OpEdNews - Page 2 of Article: What Rights Do We Have?

James Madison, the father of the U.S. Constitution, wrote in 1789:
“A man is said to have a right to his property, he may be equally said to have a property in his rights. Where an excess of power prevails, property of no sort is duly respected. No man is safe in his opinions, his person, his faculties, or his possessions.”

The Founding Fathers understood that every right we have emanates from our right to private property. In this sense, “private property” means not only the right to one’s home and land, but also the right to own the product of one’s labor.

Every right we have stems from government’s recognizance that we, the people, are born with our rights intact. We own them. We have property in them. We voluntarily forfeit some of these rights to government, in exchange for protection from outside threats, the administration of justice and the rule of law.

The purpose of the U.S. Constitution, then, is not to tell us what rights we have. We’re born with the right to do as we please, so long as we don’t harm anyone else.

The Constitution’s purpose is to outline what rights we give to the government, and to firmly define the limits of government power.

Most people do not understand this.

You have probably heard people say things like, “Where in the Constitution does it say you have the right to smoke a cigarette?” Or, “Where in the Constitution does it say you’re allowed to look at pornography?”

James Madison worried about questions like these. He feared that if we included a Bill of Rights in the Constitution, people would eventually come to assume the rights it listed would be the only rights we have. Others felt some rights ��" speech, arms, etc. ��" were so vital as to merit explicit mention.

As a compromise, they included the Ninth Amendment, which says that the enumeration of some rights should not be construed to exclude rights not enumerated. So to answer the questions above, your rights to smoke a cigarette or consume pornography are both in the Ninth Amendment.

Many will argue that “dope is dope”, but they are not looking at the overall picture, what this ruling says in essence is that a persons right to take medicine that might give him/her relief from pain or even save their life is no longer valid. Because it isn’t mentioned in the Constitution. It isn’t bad enough that the Supreme Court has kept the Ninth Amendment under wraps for years, if these rulings by the Circuit Court of Appeals are upheld it will be the obituary of the Ninth.

As the Supreme Court killed off the Ninth Amendment with Gonzales, Kelo in many ways this represents the culmination of its complete disregard for even our explicitly enumerated rights.

To refer to Madison again. A government that doesn’t respect the title to your land is in all likelihood a government that will in time lose respect for your property in your right to speech, arms and due process. And indeed in recent years, with help from the Supreme Court, government at all levels has run roughshod over even our explicitly enumerated rights.

Because of increasingly restrictive campaign laws, we’ve lost the most important of our First Amendment protections ��" the right to criticize the people who govern us at election time.

The Second Amendment is being destroyed by gun-control legislation. In our nation’s capital, for example, guns of any kind have been all but outlawed.

The Patriot Act and a bunch of Supreme Court “Drug War” decisions have rendered our Fourth Amendment protections from warrantless searches meaningless.

Our Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination has been diluted in many contexts, and outright suspended in others (drunk-driving cases, for example).

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