[risk]

I don't agree with what you said about natural law earlier. Locke and Samuel Adams who quoted him extensively point out that the rights of man are superior to governments, and government's entire authority to govern is encased in the requirement that every law, every ruling, and every enforcement be conducted within the limits of those rights. They point out that those rights emerge from the Creator, or from Natural law. In other words, if the Constitution began to violate the rights of man, it would become a worthless piece of paper.

And yes, Rousseau's ideas abandon the critical notion that laws must respect the rights of man. Man cannot redefine those rights. The right which I claim is not to have my approval forced out of me with a rubber stamp in a courthouse. I will not grant that approval. If the majority of my fellow Americans also reject that approval, the government has exceeded its authority, and therefore it has lost it.

[Tailgunner Joe]

Human laws are measures in respect of men whose actions they must direct, howbeit such measures they are as have also their higher rules to be measured by, which rules are two, the law of God, and the law of nature; so that laws human must be made according to the general laws of nature, and without contradiction to any positive law of scripture, otherwise they are ill made. - John Locke, Two Treatises on Government

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Man, considered as a creature, must necessarily be subject to the laws of his Creator, for he is entirely a dependent being. And consequently, as man depends absolutely upon his Maker for everything, it is necessary that he should, in all points, conform to his Maker's will. This will of his Maker is called the law of nature.

This law of nature, being coeval with mankind, and dictated by God himself, is of course superior in obligation to any other. It is binding over all the globe in all countries, and at all times: no human laws are of any validity, if contrary to this; and such of them as are valid derive all their force and all their authority, mediately or immediately, from this original. The doctrines thus delivered we call the revealed or divine law, and they are to be found only in the holy scriptures. These precepts, when revealed, are found upon comparison to be really a part of the original law of nature, as they tend in all their consequences to man's felicity [happiness].

Upon these two foundations, the law of nature and the law of revelation, depend all human laws; that is to say, no human laws should be suffered to contradict these. - William Blackstone, Of the Nature of Laws in General