Dreams, rights not the same

In the light of a modest civil liberties victory last week with the Supreme Court’s acknowledgment (barely) of the Second Amendment, it’s important to remember this Independence Day that rights are not assigned to us or given to us by the government. According to the founding documents of our great nation, these rights are ours by birth.

Those “unalienable rights” of “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” are drilled into the head of public school students (we hope, anyway), but our modern willingness to allow government agencies to prescribe unneeded limits to these freedoms makes us wonder if we see the Declaration of Independence as more than an abstraction.

We support both the right of citizens to own guns and the right of same-sex couples to marry. Some editorial writers at Freedom Communications newspapers who have articulated these opinions are alternately referred to as right-wing cronies by folks on the Left and members of the liberal media by folks on the Right.

We are neither. We are, however, consistent in our support of as much freedom for American citizens as possible and a government restricted to protecting these freedoms and providing for us only what the private sector cannot.

That’s a concept that seems almost alien in American politics today. Many people simply cannot grasp the idea of libertarian political philosophy, because modern liberals and conservatives are both after the same thing – using the government to create their own dream society.

The outrage in response to the Supreme Court’s handgun decision last week is fascinating and a bit disturbing. “Does this lead to everyone having a gun in our society?” Chicago Mayor Richard Daley ranted in a press conference. “Then why don’t we do away with the court system and go back to the Old West... ?”

In Daley’s mind, acknowledging that people have the right to protect themselves with firearms does not square with his dream of a society where people depend on the government to protect them and solve their problems. So he exaggerates the results of the decision to act as though the decision has put us in danger. It’s not true. The handgun ban in D.C. is what put people in danger. Criminals certainly didn’t care about gun laws and they never will.

By the same token, allowing gay couples to get married doesn’t square with religious conservatives’ untenable fantasy of a perfect society of people who behave the way they want them to. So they exaggerate the consequences of allowing gay people having the same freedoms as everybody else and try to use democratic voting as a weapon to take people’s rights away.

And so it goes. When an expression of an individual right gets in the way of an Americans’ conceptions of utopia, they don’t question their dreams – they question the right. This insistence has led us into our intractable culture war, the fight to be the ideologues with the most influence over the government.

Will we ever turn away from the “Something must be done!” mentality that has caused so many people to create an environment in America that grows more and more authoritarian with each passing day? On this Independence Day, we ask Americans to consider the idea that none of us are truly free as long as we persist in believing that rights are doled out by a benevolent government rather than gifts we are born with.