A History Lesson from the Golden Age of Radio
Modern Americans need to rediscover and embrace the Founders’ perspective on rights. We see their perspective on rights in the Bill of Rights—all through the first Ten Amendments to the US Constitution. The Founders’ view contrasts sharply to the modern view. Simply put, to the Founders, rights were God-given and were maintained when government was restrained. Today, most people believe rights are theirs when the government intervenes in their lives in preferred ways. They thus believe that government is the source of rights. Mark it down: This collective belief sets the stage for the loss of true liberty.
The Revolutionary War Was Over, but not the Struggle to Establish a Free and Stable Country
There was, in the minds of this first generation of US citizens (not just the Founders), a direct relationship between the thriving of personal liberties (rights) and restrictions that kept the federal government from intervening in people’s lives.
From Liberty to an Entitlement Mentality: The Deadly Enticement of Government Help
When the people of a nation believe they have a right to government “benefits,” they become intoxicated with everything the government is willing to offer. In turn, those in authority become intoxicated with the power they gain as an increasing number of people become dependent upon them. The more government “gives,” the more beholden recipients become. This is how a nation that began with liberty can be led into tyranny. To secure some rights, such as citizens’ rights of free speech and worship, the government primarily must stay out of people’s way. This is not so with the “rights” to be free of want and fear, nor is it true with a countless number of additional government “benefits” people have become conditioned to expect.
Negative and Positive Rights
Summary: Negative rights are rights secured when government stays out of the way and allows people to act freely. Positive rights require government intervention in people’s lives to meet specific “needs.”
Accordingly, we said in Part 4: Advocates of negative rights seek to create equal opportunities for all rather than the equal outcomes sought by proponents of positive rights.
The Founders of the United States of America understood the importance of providing opportunities rather than engineering outcomes. They thus enshrined in the Constitution through the Bill of Rights a series of liberties based on an understanding of rights as negative rights, even though they probably didn’t think of it in those terms.
Unfortunately, in recent decades in this country, the emphasis has shifted 180 degrees, and many, many people—perhaps most—don’t even realize the change has occurred. Under the leadership of progressives and those who refuse to challenge them, our government now goes ballistic in its efforts to make sure rights are secured and maintained from a positive rights perspective. (Positive rights are secured when government acts to provide a specific outcome.) Does this violate people’s fundamental negative rights? Yes, but no matter. As we have said, a positive rights perspective is consumed with securing equal outcomes.
How True Rights and Genuine Liberty Are Becoming Casualties of the Supreme Court’s Redefinition of Marriage
Rights are God-given! Put another way, human dignity is innate because it comes from God! This was the conviction of our Founders. It is a principle on which they severed ties with Great Britain and on which they founded the United States of America. The Obergefell ruling, according to [Justice Clarence] Thomas, “rejects this idea.” Justice Thomas is right.
Moreover, through its ruling the Supreme Court “suggests instead that it [human dignity] comes from the Government.” We must not miss the implications of Justice Thomas’s strong statement. Marriage, a God-given and God-ordained institution, could be redefined by government only through the most intrusive of bureaucratic actions. In redefining marriage, therefore, our government defied God! Yet, as frightening as this is, there’s even more here to alarm us. If human dignity comes from the government rather than God, is it really dignity at all?
How the Government Is Bulldozing Over Conscience Rights to Secure All the “Rights” Associated with Same-Sex Marriage
Same-sex marriage by itself violates the Framers’ concept of liberty and rights. This reality is bad enough, but as we have seen in the year since the Obergefell ruling was issued, enshrining this positive right into the practice of American culture has, more than any other governmental action, strengthened the movement for a whole host of additional counterfeit rights—positive rights that trample on the negative—and authentic—rights of ordinary citizens.
Eight Reasons Obergefell Has Derailed America, and the Importance of Rediscovering the Authentic American Way
During the past several weeks, we have demonstrated that the “right” to same-sex marriage is based on a philosophy of rights that stands in direct opposition to the philosophy of rights embraced by America’s Founders. In summary, we can confidently say that man-woman marriage deprives no one of his or her civil rights, and to suggest that it does is to totally misrepresent the truth about marriage, the family unit, American history, liberty, authentic freedom, cohesiveness in society, and all the rights afforded to individuals by nature and nature’s God.
Initiating Reform
We have said that the debate over marriage is one about rights. This conflict pits those favoring limited government against those advocating increased government intervention. It is significant that the Supreme Court would, on the one hand, uphold government regulations requiring pharmacists to violate their conscience rights, yet, on the other, strike down regulations meant to protect the safety of women. We need no more evidence than this that the government has turned completely away from the Founders’ perspective on rights and is promoting the opposite of what they advocated. We’re facing tyranny because of it, and—again—we need leaders who are willing to expose this in all its ugliness!
Elections are important, and of course I believe we must elect leaders who will work diligently to return America to its founding principles (see the quote from Founding Father Roger Sherman at the top of this post). However, now more than ever, we need to see an uprising from the people themselves. It needs to be a godly uprising and a peaceful uprising, but it must be an uprising, the likes of which we haven’t seen since the Civil Rights era, and the likes of which gave birth to this country in the first place.
As Christians, we have been rightly concerned about the need to express love and compassion to those who disagree with us. Yet I fear we have let this concern overshadow our responsibility to speak prophetically. The quote at the top from Dr. Mike Adams bears repeating here: “Some are turned away from Christianity because they see Christians as judgmental. Many more are turned away because they see them as pansies. Stop retreating and you might earn some respect.”
Epilogue: Seven Sermons that Inform, Challenge, and Warn the Church and the Culture
The Duty to Warn
Proverbs 14:12 and 16:25 say, “There is a way that seems right to a man, but its end is the way to death.” One way that apparently seems right to many today is the way of homosexuality and same-sex marriage. Mark it down: This road will lead us as a nation to a very bad place! If America is traveling to destruction by taking the road of redefining marriage (something it clearly is doing), then warnings against distorting and manipulating marriage need to be issued. Certainly this isn’t the only perilous path America is on, but it is one path about which the church has not sufficiently warned the country.
Copyright © 2016 by B. Nathaniel Sullivan. All Rights Reserved.
image credits: images for parts 4 & 5: lightstock.com