Unalienable Rights

Today we are bombarded with all kinds of outrage and anger over all kinds of issues ranging from important to petty.  The internet of things and its social media portals are full of rants and counter-rants about things like free speech, gun ownership, equality of minorities (in both race and sexual orientation), the effects of mankind on the environment, whether the news is fake or real, the Donald, and what are the rights of people who like plastic straws in Santa Monica, California. 

I had a conversation a while ago about the morality of something and drew my position from the words in our Declaration of Independence. 

“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”

The dictionary defines unalienable as “not to be separated, given away, or taken away.”  It does not define why something is unalienable, or who decides it is so.  Our founding fathers made it quite clear.  They believed the rights came from the Creator (God as one would define for themselves) and man did not have it in his power to alter those rights.  The conversation ended -- but it left me with a pretty big question.

As society begins to reject the idea of a Creator, as more and more people believe the idea of a God is irrational, as our society moves away from religion and a shared belief in a supreme being what makes any right unalienable? 

To carry it a step further, what makes any human interaction moral or immoral?  How do we decide what is and isn’t morally acceptable?

We pride ourselves on being a nation that believes in the equality of the law.  We have a court system that is supposed to act as a check to the legislative and executive branch’s abuse of power by holding them to the standards defined in our constitution, but one of the big controversies between the left and the right today is – should that actually be the case, or are the “right-minded” justices picked by the Democrats somehow endowed with a special wisdom to discern what is morally best for the nation.  Will these nine men, women (and perhaps someday non-gender identified) people become the equivalent of the gods of Olympus where they cast down their judgments of how society is to be?  Will they become the supreme power to decide what is unalienable and what isn’t, or are they already that?  But wait, they have no direct authority on the vast majority of the world, so who does?

I see this playing out before my eyes as one side condemns and the other supports behavior that was just a year ago morally abhorrent.  We, in almost the same breath, condemn the sexual abuse of children and defend the rights of a pedophile.  How can that be?  Perhaps the answer lies in the nature of the internet of things… it is like the public space in an asylum where outrageous debates used to occur, but it is louder and larger then we can really grasp and it is next to impossible to separate the legitimate voices of the sane from the insane.

For me, I will continue to keep my own council and rest easy with the acceptance of a Supreme moral authority who has provided me with certain unalienable rights.  But I do worry about those who choose not to accept my right to life, liberty, and happiness as anything more than what is given by the state, and who want the state to restrict those fundamental concepts.