The Right to Rights - Introduction

Throughout much of history the idea of people’s ‘Rights’ were both obtained and handed out based on social position and climbing the social ladder was statistically impossible. There seems to be an ongoing misconception on what a ‘Right’ is; for this author what many people call human rights are not rights at all, as shown by the governmental reaction to the COVID-19 outbreak.

 

While good intentioned, the USA’s founding fathers in their declaration listed the unalienable rights, those being: life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Approximately 250 years later the United Nations took another stab at this list by providing the following expansions: the right to life and liberty, freedom from slavery and torture, freedom of opinion and expression, the right to work and education, and many more. In other jurisdictions the list has been expanded upon to include such items as: sex, gender, gender expression. There is an expression that seems to hold true on its face, which states ‘the more laws there are, the less justice there is.’

 

Returning to the USA’s Declaration of Independence, the preamble to the listed rights is the phrase ‘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…’ The reader should in this situation, as in all things historic, apply the rules of the day to retain the context. The common understanding is that back in those days within the US, all proclamations and laws were written with the ‘white man’ in mind and that all others were excluded. Things were a little more complicated because distinctions were made on characteristics such as: land ownership status, taxable status, gender, race/religion, age, and yes of course skin colour. As a fledgling country the USA, left the mundane tasks of taxation and voting to the original thirteen colonies which ran through the full gambit of options on the topic of suffrage. The reader is encouraged to look online for a comprehensive history of American voting to see who MAY and who MAY-NOT  vote throughout the years.

 

The maxim of unintentional consequences states - there can be outcomes of purposeful actions that are not intended or foreseen. The early suffragettes made a semantic error, though that is often the case in advertising campaigns and propaganda, in that the feminists demanded ‘woman’s Rights’ when what was actually desired was equal access to ‘men’s Rights’. The previous sentence may be categorized by some as a distinction without a difference, yet to do so is to ignore history and assign a meaning to the word ‘men’ that was never intended by those who took pen to paper in 1776.

 

Back to the idea of consequence, by deviating away from the ‘all men are created equal’ expression and propagating the ‘us versus them’ narrative, the feminists opened the door for social segregation based on immutable characteristics real or otherwise. It will not be denied here that the dream of the Founding Fathers of the United States of America was not realized overnight; in fact it took a civil war and the death of tens of thousands to take the first significant step for the country. The idea of ‘your right to swing your arm stops at the tip of my nose’ was made manifest, though even then it took a generation or five to effectively make that change within American society.

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