Tell me something, do you believe slavery was a violation of rights? How bout the denial of the vote to women for so long? At the time those things were going on, the government didn't recognize the rights of African Americans or the right of women to vote. Under the logic that rights only come government, since the government didn't recognize those rights, we would have to conclude that slavery did not violate any rights, nor did the denial of the vote to women.
Agreed: it was not a violation of rights as those rights did not existfor slaves or women before the people voted for those rights. "Rights endowed by a Creator/nature" and "morality"...or what we consider good/bad or right/wrong are two different things. You are conflating the two.
Unless, rights are more complicated than just what the government does and does not recognize.
Which it isn't. Rights are given by the governing body, be that a democratic one or not. If the people are not happy with the governing body, they get rid of it whether it's a king, a Parliament, a dictator, or a political party in power.
If rights come from those entities, it follows they can be taken away from those entities.
Yes, and they have been. See the right to own slaves taken away, the right to sell alcohol taken away, the right to work children taken away.
It would also follow that those entities could never be guilty of violating your rights. After all the rights only come from them and therefor if they say you don't have the rights, you don't. Right?
Exactly. If those rights are not given by the governing body, they can't be 'violated'. Are we now violating the rights of slave owners? What about the rights of employers to make children work 8 hours a day? No...because we took those rights away.
Unless rights are something more complicated than whether or not a given government recognizes them.
But they're not. They are a human construct that can be given or rescinded. There is nothing divine or supernatural about them.
I believe the Chinese, Russians, and Cubans have certain inalienable rights and that their governments are violating their rights. Or do you think their rights are not being violated?
Only if those rights are given in their laws and the governments are ignoring those laws...which they do. Again, "rights" and our idea of right/wrong are two different things. You are conflating rights with moral/ethical beliefs of our western society.
As I said above if they rights only given to us by government, we can't complain when they take those rights away. They can simply say to us, "you only have what rights we tell you have".
We can as our government consists of legislators we vote for and their doing so would break our laws.
It is a declaration of the idea that rights do not come from the King, they are above the King, and the King was violating those rights and therefore we justified our revolution.
Exactly: it was a justification for the revolution based on their beliefs. It did not make it fact.
Our whole revolution and country is based on the idea that rights do not come at the mercy of government, or the king, they come from above, from a creator or nature. If the government fails to recognize those rights, it is the right of the government to change such government.
It's based on that "idea"; that does not make that idea a fact.
As I have said previously, some of the founders didn't like the idea of spelling them out in the Bill of rights, they were concerned it would like they were coming from the government and not the creator or nature. But others wanted them spelled out.
And you have yet to give any evidence of that idea. How about a citation?
I've given a completely different view about the opposition, and I can cite evidence.
