Are you still with Mr. Jefferson?

Do you agree with the following:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed...

I hope you do since this quotation comes from America's founding document, "The Declaration of Independence." The foundations of the argument Jefferson deploys are called "natural law" and "natural rights;" these mean simply that as human beings have a common nature (the human part), humans (merely by virtue of being humans) are obligated to behave toward each other in certain, specific ways (that's the natural law part) and humans have certain, specific claims they can make on other humans (that's the natural rights part). The adjective "natural" means "according to human nature" and should not be confused with anything about Mother Nature or some sort of neo-Darwinesque blather about evolutionary morality. Natural law and natural rights arise from the fact of being human.

To preserve our humanity (and its attendant laws and rights), we create government and positive law (laws we assert or posit). Just government and just law are consonant with natural law and natural rights; unjust government and unjust law are dissonant. Put another way, natural law and natural rights mean that we humans cannot justly and morally create government and law in any old way we choose.

In California, Attorney General Jerry Brown is using natural law and natural rights to argue before the state supreme court that Proposition 8 should be revoked. Equality before the law and a right to marriage are natural rights and cannot be revoked or infringed by a simple democratic majority in an election. These are unalienable rights. Crackpots like George Will (see below) and the pro-8 mob's lawyer Kenneth Starr are arguing that law is whatever we want it to be whenever we want it to be for whatever reasons we want it to be. The will of the majority today is the standard; tomorrow a different majority may decide otherwise. It is just astounding to see self-styled conservatives and the religious right argue that we humans can do whatever we please--at least whenever the human rights of gay people are involved. Of course, tomorrow they will argue for natural rights and natural law when the topic is abortion; abortion is unjust and immoral because a human fetus has all the rights and enjoys all the protections any other human enjoy--namely natural rights and natural law. But not gay people, who aren't really genuinely human and consequently can have their so-called rights stolen whenever an anti-gay majority mob wants.

So much for principled conservatism and the morality of the religious right. Their motto: I believe whatever I want to believe whenever I want to believe it for any reason that suits me for the moment.

Read Will's nonsense here