The Question That Should Have Been Easy

The other day I saw a discussion on this board about a basic question: where do our rights come from?

The answers were not just wrong. They were unsettling. One person said rights come from government. Another said they come from our ability to defend them. Eventually someone said they come from God and was treated like a fool.

What troubled me was not just the disagreement. It was the carelessness of the answers. The weightlessness. The sense that people were speaking about a foundational question as if it were just another prompt for banter. These were not children. I assume there are educated people on this board; patriotic people, people who think of themselves as defenders of the country and admirers of the founders. And yet when confronted with a question that goes to the root of the republic, many of them answered like people who no longer understand what kind of question is being asked.

Rights Must Stand Above Power

If rights come from government, then they are not rights at all. They are permissions.

If rights come from force, then they are not rights. They are conquest.

If rights come from consensus, then they are not rights. They are temporary arrangements.

Rights only mean something if they stand above power. They have to bind rulers and majorities alike. They have to remain real even when they are denied. Otherwise the whole idea collapses. The strong do what they can, the weak endure what they must, and we stop pretending that the word rights has any durable meaning.

That is why the answer that rights come from God, whatever one thinks of it personally, was at least closer to the truth than the others. It understood that rights must be grounded in something higher than the state, higher than force, higher than appetite, higher than the will of the majority.

Call that God. Call it natural law. Call it conscience. Call it the moral structure of reality. The label matters less than the point. Rights must transcend power, because if they do not transcend power, they collapse into power. And once that happens, they do not stand at all.

Why the Founders Used That Language

The founders were not being quaint when they spoke of a Creator. They were not writing decorative prose, and they were not preaching a sermon.

They were solving a problem.

They understood that if the state gives rights, the state can take them away. If force defines rights, then the weak have none. If rights are only what a majority says they are, then nothing prevents a majority from redefining them tomorrow.

So they grounded human dignity somewhere the state could not reach. They placed rights above human will because they knew that if rights do not stand above power, then power becomes the only law that matters.

This used to be obvious. Now even educated people seem puzzled by it.