CK MacLeod: 'Our rights come from God'

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CK MacLeod serves up some serious food for thought from Hot Air's Green Room:

"The Constitution, our dear Constitution, did not give us our rights. Our rights came from God and they are inalienable rights. The Constitution created the government to protect our God-given and unalienable rights."

Thus Sarah Palin in her speech earlier this month in Missouri, at the “Win America Back Conference.”

Though Palin’s words received the usual uncomprehending and comically overwrought response from at least one leftwing critic, the statement hardly represents a novel departure for a conservative politician. Even that little inalienable vs. unalienable problem goes all the way back to the Founding. More important, in recent years acceptance of the premise that “our rights come from God, not the government” has been become almost definitional for American conservatism.

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The concept is, of course, embodied in one of the most important single sentences in American history – arguably in all of human history:

"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness."

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It is hardly surprising that the use and even the insistence on just this language remains common on the American right, where both the deity and the Founders are treated with reverence. Nor is it surprising, or any less indicative, that the concept leaves many on the secular left dumbfounded. When reacting to Fred Thompson’s invocation of divinely ordained natural rights in 2007, for instance, “university scholar” Jacques Berlinerblau, faith-blogging for the Washington Post, saw only a calculated pitch to social conservatives, with a gesture to libertarians “on the backstroke. ” Double doctorates notwithstanding, Berlinerblau, like the HuffPo’s Malia Litman reacting to Palin... betrayed no apparent awareness of just where the wacky righty got his quaint notion.

Yet the ill-founded condescension and kneejerk suspicion from the likes of Berlinerblau and Litman underline a deeper challenge to the conservative right, as brought home during Rand Paul’s recent travails as well as in the rather appalled reaction to Newt Gingrich’s comparisons, under the rubric of “secular socialism,” of Obamaist liberals to Nazis and Communists.

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Until we have translated Jefferson’s words honestly, accurately, and accessibly into a contemporary and inclusive idiom – inclusive enough to be spoken by Allahpundit and by James Dobson, by John Derbyshire and by Sarah Palin, too – the opponents of constitutional conservatism will find justifications for ridicule and general resistance, alongside potentially critical divisions in the conservative coalition.

Read the full, thought-provoking post here.

- JP