[County Agent Hank Kimball]

Come on, you’re engaging in silly talk. Are the rights enshrined and protected by the Constitution “God-Given?” OK, I’ll say yes.

But what is the point of this sort of discussion? Presumably “God-Given” rights apply to everyone, right? So go tell Kim Jung Il that his subjects have the God-Given right to a jury trial. Tell me how that works out for you.

The Founders believed certain rights were inalienable and God-Given. But they didn’t stop there, did they? They very carefully constructed a framework to implement that belief, which quite clearly isn’t self-executing. If it were, they would have just said: “Everyone has the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” and been done with it! Obviously that wouldn’t have worked. So they carefully developed a system to safeguard liberty and natural rights the best way they knew how - with a written Constitution.

Hank

[EternalVigilance]

It seems that you haven't read the Constitution. The founders did say exactly that. The only difference is that they used the more explicit construction of protecting, "life, liberty, and private property."

From the Fifth AND the Fourteenth Amendments:

"No person shall be...deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law."

" No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.

[A_perfect_lady]

But they didn’t stop there, did they?

Exactly.