Principle Eight: Men Are Endowed by Their Creator With Certain Unalienable Rights

By John Dummett Jr.

http://www.johndummett4senate.us/

In William Blackstone’s Commentaries on the Laws of England, he said, “Rights that God has established natural, like life and liberty, do not need human laws to be vested in all men.” No legislature on Earth has the power or the ability to destroy them unless a person, who commits an act that forfeits them, does. (Commentaries 1:93) If someone attempts to deny our God given rights in this life, that person will have to answer to God’s Justice in the next.

Vested rights created by the community, state or the nation, for the protection of one’s self, unlike God’s rights, can be changed at the whim of lawmakers, but in no uncertain terms can those lawmakers destroy the right to life and liberty. For example, the state can make a law where it is legal to hunt on certain lands during certain times or the state can make laws that imprison men for crimes committed against the community. However if lawmakers attempt to make a law to destroy babies in the womb or incarcerate someone just because of the way they look or think, those laws would be against God’s Laws. In one case because it denies a person the unalienable right to life and the other case it destroys the unalienable right to liberty. The only way a person forfeits his or her right to life and liberty is if they do something to forfeit those rights.

Property rights are essential to the pursuit of happiness. Like usual, people have often guessed at what our Founding Fathers meant by what they wrote in the Constitution concerning almost everything. When the Constitution was written, the concepts written down were well understood by everyone. There was no ambiguity or confusion at all. John Adams said, “All men are born free and independent and have certain natural, essential and unalienable rights, many of which may be reckoned the right of enjoying and defending their lives and liberties; that of acquiring, possessing and protecting property; in fine that of seeking and obtaining their safety and happiness. (George A Peek Jr. ed. The Political Writings of John Adams [New York: Liberal Arts Press, 1954], p.96.)

William Blackstone boiled natural rights down to three important ones. He called these “Great Natural Rights.” The right of personal security, the right of personal liberty and the right of personal property. (Blackstone, Commentaries on the Laws of England, 1:219-20; emphasis added.)

The protection of unalienable rights was inserted into the individual State Constitutions as well as the Federal Constitution. Most importantly all unalienable rights are founded upon the protection of life. Unalienable rights relate to life itself and the preservation of these rights are directly related to one’s self preservation. God has given man all the needed characteristics to preserve, develop and perfect life. God’s gift of natural rights precedes all human laws and is superior to them. Life, liberty and property do not exist because men have made laws. On the contrary, it was the fact that life, liberty and property existed beforehand that caused man to make laws for the protection of them in the first place. (Frederick Bastiat, The Law [Irvington-on Hudson, N.Y.: The Foundation for Economic Education, Inc., 1974], pp.5-6.)