The Irreligious Priorities of the Biden Administration

The American Spectator ^ | April 18, 2021 | George Neumayr

[ebb tide]

The Irreligious Priorities of the Biden Administration

Secretary of State Tony Blinken’s dismissal of a “hierarchy” of rights is telling.

One of the marks of modern liberalism is its tendency to promote invented rights while denying real ones. As the Founding Fathers argued, rights derive not from government but from God, and the test of the legitimacy of a government is whether or not it respects those God-given rights. Modern liberalism’s conception of rights rests on a far different philosophy, one that has its source not in God but in the caprice of central planners, government bureaucrats, overreaching judges, and globalist ideologues. The Biden administration is drawing upon this conception of rights. Its spokesmen sound less like the Founding Fathers than the French Revolutionaries, for whom the “rights of man” did not mean God-given rights.

Rejecting his predecessor’s emphasis on religious freedom, Antony Blinken, Biden’s secretary of state, recently said that “there is no hierarchy that makes some rights more important than others.” It was a telling comment, and a dishonest one, for in the course of his remarks Blinken made it clear that liberalism’s invented rights would take precedence over God-given ones. The point of Blinken’s speech was not to reject a hierarchy of rights but to assert a new and skewed one.

[ebb tide]

Ping

[BipolarBob]

Godless Democrats. May God judge them for their evil works.

[Jacquerie]

Good column, but our Framers recognized rights belonging to one of three categories: Natural, Civil, and Political.

Natural rights indeed come from God, those like life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Civil rights arise when people form society, like the right to a jury trial. Political rights come from the people via their government such as the age at which one may vote.

While there may be some overlap among the distinctions, I am sure of one thing: a majority of goddamn lawyers on scotus do not have the authority to grant any rights whatsoever.

[Marchmain]

interesting:

“The more fundamental the rights, the less willing the Biden administration is to defend them. It won’t defend religious freedom at home or abroad — Blinken called the Trump administration’s focus on religious freedom “unbalanced” — but it will fight for the spread of transgenderism across the world. Biden treats transgenderism, a wholly fabricated “right,” as absolute, while casting the gun owner’s right to self-defense as expendable.”