...i told y'all before, i would break the law/ to put food in my baby girl's belly...
So my dad-in-law sometimes sends me emails - chain-mail or spam or whatever they're called, the ones that get forwarded tons of times - that are about various political shenanigans going on in the country right now. (I married into a libertarian family and I'm a bleeding-heart liberal, so this is my due.)
The most recent email he sent me was primarily about the "democratic constitutionalism" movement, a comment by Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg from January of this year, and a comparison of the USA Constitution vs the South African Constitution. I won't copy-paste the whole thing here, but I want to summarise the point that I'm curious about. (All the following information is pulled from the email, so if you know better, please speak up!)
The South African Constitution is lauded by liberals/Democrats because of the way it basically promises social equality to its citizens - food, medical care, basic housing, etc are all guaranteed to every citizen in the very Constitution of the nation. (The practicality of this is questionable, but the loyalty to the ideal is what is found to be so attractive.) The "democratic constitutionalism" movement mentioned above is apparently trying to achieve something similar in the USA - basically, to make the USA a welfare state at a Constitutional level. Leaving aside the methods by which they mean to accomplish this feat, what I want to focus on is a distinction that the group makes: they identify "positive rights" versus "negative rights".
Supposedly, "positive rights" include "right to health care", "right to housing", etc - there's a quote in the email that explains how positive rights "obligate government to intervene in social and economic life, promoting equality rather than simply procedural fairness." On the other hand, "negative rights" supposedly include the following: free speech, freedom to assemble, right to bear arms, etc. this movement would supposedly eliminate those "negative rights" and replace them with "positive rights" like "freedom from gun-toting murderers" etc.
What I want to know is this: what do you think are (or should be) your "rights" - as a human being, or as a citizen?
Personally, I think the only true right that no human being should be denied is the right to struggle to survive and to thrive.
This is essentially similar to the "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness" that the US gov't is founded on, but not quite the same. The bleeding-heart liberal in me says that everyone should have the right to life and liberty - but then you get extreme cases like serial killers and the terminally stupid and people who straight up just don't want to live anymore for whatever reason, and it's hard to fit those in with the rights of life and liberty. But I do think that self-defense is very difficult to deny as a right, and no one can argue that people oppressed to the point of death from starvation or exposure have the right to fight back against their oppressors for their lives and the lives of their loved ones. So: the struggle for survival, human right.
Now, rights as a citizen are a whole different kettle of fish, and that's where our political system is literally tearing itself apart, imho. I'm a very Lockean kind of person - I believe that your rights as a citizen are whatever you want them to be - they're part of your pact of citizenship with your government. You give up certain freedoms to your government, whatever they may be, in exchange for certain guarantees from your government in turn. Some people are perfectly content with the idea of giving up some percentage of their paycheck each month to the government in return for never having to worry about paying for medical care; other people prefer to only pay the government to do things that are too large-scale to be handled one-on-one, like raising armies and building highways. The problem is when you get both kinds of people trying to live under only one kind of government. That's our problem in the US today. We have too many citizens disagreeing about what should be guaranteed by the government and what shouldn't be.
The most recent email he sent me was primarily about the "democratic constitutionalism" movement, a comment by Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg from January of this year, and a comparison of the USA Constitution vs the South African Constitution. I won't copy-paste the whole thing here, but I want to summarise the point that I'm curious about. (All the following information is pulled from the email, so if you know better, please speak up!)
The South African Constitution is lauded by liberals/Democrats because of the way it basically promises social equality to its citizens - food, medical care, basic housing, etc are all guaranteed to every citizen in the very Constitution of the nation. (The practicality of this is questionable, but the loyalty to the ideal is what is found to be so attractive.) The "democratic constitutionalism" movement mentioned above is apparently trying to achieve something similar in the USA - basically, to make the USA a welfare state at a Constitutional level. Leaving aside the methods by which they mean to accomplish this feat, what I want to focus on is a distinction that the group makes: they identify "positive rights" versus "negative rights".
Supposedly, "positive rights" include "right to health care", "right to housing", etc - there's a quote in the email that explains how positive rights "obligate government to intervene in social and economic life, promoting equality rather than simply procedural fairness." On the other hand, "negative rights" supposedly include the following: free speech, freedom to assemble, right to bear arms, etc. this movement would supposedly eliminate those "negative rights" and replace them with "positive rights" like "freedom from gun-toting murderers" etc.
What I want to know is this: what do you think are (or should be) your "rights" - as a human being, or as a citizen?
Personally, I think the only true right that no human being should be denied is the right to struggle to survive and to thrive.
This is essentially similar to the "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness" that the US gov't is founded on, but not quite the same. The bleeding-heart liberal in me says that everyone should have the right to life and liberty - but then you get extreme cases like serial killers and the terminally stupid and people who straight up just don't want to live anymore for whatever reason, and it's hard to fit those in with the rights of life and liberty. But I do think that self-defense is very difficult to deny as a right, and no one can argue that people oppressed to the point of death from starvation or exposure have the right to fight back against their oppressors for their lives and the lives of their loved ones. So: the struggle for survival, human right.
Now, rights as a citizen are a whole different kettle of fish, and that's where our political system is literally tearing itself apart, imho. I'm a very Lockean kind of person - I believe that your rights as a citizen are whatever you want them to be - they're part of your pact of citizenship with your government. You give up certain freedoms to your government, whatever they may be, in exchange for certain guarantees from your government in turn. Some people are perfectly content with the idea of giving up some percentage of their paycheck each month to the government in return for never having to worry about paying for medical care; other people prefer to only pay the government to do things that are too large-scale to be handled one-on-one, like raising armies and building highways. The problem is when you get both kinds of people trying to live under only one kind of government. That's our problem in the US today. We have too many citizens disagreeing about what should be guaranteed by the government and what shouldn't be.