Posted on 02/24/2015 11:08:39 AM PST by wagglebee
February 23, 2015 (BreakPoint.org) -- During a recent appearance on CNN, Roy Moore, the chief judge of Alabama’s Supreme Court, debated the issue of same-sex marriage with CNN’s Chris Cuomo, the son of the late New York governor Mario Cuomo and the brother of New York’s current governor, Andrew Cuomo.
During the discussion, Moore said that “Our rights, contained in the Bill of Rights, do not come from the Constitution. They come from God. That’s clearly stated in the Declaration of Independence.” Cuomo then responded “Our rights do not come from God, your honor, and you know that. They come from man.”
Cuomo added that the idea of God-given rights is “your faith [and] my faith, but that’s not our country. Our laws come from collective agreement and compromise.”
I can’t help but wonder which country Cuomo is referring to. After all, the Declaration of Independence, by way of justifying the enormous steps the Founding Fathers were about to take, states “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” And “That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men . . .”
These words, which previous generations of American school children were made to memorize, set forth an order that is 180 degrees from that suggested by Cuomo: first comes the Creator, who then endows his creatures with “certain unalienable rights,” and then the creatures form governments to “secure those rights.”
In essence, Cuomo is resorting to a kind of legal positivism, that is, the idea that “law is a matter of what has been posited,” something “ordered, decided, practiced, [or] tolerated,” and is not based on any deeper truth.
But that approach has serious flaws—as our own history bears out. In the run-up to the Civil War, for example, defenders of slavery appealed to the text of the Constitution, which permitted slavery without mentioning it by name. Opponents of slavery, or at least those against its spread into the territories, such as Lincoln, appealed to the Declaration of Independence and its ideas about God-given rights.
Sticking to man-given rights and appealing to “collective agreement and compromise” as Cuomo insists upon doing, would not have ended slavery.
However, if our nation’s leaders agree with Cuomo that the rights we possess are those the government has deined to give us, that would go a long way to explaining the erosion of religious liberty we are witnessing in the U. S. After all, the same government that can create a right to abortion and same-sex marriage can also take away the rights of freedom of religion and freedom of association. This may yield the results folks like Cuomo want, but it undermines the very foundation of human rights that we all claim to hold dear.
And that is really what’s at stake. Years ago on this program, Chuck Colson said that human rights are “based on our most fundamental beliefs about humans being created in the image of God.” Our “rights are not conferred by government, and so they cannot be denied by government.” It was this belief that led Chuck to draft the Manhattan Declaration in defense of human life, marriage, and religious freedom.
More than half a million Americans have signed the Manhattan Declaration. So if you have not, or if you haven’t even read this vitally important defense of our rights and freedom, please come to BreakPoint.org, click on this commentary, and I’ll link you to it.
Chris Cuomo was right about one thing: God-given rights are what our faith teaches. If that’s no longer true about “our country,” Heaven help us all.
Reprinted with permission from Break Point.
Exactly!
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Few get that.
Regressives like Cuomo are the reason why a National Divorce may be the only way to restore sanity to SOME of the country.
The left doesn’t want to recognize rights come from God. In their atheistic view, “rights” are conferred by the State, not individually but “collectively.”
To deny that rights are divine in origin is to deny that men are creations of God, and do not have eternal souls. In other words, we are just pieces of meat, to be disposed of as the State sees fit.
When looked at that way, everything that happened in the Soviet Union is quite understandable.
Meanwhile,
Luke 20: 24,25
“Show Me a denarius. Whose likeness and inscription does it have?” They said, “Caesar’s.” And He said to them, “Then render to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, and to God the things that are God’s.”
Cuomo’s capricious stance on the nature of Constitutional law is dangerous and exemplary of the Left’s mentality that aims to take on the role of God.
Our rights are from God, not government
If true... then Canada, ALL of Europe and the entire rest of the world’s GIVERMENTS have NO RIGHTS..
For..... Uniquely to the United States Constitution is a generic GOD granted sole ownership of actual RIGHTS...
AND denyed that givernment’s right to grant certain privileges..
AND makes then UNALIENABLE...
The ONLY givernment in history to have UNALIENABLE RIGHTS..
Still TRUE even IF that givernment abridges those RIGHTS.. illegally..
Literally NO OTHER givernment in history has UNALIENABLE RIGHTS.. NONE.. Zip.. Nada..
Not Canada, UK, Germany, Norway, Sweden or France... and certainly not Russia.. they are all SLAVES to givernment..
Must be something in this family that that they can’t comprehend what is written very plainly. Either that,or they spend so much time with the NY Times that they don’t have time for any other reading.
Must be something in this family that that they can’t comprehend what is written very plainly. Either that,or they spend so much time with the NY Times that they don’t have time for any other reading.
Maybe he wasn't there the one day they discussed the Declaration of Independence.
A right has to do with a divinely ordained duty. That’s because we are not supposed to make it about ourselves.
Sorry about that double post;it was not intentional.
It’s not that the left doesn’t “get” that - they actively REJECT that.
It inhibits their power over their fellow human being.
The trouble with claiming that the American bill of rights is just a list of divine rights... is that it isn’t entirely that. Some of it really IS positivism.
Importantly, *some* rights are indeed given by government, and it is *vital* that these are never lumped together with God-given rights.
The elephant in the room of government given rights are corporate civil rights. They were created out of whole cloth during the time of Lincoln, not by congress or the president or the supreme court, but by an *interpretation* of a supreme court decision. Yet from that modest beginning, today they dominate corporate business law.
At the time, some of the first national corporations had come into being. Before they had been exclusively state entities. But becoming national they came under the sway of the correctly interpreted Interstate Commerce Clause.
States saw such corporations as “cash cows” they could force to pay taxes, hire employees in that state, and otherwise operate their business there, even if they just wanted to pass through.
However, to protect them from this abuse, the idea of corporate civil rights arose. *Almost* identical to God given rights. And there is no clear dividing line between them. And this is a major problem.
Granted, corporations do need some protections, rights, under federal law, but they do not have as an organization, God given rights. They cannot marry, adopt children, vote, run for public office, have a right to bear arms, free speech, etc.
In the law, this has become such a problem that it might eventually need to be addressed with a constitutional amendment. One that clearly says that corporate rights are derived from government, not God.
I agree. Rah rah USA isn’t QUITE the same as rah rah God.
Aptly put! And it’s this differentiation that has determined this country’s greatness, until now. The Godless Leftists are trying to “pack the country” with people to whom this distinction doesn’t matter (or more likely that they are too stupid to understand). Give “citizenship to enough dune couns and south-of-the border types, and you HAVE fundamentally changed this country forever. It pains me to contemplate my children and their children not having the kind of freedom that I’ve had.
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