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As Americans, we are uniquely blessed. We are born with our rights. Our rights are not granted to us by the State. In fact, it is we the people who are the sovereign, and it is we who grant certain enumerated powers to the State. In establishing this hierarchy, our founders set forth on a journey never before undertaken by mankind. They created a nation, as Lincoln famously stated in the Gettysburg Address, a “government of the people, by the people and for the people.”
In fact, this principle is clearly articulated in our founding documents. It’s one of the most important sentences in American history. In a global context, it’s arguably one of the most important sentences in human history: the first sentence of the second paragraph of the Declaration of Independence. Penned by Thomas Jefferson, we’re mostly all familiar with the phrase included in the declaration that states, “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal”, famously quoted by the great Dr. Martin Luther King in his ‘I Have a Dream Speech’ on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial in August of 1963 during the Civil Rights movement.
As the sentence continues, there’s a lesser quoted, yet equally powerful series of words Jefferson composed. These words would go on to declare that the rights stated within the Declaration, the ‘right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness,’ are not simply guaranteed by the State, but are instead guaranteed by our mere existence as individuals. “All men are created equal, that they are endowed by their creator with certain unalienable Rights.” To this day it remains a profound proclamation.
But let us go back a little bit, to the origins of how it came to be that Jefferson believed so deeply in this idea that it was included in our nation's founding documents. The idea originated with the political philosopher John Locke, who in 1690 wrote his “Second Treatise of Government”. In it, he proposed the idea that we as human beings, by nature, are free, equal, and independent and cannot be, “subjected to the political power of another, without his own consent.” These words would go on to be the basis for the First Amendment of our Bill of Rights. While the American colonies lived under the shadow of tyrannical British rule, Jefferson, and the other founders, who were great admirers of thinkers like Locke and Rousseau, were adamant that these “inalienable rights” are intrinsic to each individual, therefore it must be declared by law that it is not government who is their grantor and guarantor. By declaring this, the government cannot therefore infringe on those rights. We see an example of this in the First Amendment when it starts out by stating, “Congress shall make no law”.
There’s probably been a point in time when each of us has in some way or another said that our right to the freedom of speech is our Constitutional right. What’s important to understand though is that in fact it’s not our Constitutional right, it's our “God-given” right as a human being. These inalienable rights that we speak of cannot be infringed upon by anyone, and therefore we should be allowed to pursue them. This applies to each of us in our daily lives as we interact with the world. How we dress, how we speak, how we write, our freedom to choose our own life’s trajectory is not something given to us by government, but inherent to our being. And for each of us fortunate to live here in the United States, liberty survives only if we choose to recognize, protect, and enjoy this principle, each and every day.
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