convention, so it is now forced ad hoc into the gathering’s resulting manuscript by those who wish it had.

And any day now one of these Separationists will find a complicit minister in some suburban liberal Protestant church to serve as the test case that, because places of worship are exempt from federal taxation, they “receive” federal tax dollars and they, too, must remove the Ten Commandments from the premises.

All in the interest of further raising the extra-Constitutional “wall”.

And as a group, the Bill of Rights has been bastardized beyond any recognizable semblance. We now have United States Congressmen, who ostensibly should know better, proffering legislation meant to bestow new “rights” upon people. And each new bogus slate of “rights” cheapens the original set.

And along with warping the façade, these new cadres of “rights” have completely distorted the original definitions of our actual Rights.

Words mean things. Rights as intended in the Constitution have nothing to do with the “rights” about which Senator John Kerry stumps. It is imperative for the Left to warp the definition of words when the definition of words impedes the march to a socialist utopia.

It does NOT depend on what your meaning of the word “is”, is, because there is only one definition of the word “is”, Bill Clinton’s wistful notions notwithstanding.

And with the High Chair President in mind, I would like to coin a Hot Springs, Arkansas analogy: You can put an evening gown and make-up on a pig, but I am still going to the prom stag.

Over the last fifty years, the metamorphosis from Rights to “rights” has turned this concept on its head. The government has gone from protecting your life, liberty and property from others to guaranteeing others access to your life, liberty and property.

The purpose of the Bill of Rights is to protect the individual’s freedoms; from the government primarily, and from other individuals secondarily.

Freedom of speech, freedom of assembly, freedom of religion et. al. were accompanied by some variation on the theme “Congress shall make no law abridging…”. Which was the document’s way of saying, “This is yours, and no one else’s of which to avail themselves ”.

Not so of today’s “rights”. Today’s “rights” mean a diminishing of the freedom of others in order to provide you with your new “right”.

Often, it is their property of which “the Others” are deprived. And by property, we mean money. The Others are deprived of a part of their property to pay for someone else’s newly minted “rights”.

Senator Kerry says that Americans have a “right” to health care. What he means is some people have the right to force other people to pay for their health care, with the government serving as the conduit enforcer to make sure “the Others” pony up.

With an annual federal budget exceeding $2.4 trillion, there are many “rights” to be maintained, and much federal enforcing to be done. And in this regard, Kerry views “rights” the way Bill Cosby views Jell-O; there’s always room for more.

The strident moves to more and greater “rights” have resulted in less and less of an ability to avail ourselves of our Rights. The search for governmental security has come at the expense of individual liberty, with no real delivery on the former and the moral certitude of the latter.

To alter slightly the thoughts of the eternally citable Ben Franklin, they that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little security deserve neither.

The most egregious error “the Takers” make is their failure to realize that if the government is allowed to take from “the Others” for their benefit today, what’s to stop the government from making them a part of “the Others” tomorrow?

Unfortunately “the Takers” are not that far sighted; their vision is impaired by their rigorous adherence to the maxim of the un- or under productive, and it is this creed and their rugged aversion to self-realization that traps them perpetually on the liberal merry-go-round:

With Rights come responsibilities. With “rights” come government checks.

The conscripted grafting usually involves money; but not always.

The Right to Life has, since 1973, been subserviated to the “right” to choose. The Right of the child to life is deemed of lesser import than the “right” of the person who cavalierly participated in its creation, who by this “right” can now choose to dismissively bring about its destruction.

That certainly is a liberating and uplifting “right” for our country, is it not?

In actuality, though, life, liberty and property are intertwined and inseparable. The person who is forced to render unto Washington a portion of their property to pay for the “rights” of others must sacrifice an additional portion of their life to recover their property loss.

And certainly anyone forced to rob from their life to pay property to others has had their liberty infringed as well. There is a word for the circumstance of working for someone else without compensation.

We fought a Civil War in part to bring a certain version of this Peculiar Institution to an end, only to see it reemerging incrementally one hundred and forty years later.

These things come in drips and drabs; the puddle has more than begun to accrue. It is past time to begin to drain the Fever Swamp.