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Politics : Politics for Pros- moderated -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Ilaine who wrote (100470)	2/14/2005 8:17:50 PM
From: TimF	Respond to of 793778

As I said, I think it's a misnomer to say that the Constitution gives us rights, so we're really talking at cross purposes here. The constitution recognizes natural rights and gives us constitutional rights to protect the natural rights. The word "rights" is like the word "love" in that it means more than one thing. You probably don't have a romantic relationship with pizza no matter how much you might "love" it. It's hard for me to imagine that people actually believe that the government has the right to tell you that you can only have one child, and if you have more than one child, they can force a woman to have an abortion, or sterilize men and women who have had their one child. The government has no natural right to do that. Also the federal government would have no constitutionally granted power to do any of that. The feds are (or at least legally should be) limited not only to not infringing on what rights have explicit constitutional protection but also from not acting in ways that are not constitutionally authorized. You can't turn to the Constitution, because there is no enforceable right to be let alone, or so you say. You could if it was the Feds that were imposing the requirement. Also both the founders and I would support resisting profound and protracted infringement on natural rights whether or not it was strictly speaking legal/constitutional. They did after all secede from Britain despite the fact that (to my knowledge at least) there was no legal allowance for unilateral secession under British law. (Parenthetically, is it fair to say that you have no intention of actually reading any of Elliot's Debates?) If there is anything in them that you would like to point out I will read it. I responded to the ideas that you quoted. The debates as a whole seem to be 5 volumes. I saved the link and I might use it as a reference but I'm unlikely to read the whole thing at this time. Tim