“It’s my constitutional RIGHT to have an abortion!” proclaims the media and the pro-choice crowd. Unfortunately all to often the American people are plagued by a misconception of their rights. Many people use the “it’s my right” mentality to justify killing their child or others. In a sense, they believe they have earned a right to slaughter, while in reality they have no such right. These people believe that they can justify murder because they have a “right” to. What they neglect is the simple fact that:
A right is a right so long as it doesn’t infringe on another person’s right.
One well known example is this:
You have a right to swing your arms but your right stops the moment it hits my nose.
In other words, once you use your right against another person to do them harm, the “right” or freedom you were using no longer exists in your case. For example, if someone were to go into an airport and start shooting people, they violated their right to own and bear arms by violating other people’s right to life. However, if someone started shooting at you, and you shot them in self defense you would be in the right because you were protecting your unalienable rights to life, liberty and property.
It is important to establish that a “right” is two-fold: Alienable and Unalienable. The difference is that an alienable right is a privilege that was granted by a governing source where as an unalienable right is something that can not be fully eliminated from the human race. Unalienable rights also supersede alienable rights. Like we saw in the example of a gunman in the airport. He was wrong to shoot people for no reason even though he was legally allowed to own and carry a gun. The right to own and bear arms is alienable. However, the right to protect and preserve your life, liberty, and property is a natural or unalienable right. The reason you would be right in shooting back in self defense is because you were trying to save life rather than eliminate it.
In America, we believe that everyone has an unalienable right to Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of happiness. Frederick Bastiat in his book The Law talked about unalienable rights being Life, Liberty, and Property. The question remains, what happens when someone does violate someone else’s right to life, liberty, or property?
A factor called Justice comes into play. The following excerpt is from a conversation I had with a friend of mine about the subject that will explain how justice works here:
Friend: freedom, haha
so complex
me: not really
Friend: oh, yes
you want freedom to do some things and freedom from other things
and in order to have freedom from something, you must restict someone else’s freedom to do something
me: not necessarily
Friend: most of the time
me: now a days.
only because people have a distorted veiw of freedom
freedom involves choice
you can choose to or not to listen to rap - but just because you don’t like rap does not mean that we should take our freedom to change the channel and instead of changing it, say “I hate rap so much, rap should be illegal”.
rap is not good music, but that doesn’t mean we should ban it - we can choose not to listen and if there’s no market for it, rap will go out of business. But we shouldn’t say, because I don’t like it, and because my friends don’t like it, we need to outlaw it.
Friend: I suppose in that sense
but you’re not looking for freedom from rap
unless you’re being forced to listen to it in the first place
me: right
what do you mean by freedom from something?
Friend:freedom from say theft
me: theft isn’t a right
and
you have the freedom to protect yourself
Friend:see, there we go back to rights
me: theft is a crime
Friend: but what makes it a crime?
me: It goes against God’s law, Con law, and Common law.
make sense?
Friend: it’s not so simple, my friend
me: depends on how you understand it I guess
it goes back to what I said earlier
a human law or right is justice, and when someone violates that, in order for justice to be served, there must be a restriction or limitation on the person who violated it.
As we can see, in order for a right to be insured, there must be justice. Without justice, there is no guard against people violating other people’s rights.
The misconception many people have is that as long as exercising their own rights doesn’t hurt themselves, that they have liberty to do it. Really, they don’t have a right to hurt anyone else, and when they do, the person effected has a right to defend themselves because of a very important detail called the justice factor.
