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Fundamentally Wrong About Fundamental Rights
Townhall.com ^ | September 18, 2017 | Derek Hunter

Posted on 09/18/2017 5:35:04 AM PDT by Kaslin

Did you realize you have a right to not be offended? That you have a right to other people’s property and their labor? Were you unaware that you, as a citizen, have the same rights in the United States of America as an illegal alien? These are among the newly declared “rights” Democrats have bestowed on people through the power of simply saying they exist. The problem is this concept is fundamentally un-American.

Our rights as Americans are not granted to us by the government. Our government is empowered by us on the condition it does not infringe upon the rights with which we were born.

The Founding Fathers were brilliant in that they wrote the Constitution to limit government, not citizens. The First Amendment, for example, is explicit in how it starts, “Congress shall make no law…” The rights to free speech, freedom of religion, the press, assembly, etc., are not granted by the Constitution, they are protected from government by it.

The whole of the Bill of Rights is written the same way, “Shall not be infringed,” etc.

Since the government is not granting those individual rights – we were born with them – it can’t take them away. For liberal progressives, this concept is a threat – they prefer the government being not only the protector of rights, but the decider of what is and is not a right. That’s not liberty; it’s closer to slavery.

And slavery is what the left-wing Antifa would like to impose on the country. When Ben Shapiro spoke at UC Berkeley Thursday night you would have thought he was staging public executions of anyone who disagrees with him by the way these leftists greeted the event.

All Ben did was speak and answer questions; he responded to words with words. This is offensive to the left, who consider it to be violence.

With regularity, these progressive activists greet “violent speech” with actual physical violence before the speeches are given. The left, it seems, believes wholeheartedly in preemptive war against their fellow Americans who think wrong.

They believe they have the right to not be offended, and to stop anything they determine offensive. You have to have the mentality of a 5-year-old who mistook a pile of lead paint chips for Pringles to think any of this resides in the same time zone as a “right,” but this is the base of the Democratic Party nowadays.

Speaking of eating paint chips, Bernie Sanders revealed his long-awaited (by journalists) “Medicare for All” plan to end, once and for all, the United States being the world’s last bastion of hope for people on wait lists for life-saving medical treatment. “Health care is a right,” the Doc Brown from Back to the Future look-a-like has been grumbling for years.

But health care isn’t a right; it’s a service. Medical professionals provide this service in exchange for payment. No other “right” protected by the Constitution requires someone else to provide a service for you.

The closest is the Second Amendment, which liberals hate, because to exercise it, they say, you have to buy a gun. Actually, you don’t. You can be given one. You can trade for one. You can inherit one, or you can make one. But that doesn’t really matter – the right to keep and bear arms is unambiguous, yet liberals don’t argue gun manufacturers must provide them to people free of charge. Quite the opposite, actually.

Yet with health care, if it’s a right, people who’ve invested years of the life studying, and tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars in that study, have no business expecting pay for their services because to do so would be to infringe upon the “fundamental right” of another human being. They could not refuse new patients, or really charge for their service. To do so would be akin to a poll tax.

Of course, health care is not a right, and Bernie knows this. But it sure sounds good to people who have no understanding of the concept of liberty and find the idea of personal responsibility to be as distasteful as differing political opinions.

Speaking of differing political opinions, the city council of College Park, Md., this week attempted to extend the right to vote in local elections to all “residents” of the city, regardless of immigration status. The argument liberals made was residents should have a say in their local government, which they would if they were in their home countries. But now illegal aliens will have a say over local representatives and referendums.

Democrats on the city council considered putting the idea on the ballot next year, but they were afraid their constituents wouldn’t vote the way they wanted, so they tried to impose their will on the people themselves. A bit of ironic hilarity from the party of gangs of unshowered mutants blocking traffic and chanting “This is what democracy looks like.”

Left unanswered is how long someone has to be a “resident” of College Park and how the actual citizens (you know, the suckers paying the bills) feel about this new “right” being granted to people with no business being in the country.

They got a majority of the council but fell 2 votes shy of the total required to change the city charter. This was the first bite at the apple, they’ll be back and considering it’s a liberal college town, they’ll likely win eventually. People get the government they deserve.

People who look to government to grant them rights are always finding new and creative ones they demand be honored by people who just want to be left alone. As evidenced by President Trump’s DACA decision, the problem with this idiocy is if you believe rights come from government there is little stopping the government from taking away some rights when it suits their desires. As an American the whole idea offends me, which means liberals will support doing away with it, right?


TOPICS: Constitution/Conservatism; Culture/Society; Editorial; Government
KEYWORDS: policy

1 posted on 09/18/2017 5:35:04 AM PDT by Kaslin
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To: Kaslin

Democrats push ‘fashion statement/idea of the day’ as law... it’s silly.


2 posted on 09/18/2017 5:40:43 AM PDT by GOPJ ("$3 Million Dollars 'PER DAY' is spent to incarcerate criminal illegals.That's $1.2 Billion a year.")
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To: Kaslin

Nicely written.


3 posted on 09/18/2017 5:54:58 AM PDT by New Jersey Realist (Be Nice To Your Kids. They Will Pick Out Your Nursing Home)
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To: Kaslin

At most colleges and universities today, Freedom of Speech means freedom from having to hear any speech that makes you feel bad.


4 posted on 09/18/2017 5:55:33 AM PDT by Bubba_Leroy (The Obamanation has ended!)
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To: Kaslin

Americans also have the right to advocate and demand that Demonicrats be indicted, tried, convicted, and sentenced to publicly hang for giving aid and comfort to the enemy and crimes against humanity for the genocidal murder of unborn children.


5 posted on 09/18/2017 6:12:31 AM PDT by Carl Vehse
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To: Kaslin

Outstanding!


6 posted on 09/18/2017 6:12:59 AM PDT by Buffalo Head (Illegitimi non carborundum)
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To: Kaslin

If there is one primary theme or message that you can take away from the full gestalt of what leftists are doing these days, it is that they feel free to harass and intimidate people into silence and compliance.

It seems soooo ironic about all this is that this social thuggery by the left is actually permitted to happen. It’s ironic because they try to portray the right, or anyone who they are attempting to harass and herd into the box they made, as facists. But if the middle, or the right, were facists, these people would have been completely brow-beated down at the first public tantrum they ever threw. In fact, the level of acceptance and timidity by the public for the antics of the left is astoundly opposite to facism.

But I say this all seems ironic. It not irony. It’s no mistake at all.

These leftists know that people can be culled and quieted. They know because they have been getting away with it for some time now. What they are truly afraid of is a real backlash. In order to counter any sort of suppression of their aggression against the public, they need to pre-emptively say that they are against fascism, because that’s exactly how it would appear, if they frame it that way.

...and it works.

So all that isn’t irony. It’s intentional.

What I find ironic is that recently juggalos shared a protest day in Washington DC with trump supporters. What were the Juggalos protesting? Law enforcement declaring that some of their activities could be perceived of and investigated as criminal.
Why is this ironic?
Because it is the anti-social and organized violent activities of leftist groups that are being overlooked in stark contrast to how almost any other group would, and are.


7 posted on 09/18/2017 6:26:11 AM PDT by z3n
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To: Kaslin

Nothing is a “right” if it requires someone else’s money or labor.


8 posted on 09/18/2017 7:29:15 AM PDT by circlecity
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To: Bubba_Leroy
The Anti First Amendment movement has nothing to do with protecting anyone's feelings.

That pretext is simply a shield for the real, darker basis for the movement, which is to shut down the freedom of expression and the freedom of association of a specific group of people.

9 posted on 09/18/2017 10:14:59 AM PDT by Architect of Avalon
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To: circlecity
Nothing is a “right” if it requires someone else’s money or labor [to claim or enjoy].

Unfortunately, a temporal supreme court decreed relatively recently that the reverse is true, further pushing discussions into rhetorical entropy.
This, in the practical sense, leaves the reasonably informed citizen with no useful grasp of what is fact and what is simply politics.
So although I agree with your statement, it is useless to us as a rhetorical anchor.

The villain appears to be our judicial system, which can most charitably be considered chaotic to the point of criminality.

So where to start to set things right?

10 posted on 09/18/2017 11:58:33 AM PDT by publius911 (Seriously??)
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