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To: Sherman Logan
She was talking about the belief that the majority has a "right" to take away the individual rights of the minority.

Maybe we should vote to take away the rights and property of blacks, and then build a wall around Harlem.

Substitute Jews and Warsaw, and it's saying the same thing.

What is your difference between "hunan freedoms" and the right to Liberty?

-PJ

95 posted on 04/15/2013 11:05:05 AM PDT by Political Junkie Too (If you are the Posterity of We the People, then you are a Natural Born Citizen.)
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To: Political Junkie Too

Freedom is simply the potential to do things.

Some of those freedoms are inalienable rights: speech, worship, protection by being armed, etc.

Other individual freedoms are not rights, precisely because they infringe on the actual rights of others. Therefore since the Founding I have had no right to rape, kill or steal. The law infringes (as it darn well should) on my (or your) freedom to do these things, because doing so infringes on other’s actual rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

Since December, 1865 my previous human freedom to own other humans if I so choose was demoted from a protected property right to a prohibited infringement on another’s human rights. As well it should have been.

Or to put it another way: Your right to swing your fist ends when it impacts my nose. Your freedom to strike me is not a right, it is a crime when implemented.

I do believe this is all a truism. Not all freedoms are rights, and much of the discussion in our society over two centuries has been about which freedoms are and are not rights.


96 posted on 04/15/2013 11:13:49 AM PDT by Sherman Logan
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