Posted on 08/29/2013 2:30:51 PM PDT by pbmaltzman
Civil rights are a claim, usually enforced by the force of government, on the life, liberty, or property of peaceful citizens. These alleged "rights" are ascribed to special-privileged groups or classes or ethnicities (blacks) and are not to be confused with the genuine natural individual rights of peaceful citizens referred to in the American Declaration of Independence, John Locke's Second Treatise of Civil Government, or C.F. Bastiat's The Law. No one has a right to force peaceful American citizens to provide them anything except to refrain from the initiation of coercion or violence.
No. Civil rights are government recognized rights.
The third amendment describes a government recognized right, but there isn’t much enforcement activity recently, and it doesn’t take anyones property.
bkmk
Taxes are coerced value delivered to the government. If you are opposed to any taxes, to be fair you have to describe how you would fund the government without them.
The right to vote and freedom from discriminatory laws are both genuine rights. Wasn't that sort of what the Declaration of Independence was all about? A complaint about non-representation in Parliament and about the unequal treatment of the colonists as opposed to Britons living in Britain?
The problem with so-called civil rights is that, just as they do with many federal spending programs, corrupt federal politicians are trading the "promise" of new, constitutonally indefensible federal civil rights for votes imo, low-information voters oblivious to the federal government's constitutionally limited powers.
Low-information voters need to learn to work with their local, state and federal government representatives to work out civil rights that will be acceptable to the Article V state majority.
“The right to vote and freedom from discriminatory laws are both genuine rights. Wasn’t that sort of what the Declaration of Independence was all about? A complaint about non-representation in Parliament and about the unequal treatment of the colonists as opposed to Britons living in Britain?”
I think the OP’s choice of words when he said “genuine right” was poor. Surely he really means “natural rights”, those immutable rights granted by God. The right to vote and the right to be free from discriminatory laws were not considered natural rights by the founders, because they based their claims to them on their status as British citizens. They did not stand up for those same rights to be granted to slaves, on the other hand, because those slaves were not citizens, and so they had no claim on those civil rights, under British law.
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