I am getting a little sick of people complaining that “President Obama is going to give people from other countries the same rights as Americans”. Let me remind you, President Obama does not have the right to “give” rights to anyone. Our rights as Americans do not come from President Obama, or Congress, or even from our Constitution or Declaration of Independence. Those who think that way do not agree with what is actually the bedrock of our society, that “ALL men are endowed by THEIR CREATOR with certain INALIENABLE rights, among them life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
If a president can “give” those rights to someone from another country, then he can withhold them from any of us. He has no such power. Our rights do not come from Barak Obama, they are inalienable. Sadly, this is often inconvenient. And they chose, appropriately, to use the term “ALL MEN”, which for clarity includes all women and all blacks, despite the language about slaves that was included at the time.
If ALL MEN have rights that were not granted by government, but simply acknowledged by government, then someone will have to explain to me how that means “Americans only”. The right to freedom of speech and religion and peaceable assembly are not granted by government to some groups but not others.
Of course, government has always been able to take away rights for just cause and after due process. If you commit murder and are convicted your liberty is forfeited. If you are a German soldier in World War 2, then we recognize that our soldiers have the right to take your life. If someone breaks into your house to kill your children, your right to self defense trumps his right to live. So drone strikes on enemy combatants, since we have indeed authorized war against the Taliban and insurgents in Afghanistan, is not a violation of our principles since they are enemy combatants, and this applies whether they are US citizens or not. If a SWAT team could have taken out Timothy McVeigh and prevented the Oklahoma City tragedy then that would have been justified.
When we detain people in Guantanamo without charges or due process, we cheapen our own system. We spit on our core principles. ALL MEN means ALL MEN. Those rights do not stop at our borders.
I do think I know where the confusion comes from. The confusion comes when we do not understand the nature of God-given rights. For example, the right to an education, or the right to health care, are not enumerated anywhere in our founding documents. These things are not and can never be inalienable, and do not come from God or nature, nor for that matter do they flow logically. It is absurd to claim that someone from Afghanistan has a “right” to health care in the US, because NOBODY has the right to health care, period. Education, health care, and housing are things that we all hope everyone has and they are good things, but they can never be guaranteed. Our system, our philosophy of government and society never claimed or acknowledged such rights, because they cannot logically or morally do so.
These things that are so-called “rights” do and must come from government, and government must force one person to provide them for another person. Whatever you call them, they are not inalienable, do not come naturally from God, and were not acknowledged by the founders. And as such, there is no way to include the ALL MEN part when talking about health care. Even those who tout health care as a human right have to acknowledge that the “right” only applies to Americans, not Mexicans or Afghans, because they realize we cannot afford to provide things for the whole world. We should take that a step further and acknowledge that we cannot afford to provide them to all Americans either.
But true rights, the ones mentioned in our founding documents, which require no more than acknowledgement by our government and the freedom of people to live their lives in peace, those do not stop at any border and do indeed apply to all men, so stop talking about how non-Americans are not entitled to them. They already have them, you just don’t wish to acknowledge it.
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