Where Do Our Rights Come From?

Jonah Goldberg reminds us that in his infamous speech in Georgia last week President Biden made the startling claim that “the fundamental right to vote is the right from which all other rights flow.”

Goldberg goes on to say that,

This is a common view, and one that Biden has subscribed to for a while.

As vice president in 2015, he issued a statement on the 50th anniversary of the Voting Rights Act: “Voting is the engine that drives all civil rights, all human rights, and all economic rights in this country. It’s the right from which all other rights flow.”

Robert Kennedy said the same thing a half-century ago.

But whether Mr. Biden says it or RFK says it, it's a very misleading, if not entirely false, assertion.

Goldberg has an interesting discussion of where our rights come from in his column, and after considering several candidates for sources of our rights he ultimately lands on the right one:

Then there’s the philosophical argument. This is a bit of a misnomer because it can rightly be called a theological argument as well. It’s pretty straightforward. We are created by God. Our rights derive from this fact, and it is the job of the state to protect those rights.

Some atheists and humanists don’t like this formulation for some obvious reasons (and some exhaustingly obscure ones). But the simple fact is that without the essentially Judeo-Christian view of humans as being equal in the eyes of God, we wouldn’t have the idea of inalienable rights today.

This is so obvious that one would think it's a point that hardly needs making. Thomas Jefferson and John Adams surely thought it was obvious when they wrote the Declaration of Independence, which asserts that our rights are given to us by God, and it's hard to see how there can be inherent human rights, as opposed to arbitrary legal rights, if they're not ordained by God.

Our rights are based on the uniquely Judeo-Christian idea that all men and women are created in the image of God and are loved by Him. That conviction leads to the idea of human equality, that all men and women are equal in the eyes of God.

Apart from the historic influence of Judeo-Christianity in the Western world those ideas would never have taken hold. Or, if they did, they would've soon collapsed for want of a substantive foundation.

Nowhere else in the world over the last two millennia has the idea of human equality arisen, except in areas where Judaism and Christianity had become established.

If we are not created beings, if God did not fashion mankind in His image, then we're the product of impersonal, mindless processes like chance and fortuitous natural selection.

If the latter is true, if we're the product of eons of evolutionary struggle, where does the idea of human equality come from? It's certainly not necessary for survival of the species, nor would it be rooted in any biological fact about humanity since biology knows nothing of equality.

Moreover, if the belief in equality arose through a mindless evolutionary process why should anyone feel any obligation to reverence it any more than they have an obligation to reverence the idea that might makes right?

It's just silly to claim, as Mr. Biden does, that human rights are derived from the right to vote. Human rights are an endowment from our Creator and apart from a Creator human rights are nothing but a happy fiction.