Iowa forbids voting by Homosexuals? Property ownership? What?
Civil rights are defined by law and it is the stated goal to be covered. Making the claim of a violation persuades those of contrary thinking to acquiesce.
Most rights either affirmed by or granted by the constitution have morphed into privilages to be excercised at the pleasure of the ruling class, all the while they create new bogus rights out of whole cloth.
Oh, I know the answer to this one. Rights come from God and the legislature passes laws that are just supplemental to God’s Law so long as they don’t conflict with God’s law.
From the article: “Rights are a state of being.”
I don’t see it. If rights are a state of being, does that mean I have a right to life or death, liberty or captivity, health or sickness, sanity or insanity?
Very few people are precise enough when they talk of rights. I think there are different types of rights.
For instance, natural or inalienable rights stand on their own as rights we would have in a state of nature, absent an organized society.
Contract rights are those we can gain through contracts or agreements with others.
Constitutional or legal rights come from the law of a particular society.
Discussing “rights” without adequate differentiation just leads to confusion and anger.
Several posts above well summarize our civil rights as intended by our US Constitution and the first ten amendments.
Our founders rejected the Divine Right of Kings and recognized that human rights come from Nature’s God. We all may interpret that God differently but we must never forget that we come into this world with “unalienable rights.” [post 3]
Excellent writing on this matter was done by Thomas Paine and Jean Jacques Rousseau. Their discussions have served as the basis for most debates on rights and their genesis. [post 5]
...westerners typically defined [rights]by the Christianity common thread had a very significant contribution by the the Great Brits in 1260? called the Magna Carta [1215] which became the basis for most rights law amongst the colonies. Concepts, wording, phraseology and are of English heritage. [post 9]
Our founding fathers used Christian concepts of every man’s inner God given worth, the experience of tyranny under the British Crown and British common law to create our constitutional republic. The Constitution says the federal government only has powers and control as listed in Articles 1-3.
Amendments 1-8 list certain rights the federal and state governments cannot take away or unduely limit from we citizens.
Amendment 9 states: “The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.”
Amendment 10 states: “The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.”
In summary, Our rights existed before the government created by our Constitution and continue now. Activist judges and liberal statist lawmakers have twisted the original language of the Constitution or ignored the stated limits on our federal government to make our government more intrusive on our lives. That threatens our rights and must be corrected through the ballot box or by a second American Revolution.