Newsgroups: bit.listserv.politics
Date:         Sat, 5 Sep 1992 10:48:19 EST
From:         Kerry Stephenson <KSTE@PURCCVM.BITNET>
Subject:      Re: Rights, and other comments ...

G. Racz states that a bill of responsibilities would be in diametric
opposition to the Bill of Rights.  Not so.

The Bill of Rights was designed to prohibit the *federal* government
from abusing its power.  However, it was assumed that the citizenry,
under such a government, would exercise its liberty in the way the
Founders perceived liberty.  This is part of our discussion problem.
To the Founders, "liberty" (as in "ordered liberty") meant the
right to behave *responsibly.*  It did *not* mean the right to do
anything an individual took it into his or her head to do.  In a
culture where there are understood and agreed upon *values*, the
government has no need to regulate the majority of behavior.  In a
culture in which larger and larger portions of the population lose
these basic understandings, confusing liberty with *license*, the
society, in the interest of its own continuing good health, must
move the focus of regulation further and further toward the behavior
of the individual.
   In any society, rights are associated with *responsibility*--not
the responsibility of government *alone* to protect those rights,
but the responsibility as well of the citizens to refrain from abusing
the rights they have.  Thus, the right to free speech does not carry
with it the right to *falsely* yell "fire" in a crowded theater.  While
it could be argued that such an utterance might well be kind of fun and
most likely wouldn't cause any more damage than the average Guns N Roses
concert, it is a violation of common values to deliberately induce such
fears just to prove you have the right.  By the same token, the Court has
ruled that the 14th Amendment right to "privacy" does not extend to a
protection of the act of homosexual sodomy.  The Court said "to claim
that a right to engage in such conduct is 'deeply rooted in this
nation's history and tradition' or 'implicit in the concept of
ordered liberty' is, at best facetious."  (Bowers v. Hardwick
478 U.S. a86, 106 S. Ct. 2841, 92 L. Ed. 2d 140 [1986]  The internal
quotes refer to Palko v. Connecticut and Moore v. East Cleveland.
[sorry, my editor won't underline things.)
   The Constitution is a document of *ordered* liberty, not license.
Liberty without order is anarchy, and order without liberty is fascism.
This is a democratic republic--not, I remind you, a democracy--and it
is premised on the notion that human beings, being sinful, require
government for their own preservation.  The Founders did not forsee
a nation in which all rights would be considered equal, nor one in
which all behavior would be considered a "right."
    We can argue all you like about whether the Founders were "Christian"
or not; that is not the point.  The point is that their understanding
of ordered liberty was premised on a notion of morality that most people
on this list do not share, and which some go so far as to ridicule.
If the Founders had wished to create a society based on unfettered
personal freedom in all aspects of behavior, they would have created
Revolutionary France (which Jefferson, by the way, was wildly favorable
toward, even after the fact).  They did not.  And the Republic has
been the better for it.

If we wish to create a new society, one that rejects God, rejects
morality, and defines as right anything anyone wants to do that does
not directly harm another, then we might just as well call a new
Constitutional convention and create that society.  We might as well
admit that we as a people have decided that the government we have lived
under for 200 years of unbroken advancement, the government that has
made of this nation the most prosperous--and the country most desired
to be entered of any nation in the world--is no longer viable.  We should
dispense with bending the Constitution to suit our new ideas and just
break it for good and start over.

If the culture of the Republic is dead, then let us bury it and move
on.

But God help us if we do.

--Missy P 2 B
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