In your opinion, are all rights enumerated in the Constitution? Is the Constitution the source of rights?
Or are rights inherent in all mankind?
IMO the word "rights" means more than one thing.
There are "natural rights" or "human rights", and there are "legal rights" of which "constitutional rights" are a subset.
The founders apparently believed that the rights they explicitly listed in the constitution where natural rights and I would probably agree with them. I don't and I don't think they did, think that every legal right is a natural right. I also don't think that agreeing on something as a natural right does or should mean that it is a right protected by the constitution. IMO if there was no 1st amendment, freedom of speech, religion, ect. would still be a natural right, but they would not be constitutional rights, and the fact that the founders supported free speech in their other writings would not itself change the constitution to make them constitutional rights.
A general right to be left alone (or a right to privacy for that matter) is not a right contained in the constitution. Its not even IMO strictly speaking a natural right. It is a useful and important principle that I think the government should pay more attention to, but it is far to vague to be a specific right. You could declare almost any government action unconstitutional if we all had the constitutional right to be left alone, and if you consider it to be a natural right you could declare any government action to be an infringement on your rights. Certainly the government is not leaving people alone when it requires them to sign up for selective service, or to pick something almost completely uncontroversial it is not leaving me alone when it requires that I pay incomes tax, sales tax, property tax ect. I don't have the right to privacy to not disclose my income or my security transactions to the government, or the right to be left alone and not be taxed on them or prosecuted for them if I had insider information and acted on it. Our constitutional rights spell out specific areas in which we are to be left alone. It can be reasonably argued that we should expand these areas either implicitly in the constitution or as a matter of custom and wide spread belief that causes more areas to effectively be protected even if they are not granted explicit constitutional protection, but to argue that we have an enforceable right to be left alone in general is to pretty much argue that we have an enforceable right to demand a situation of anarchy.
Tim |
