"Evidence that government exists to protect rights"?
Well, yes, certainly. It "exists" to do what we have put it there to do.
We want certain "rights." ; we declare certain "rights" to be ours and fight to attain them; and we seize them through struggle from those who have other ideas for us, and we place a government at our head simultaneously to administer our hardwon "rights," and make clear to those who might wish to deprive us of them (by invasion, for example, or by more subtle means), that we will make it costly for them to do so. We might, for example, kill them with the military might we have assembled for that purpose.
Most of us feel deeply that everyone should have laws that bring them the rights ours bring to us. I work actively for Amnesty International because I believe in "human rights," pretty much as embodied in the United Nations International Declaration of Human Rights, to which the United States is a signatory. (The rights there enumerated seem to most Americans strikingly unexceptionable.)
This is partly a language question, Gordon. What I mean when I say "I believe in human rights" is that I believe it is wrong, awful, sad, tragic, destructive, ugly, misery-causing, and regrettable in every way, that so many citizens in so many countries do not have so much that we value and take for granted. When I (along with thousands of people all over the world) write a letter in an attempt to influence the head of some country or another to release a poor devil they're torturing because he wrote a column criticizing him or was found with prohibited literature or joined a trade union or taught his children forbidden prayers, I might point out to that leader (or Commissioner of Prisons or some General, if torture is my complaint) that their country is a signatory to the UN Declaration of Human Rights (signing is one thing; abiding by the precepts is another), and that this prisoner's "human rights" are being violated by imprisonment without trial, by being refused medical care, by being prohibited from practicing his religion, etc.
But when I do that, I know that those rights are an ideal. Just because I say their prisoner has them doesn't mean he does. He doesn't, in fact! If he did, I wouldn't be writing the pleading letter. What I claim are "his human rights" are what some human beings want all human beings to have because we think this way is beautiful and good and just and will make the world a better, happier place for all. The believers in this way of living try to spread to others their view of what is fair and just. They say, indignantly, "All of us are human beings. We have a right to freedom of speech and thought. We have a right not to be imprisoned because of our religion or ethnicity or beliefs. We have a right not to be held incommunicado. If we are arrested, we have a right to a fair and speedy trial. We have a right to medical care, and to be free from torture....
Etcetera.
But unless the country has laws guaranteeing those rights, and those in power in that country are accountable to the citizens for upholding those laws... those "rights" we claim we "have," are... dreams. Rhetoric.
Cultures differ wildly in what "rights" are accorded. In some, women have no "right" to show their faces in public. In some a man has a "right" to beat his wife and in lean times, to eat before his children eat, so he remains robust and they starve. In some countries a woman does not have a "right" to scrape out her own uterus if her menstrual period is late, or to get a friend to do it for her. Each government exists to protect... the "rights" their laws, or constitution-equivalent (or despotic leader, as the case may be), accords, and those only.
If you think the "rights" came from God, you must wonder about how variously they have been defined and manifested through the centuries. Almost as though they had come from Man, in all his cultural and political and social and characterological permutations.
I think it is really odd, Gordon, to quote a manmade document, a declaration by men made to persuade and achieve their ends, to prove that government exists to protect something that was already there. It wasn't. The founding fathers brought those rights into existence by DECLARING them OURS, and being willing to fight to see we got what we wanted and thought fair and felt we could wrest from England.
They MADE them exist materially ("secured" them), by law and by force, where before they existed, for us as an independent nation, only in their brilliant, dreaming minds.
And they still do not exist, simply do not exist at all even in dreaming minds, in many places, among many peoples. |
