Originally posted by Johnv:
</font><blockquote>quote:</font><hr />Originally posted by Scott J:
John, Abortion is not a right. Period.
Yes it is. A person can go out right now and have an abortion, and that is protected by law.</font>[/QUOTE] That isn't the definition of a right John. Making something legal doesn't make it a right. In Nazi Germany it was legal to exterminate Jews. That does not mean that they had a "right" to do it.
Rights are not created by human beings nor their legislatures. They are either recognized and protected or else denied and/or confiscated.
Most of human history and most nations today are governed by the errant and enslaving notion that rights belong to and are dispensed/created/destroyed by government. Our founders wisely rejected that notion.
So while you and I might find it morally objectionable, it is a legally guaranteed right. Period.
It is a legal "privilege" resulting directly from the confiscation of the rights of the unborn.
The same is true of taking the Lord's name in vain, or coveting, or lusting.
No it isn't. Those things
are rights so long as they don't infringe on the rights of others... and as long as the person who does them is willing to accept the consequences. One of which might be that no one wants to employ them, sell them property, do business with them, associate with them, etc. This is the way it works in a self-governing society... which is what our Constitution purposed to create.
The same was true in the past of slavery. That right is no longer in existence.
Either it does and it is being denied or else it never did. I submit that very much like abortion, it was an attempt a human creation of a right that never legitimately existed... by saying that human beings could legitimately be considered property like an animal in a "free society".
BTW, we have forms of slavery today. A slave is a person whose labor as a resource belongs to someone else... so why is it again we pay income taxes on our wages? Who ones our labor? What happens if someone refuses to give the massa' his share?
They're all rights, though they're all morally reprehensible to you and me.
I submit that one person does not, and never has had, a legitimate right to own another person. I submit that one person does not, and never has had, a legitimate right to kill someone else simply because they deem them inconvenient or undesirable.
I of course don't have the moral right to covet, lust, or curse, but I have the legal right to them nonetheless.
I disagree. You
do have a moral right to do those things since they are clearly moral determinations that rightly belong to you and no one else... so long as you don't exercise those rights to infringe upon them. I have a right to disagree with your moral decision. I have the right to not associate with you. I have the right to ban you from my property. I don't have the right moral or legal to tell you not to do it.
The founders had the idea that individuals were sovereign, not government. That rights came directly from God to man, not to or through government.