"The people of Britain…extorted from their tyrants not acknowledgments, but grants, of right."
Founder's Quote of The Week
Do people in North Korea have what Americans would call a 2nd Amendment right? Do they have the right to arm and defend themselves? What about the freedom of speech and association? The freedom of movement? Are these rights the people in any totalitarian or authoritarian state have?
Most people would say, “No.” But if you’re an American and understand human rights, you would emphatically say “Yes!”
An American understanding of rights is that they are granted by God and there is no human that can take those rights. Those rights always exist regardless of your freedom to express them. Americans are just lucky enough that our Founding Fathers understood this and sought not to grant rights, but to protect them.
You can see this expressly in the difference between the Magna Carta and the American Declaration of Independence (DOI) and its Constitution. And that is what John Quincy Adams was expressing in the quote featured here.
Here is an extension of that quote from a speech John Quincy Adams gave for a Fourth of July celebration in 1821:
“The people of Britain…extorted from their tyrants not acknowledgments, but grants, of right. With this concession they had been content to stop in the progress of human improvement. They received their freedom as a donation from their sovereigns; they appealed for their privileges to a sign manual and a seal; they held their title to liberty, like their title to lands, from the bounty of a man; and in their moral and political chronology, the great charter of Runny Mead was the beginning of conquest; it had been cemented in servitude, …instead of solving civil donations from their kings.”
The Magna Carta is an historical document signed in 1215 by King John of England at Runnymede. Local barons demanded that the king should also be subject to the rule of law, just as his subjects were. The Magna Carta outlined several breakthrough changes to what was traditionally the rule of kings as they see fit. As important as this early example of our beloved concept of rule of law was, ultimate power — the sovereign — was still located with the king. It was still a human being at the top of the hierarchy instead of having some transcendent principle beyond which even the king reported to.
This changed with the DOI and the Constitution.
One thing that made America different was putting government on a lower plane — a plane underneath God and/or natural law. Everything was to be structured based on the nature of mankind. All power and rights come first from what is divine or sacred. Rights were recognized, not granted.
The government never gives us our rights, the government only secures those rights that exist based on the nature of humanity itself.
It’s not surprising, understanding the history of the people who fled England for the east coast of North America, that they would construct a country based on the spiritual above and beyond the power and importance of their government. This was a population of people who traveled across the Atlantic, braving disease and death, to freely practice their religion. One of the first things they did was organize a church and create a written covenant, which by its nature commits them to God first and everything follows from that.
As Thomas Jefferson stated, the Declaration was designed not as new ideas, but “to place before mankind the common sense of the subject, …intended to be an expression of the American mind…the genuine effusion of the soul of our country at that time.”
Although many great minds were employed in the creation of our founding documents, their ideas were not pulled from their own minds or only the minds of great socio-political authors of the time. John Locke was said to be more American than Americans were Lockean.
As Americans become more and more secular, and as atheists become the most active political group, it stands to be seen if human rights can survive if they lose their original source. Without a transcendent source, rights are simply opinions of men or conveniences of those with power.
If our human rights can find new footing, or if we are sawing off the branch that creates the rights we cherish, is yet to be seen.