[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.

[donmeaker]

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.

[Sergio]

bkmk

[donmeaker]

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.

[x]

The first and primary civil right is the right to vote. After the basic political rights and civil liberties comes the freedom from discriminatory laws that restrict particular groups in the population and not others.

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?

[Amendment10]

Regarding federal civil rights, the states have delegatated to the feds, via the Constitution, the specific powers to protect only those privileges or immunities expressly protected by the Constitution. Such privileges or immunities are listed mainly in the Bill of Rights, but also include the 15th, 19th, 24th and 26th Amendments which protect specific voting rights. (Did I miss any?)

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.