2016 Voter's Guide: Where do we get our rights?

     Two sources have been proposed for the idea of a human right:  God and the government.  If the government grants rights, then they are necessarily arbitrary.  Your rights will be defended or withdrawn by the judgment of the government.  Rousseau believed that once a government was formed, all of your rights were given to it.  If the government at some point desired to take your life you should willingly surrender it because of all the benefits you had already received from its rule. 
     If this is the source of our rights, then force and persuasion become omnipotent.  If I want a right, all I must do, however unjust that right, is persuade 51% of people to vote my way.  If I can't persuade them, I can force them.  However, as soon as I lose power or influence, every right I have fought for can go away in favor of your opposing right.
     Jefferson wrote in our Declaration of Independence that we are endowed by our Creator with certain unalienable rights.  This means that certain rights are part of our nature, whether the government grants them to us or not.  We have a right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.  This is a way of describing our right to freedom.  We have a right to be secure in our persons, to make our own decisions and to pursue our own ends.  As moral people, we are to be free and unencumbered by others.
     Jefferson used this idea of innate human rights to explain that one purpose of government was to secure our rights for us- not give us our rights, but to make sure that we got them.  If government became a tyrant, Jefferson argues that we have a natural right to dissolve that government and to create another one that could do it better.
     When we pursue our rights, are we pursuing those given to us by God?  Our nation is pursuing new rights, civil rights, all the time.  Are these rights coming from a recognition of what God has given us by our design or are they being foisted upon us by political power and persuasion?  This fall, vote for men and women who believe human rights exist objectively as gifts from our Creator.