The Source of Our Rights

July 13, 2026

Where do our rights come from? Do our rights come from God, or from man? If our rights come from man, do they come from the government, or from the people?


Filius X. Publius
	Where do we get our rights? What source has granted us our rights?
Tall, Dark, and Handsome
	From the Constitution. That’s why we call them constitutional rights.
Blayden Balance
	From Magna Carta. We can trace many of our rights back to Magna Carta.

	It was the first time the British government formally recognized rights of the people. It was the start of the rule of law. It said that even the king was subject to law. It required trial by jury, and the first application of due process. It limited the king’s power to tax without the consent of Parliament.
Spawn of the Torch Lady
	From the Declaration of Independence. We all have the rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
Matthias
	From God. God created us, and granted each of us inalienable rights.
General Ken
	From the Supreme Court. They create and remove rights whenever they want. Separate but equal was ok, and then it wasn’t; for a long time abortion was illegal, then there was a constitutional right to abortion, and then there wasn’t; states could define marriage as being between a man and a women, and then they couldn’t; Congress passed a law banning racial discrimination, but for years the Court allowed it, and then it didn’t.
Blayden Balance
	Great! We have five answers so far. How do we decide who’s right?
Filius X. Publius
	The good news is that there is some overlap in our answers. Our choices so far are: God, the Supreme Court, or government charters. The government charters that we have mentioned are Magna Carta, the Declaration of Independence, and the Constitution.
Matthias
	We don’t need to ask where God gets His power. He created the universe and established the laws that govern it. Naturally He has the power to grant us rights.
Filius X. Publius
	That still leaves us with finding out where the Court and government charters get their power to grant rights.
General Ken
	Doesn’t the Supreme Court just count as part of government?
Filius X. Publius
	It does if it is just applying existing laws. When it makes up new "rights" on its own, and imposes them on us, it is acting more like a ruling council rather than an impartial judge.
Tall, Dark, and Handsome
	The Supreme Court doesn’t just create rights. Those rights are already in the Constitution.
Filius X. Publius
	That’s what the media tells us. Few believe it. The states ratified the Fourteenth Amendment back in 1868. Does anyone believe that the states included same-sex marriage in the Amendment at that time? And that since then states knowingly passed laws that deprived homosexuals of their equal rights? And the states did that in spite of the Fourteenth Amendment? And all of the courts allowed this up until 2015?
Spawn of the Torch Lady
	It is more believable that the Supreme Court amended the Constitution on its own. They decreed an amendment they thought the people should want. That is, the people would want it if they were as enlightened as the five members of the Court who imposed the new "right" on the nation.
Tall, Dark, and Handsome
	As society changes our Constitution grows and changes with it. The Constitution is a living document. It evolves over time, like our society. When the Court recognizes a new right it is because society has evolved.
Filius X. Publius
	Strange that the Court always seems to evolve first. When the Court "recognized" the right of gay marriage, it reviewed changes in society. Most of the changes it noted were a string of changes, "evolutions," that the Court had decreed on its own over the preceding years.

	Also, it is strange that the Court now acts as if the Constitution changes on its own. It once ruled that the Constitution is permanent. That it does not change, except by amendments ratified by the states.
		That the people have an original right to establish, for their future government, such principles as, in their opinion, shall most conduce to their own happiness, is the basis on which the whole American fabric has been erected. The exercise of this original right is a very great exertion; nor can it nor ought it to be frequently repeated. The principles, therefore, so established are deemed fundamental. And as the authority, from which they proceed, is supreme, and can seldom act, *they are designed to be permanent.* (emphasis added)
Tall, Dark, and Handsome
	The Constitution may have been permanent back then. It has evolved into a living document now. It had to. The Constitution did not identify all of our rights. The Supreme Court explained why it has to recognize more rights:
		The nature of injustice is that we may not always see it in our own times. The generations that wrote and ratified the Bill of Rights and the Fourteenth Amendment did not presume to know the extent of freedom in all of its dimensions, and so they entrusted to future generations a charter protecting the right of all persons to enjoy liberty as we learn its meaning. When new insight reveals discord between the Constitution’s central protections and a received legal stricture, a claim to liberty must be addressed.
Filius X. Publius
	I agree with that quote from the Court. I strongly disagree with how they put it into practice.
General Ken
	How so?
Filius X. Publius
	I agree with the Court that the Bill of Rights didn’t protect all of the rights we want to protect. In the last 235 years we have added amendments to protect more rights. For example, we ended slavery, and we extended the right to vote to all races, and to women.

	My disagreement is with the way the Court has acted on that need to protect rights. The Constitution includes a way for us to add to the list of protected rights. We can amend the Constitution. It even spells out the steps for adding an amendment. The Court has usurped the power to amend the Constitution. When they find some new right they want, they pretend that it is already in the Constitution. Then they order all courts to stop enforcing laws that were legally enacted. They do this without the consent of the governed.
Tall, Dark, and Handsome
	We can’t put basic human rights up for a vote. Each amendment requires ratification by three-fourths of the states. We can’t risk denying people a basic human right because we couldn’t get enough votes for it.
Blayden Balance
	Yes, we can put basic human rights up to a vote, and we have. We voted on all of the rights the Court referred to, those in the Bill of Rights and those in the Fourteenth Amendment. Those amendments, those rights, are in the Constitution because the people voted for them. That is also true of the rights in other amendments. A supermajority of the people voted for each one of them.
Filius X. Publius
	We put basic human rights up for a vote even when the Court adds them. When the Court creates rights, only nine people get to vote. The Court added the right to abortion on a vote of seven to two. It added same-sex marriage on a vote of five to four. No matter which way we add rights, we put them up for a vote. When we use the amendment procedure in the Constitution, the people have a say in what rights we add. When the Court acts on its own, only the ruling council gets to vote.
Tall, Dark, and Handsome
	Opinion polls show that the people like the changes the Court has ordered.
Filius X. Publius
	I would say it differently. The polls show that people put up with the changes the Court has decreed.
Tall, Dark, and Handsome
	Why would they put up with the changes if they didn’t approve of them?
Filius X. Publius
	We haven’t approved of the Court creating rights. We have pushed back. We elected presidents who nominated better justices. Justices committed to the permanent Constitution. Less inclined to create new rights on their own. Some nominees have disappointed us. But overall, the Court has improved. It has been moving back to using the original, permanent, Constitution. For now, we put up with the evils that result from the Court making up new rights.
Tall, Dark, and Handsome
	Evils?! What could be evil about granting rights to the people? About protecting the rights of the people?
Filius X. Publius
	Protecting peoples’ rights isn’t evil. In fact, we created our government to protect our rights. The evil is that the Court has usurped the power of the people. Back when the Constitution was meant to be permanent, the people were the ruling power. We, the people, decided which rights to protect. Sometime later the Court seized the power to change the Constitution. And the power to grant whatever rights it pleased. When will the "No Kings" protesters notice that we now have a ruling council of nine kings?
Blayden Balance
	The same-sex marriage ruling wasn’t the first time the Court based a ruling on marital rights. In fact, our "right to privacy" started out as a marital right. The Court said that this right is older than the Bill of Rights, our political parties and our school system. Even older than our country. So the Court concluded that we had to alter the Constitution to make room for this ancient marital right.

	The Court then altered this ancient marital right to conform to the Constitution. Marital privacy had to comply with the equal protection clause. Single people now also have marital privacy. After that the Court switched from calling it "marital privacy" to just "privacy." Yet the right to privacy continued to grow and change. The husband might participate in the decision to abort his child, but he could not veto it. Then it turned out that the right of marital privacy didn’t include the husband much at all. The mother of his child does not even have to tell him what she has decided to do.
Filius X. Publius
	So we could really call the right to privacy a *non*-constitutional right?
Blayden Balance
	Yes. It grew out of the ancient right of marital privacy, not out of any clause in the Constitution or any of the amendments.
Tall, Dark, and Handsome
	But the Court has said it comes from the penumbras of the First, Third, Fourth, Fifth, and Ninth Amendments. And from the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.
Filius X. Publius
	I suspect that they had to say something like that. Otherwise people might wonder why the right of marital privacy applies to unmarried people. And does not include a married husband.
Spawn of the Torch Lady
	Isn’t that ancient marital right of privacy the basis for the Court’s decisions on contraceptives, abortion and same-sex marriage?
Blayden Balance
	Yes. But you should remember that the Court has already overturned itself on the abortion decision, and returned that issue to the states.
Spawn of the Torch Lady
	It looks like we have found another one of the sources of our rights. The rights granted to us by the Court come from the divine right of ruling councils.
Blayden Balance
	Ok. That leaves us the government charters. Where do Magna Carta, the Declaration of Independence, and the Constitution get their power to create rights? Where do the governments created by those charters get the power to create rights?
Filius X. Publius
	The answer for two of them is military force. King John signed Magna Carta because the barons were in armed rebellion against him. And he wasn’t able to beat them. The American colonies declared their independence while they were in open rebellion. The men who signed the Declaration pledged their lives, their fortunes, and their sacred honor to the cause. And they won the war.
General Ken
	What about the Constitution? How does it add rights?
Blayden Balance
	The Constitution allows us to add amendments. We’ve added 27 so far. The first session of Congress proposed twelve amendments. The states quickly ratified ten of the proposed amendments. Those first ten amendments are now known as the Bill of Rights. The states ratified another one of the original twelve in 1992.

	There have been more individual rights added after the Bill of Rights. We ended slavery, required equal protection of the laws, and granted the right to vote to all races, and to women.
General Ken
	Does the Constitution have a complete list of our rights?
Blayden Balance
	No. It only has the rights that we have specifically enacted in amendments. There are many rights some people want to add to the list of protected rights, but we have not yet added those other rights through amendments.
General Ken
	Why not?
Filius X. Publius
	Ratifying and amendment is difficult. Ratification needs three-fourths of the states to vote in favor.
General Ken
	Why make it so difficult?
Filius X. Publius
	To make sure that we have broad agreement among we, the people, on what’s in the Constitution. Everything in there is something that we want the government to take seriously. And comply with. All of the government. All the agencies, and all of the courts. Even the Supreme Court.
General Ken
	Where did the Constitution get the power to grant rights?
Blayden Balance
	From the people. The Constitution took effect once conventions in two-thirds of the states ratified it.
General Ken
	Where does all of this leave us? Have we identified the sources of our rights?
Matthias
	I think so. At least, we have identified the sources as best we can. God gave each of us rights. We combined together to create governments. We created our Constitution, and our federal government, to respect and protect our rights. We have amended the Constitution to add more rights to the list of protected rights. That is the source of the rights that we, the people, have recognized and approved. We demand that our federal and state governments must respect and protect those rights.

	We also have some other "rights" invented by the Supreme Court. The Court has never made it clear where it got the power to amend the Constitution. Certainly it was not from the consent of the governed. Perhaps we should just describe it as the "divine right of ruling councils."
Tall, Dark, and Handsome
	What about atheists? Does any of this change for them?
Matthias
	Not much. They don’t believe in God, so they won’t agree with the Declaration that all men get their rights from God.

	That shouldn’t keep them from accepting the rest of the Declaration. That we do have rights, all of us. That we did not get those rights from any government. That we created the government so it can protect our rights:
		We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are . . . endowed . . . with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness — That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, — That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. (references to God omitted)
General Ken
	Aren’t we still at our starting point for the discussion? Where do the people get their rights from?
Filius X. Publius
	We have made some important progress. It is clear that the Supreme Court doesn’t have any constitutional authority to invent new rights. We founded our country on the idea that the people are the supreme power. The people created the government. The government is supposed to protect our rights, not to create them. And definitely not to remove our rights.

	That leaves us with two sources of rights: God, and human nature.
General Ken
	I agree with everything that you just said. But it doesn’t answer the atheists’ question. If we don’t get our rights from God, then where do we get our rights from?
Matthias
	If there is no God, then rights are one of the things humans are born with. Just like we have arms and legs, and the ability to reason.
Tall, Dark, and Handsome
	Not everyone is born with all of those things. What about the others?
Filius X. Publius
	What do you propose? Are there some people you think aren’t born with equal rights?
Tall, Dark, and Handsome
	We have not always respected peoples’ rights in our laws. Remember slavery?
Matthias
	Yes, we all remember slavery. The woke keep trying to punish us for it. They also want us to pay them for it. Apparently they don’t remember that in the Civil War we paid dearly to end slavery.

	As a Catholic, I am aware that at times people fail to live and act as they should. Even good Christians often fall short of keeping the commandments. So too, our country has at times failed to live up to our founding principles. The correct response for the sinner is to repent, resolve to sin no more, and to keep the commandments. The correct response for our country is for each of us to dedicate ourselves to our founding principles.

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