If they are the sort of things which can be granted, permitted, dispensed, or won, then they can also be rescinded, forbidden, withheld and lost. But they are, on the contrary, natural and pre-existing, and therefore inalienable, as in "From my cold dead fingers!"
And I’m proud to be an American,
where at least I know I’m free.
And I wont forget the men who died,
who gave that right to me.
Nobody "gave that right" to freedom, or to anything else, to anyone. Everyone already has "that right." It is granted by God, or Nature's God if you prefer, by virtue of His will that one exists.
On this subject Thomas Mitchell offers "A Few Reminders for the Constitutionally Challenged," which appeared here and which was the original occasion of this post, which is now kind of an irony because Mitchell's post opens with the words of James Madison: "The right of freely examining public characters and measures, and of free communication among the people thereon has ever been justly deemed the only effectual guardian of every other right."
Why irony? Because as I edit this post today, July 24, 2010, The Las Vegas Review Journal is in the news at wired.com for hiring a lawyer to go after bloggers like me for copyright infringement for reproducing their articles on their blogs.
While we really like Mitchell's idea that The Bill of Rights should be renamed The Bill of Prohibitions, here's a reminder of a little something that predates the current copyright law, Mr. James Madison and the Bill of Rights:
Woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! for ye are like unto whited sepulchres, which indeed appear beautiful outward, but are within full of dead [men's] bones, and of all uncleanness.
Try copyrighting that.
