So last week, I opined that Americans didn't have an individual right to own a firearm until DC vs Heller (2008.) People protested: rights don't come from SCOTUS, they pre-exist as "natural" or "God-given"rights. A response via thread: (1/x)
(2/x) The concept of "natural rights" is v. important, a necessary antecedent to the US Constitution and Western democracy. "All men are created equal." And the idea still informs current debates, eg, same-sex marriage. Yay, natural rights!
(3/x) But it has no legal, practical, real-world meaning. First, the idea of what's a natural right is entirely subjective. I could claim to have a "natural right" to play LF for the @RedSox, but I'm not getting on the team, because no one else agrees.
(4x) Less frivolously, many people believe that women have a "natural right" to decide, for themselves and by themselves, whether to carry a pregnancy to term. Many others disagree, citing a "natural right" to life. Who's right? It doesn't matter. Actual law matters.
(5x) Even less frivolously: the 14th Amendment guarantees "equal protection of the laws." Plain reading means: equality for black people. But if a black man asserted that right and walked into a whites-only hotel in 1906, he'd be thrown out. Or killed.
(6/x) Because his "natural right" -- "All men are created equal" -- and even the 14th A itself, meant *nothing* without a guiding SCOTUS ruling and appropriate enforcement. SCOTUS, of course, had ruled the other way in Plessy vs Ferguson.
(7/x) So what happened with SCOTUS reversed Plessy in Brown v Board? Did a "natural right" reveal itself? Nope. The law changed. A right was created not in nature but *in the civic arena," which is where rights operate. And the Fed Gov enforced it.
(8/x) (Apologies for reducing an entire tragic, complex ongoing chapter of American history to a happy anecdote for the sake of this argument. Onwards:)
(9/9) Thus: Nature, or God, may imbue you with lots of rights in your opinion, and use those arguments all you like... to win cases, pass legislation, and change the law. Because without rights *defined* by the law, and *protected* by the Government, you've got no rights. FIN.
