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To: robertpaulsen
Life, liberty, and property are inalienable rights and CANNOT be removed without individual due process. Right there in the 14th amendment. All the rest are natural rights.

Ah, so it is the Fourteenth Amendment that distinguishes between "natural" and "inalienable?" That's an interesting take. Very original, but not very useful since the Fourteenth Amendment doesn't really enumerate these "inalienable" rights, once again leaving the interpretation open to whoever has the guns to enforce it.

Let's take a more concrete example. I have a right to refuse any and all medical procedures on my body. Is that an inalienable right or a natural right? According to your (arbitrary) criteria, it appears to be a natural right and subject to the whims of democracy and/or oligarchy. And please don't bother trying to shoehorn this into one of your enumerated "inalienable" rights (like telling me my body is my property). That is also arbitrary since it allows anyone with sufficient capacity in rhetoric and argument (i.e. a lawyer) to redefine the criteria.

In any case, this is foolish. Your distinctions between classes of rights are straw men invented from whole cloth to support your collectivist argument against the blanket right to keep and bear arms and your convenience definitions of what constitutes arms. The inalienable nature of a right and any post facto requirement for due process of law to violate it has nothing to do with an assumed collectivist right to regulate it. The Bill of Rights is very clear that the government, most specifically the federal government, must not abridge its enumerated rights. Your personal incredulity that they would unequivocally disallow collectivist regulation of these rights is insufficient to negate the fact that they chose to do so.

267 posted on 03/21/2007 1:12:35 PM PDT by NCSteve (What good is it if you're wearing your superman underwear and can't show it to anyone?)
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To: NCSteve
"Ah, so it is the Fourteenth Amendment that distinguishes between "natural" and "inalienable?"

I asked you a question. Give me some examples of additional inalienable rights. Can you? If you cannot, just admit you were talking out of your a$$ and be done with it.

277 posted on 03/21/2007 2:01:54 PM PDT by robertpaulsen
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