The right to life, liberty, pursuit of happiness

Well... Jefferson's a hero of mine, along with Washington and Benjamin Franklin, but let's be real... Mssr. Jefferson was off-base. We aren't given such rights from our Creator. Our Creator gave us the right to pursue all of those things, red in tooth and claw, and that's as far as it goes. We have those things - life, liberty, pursuit of happiness - only as far as we are willing to grab them, and it's the fortune and circumstance of our era that we in the USA don't have to scrape for them ourselves, in most cases, although I'm sure that many of our friends from around the globe would be happy to remove our illusions about liberty.

Life is a gift, one that has no guarantees. Children are born to parents who have no right to procreate every day. Some of those parents take their children's lives, a very clear statement on their part that they want to be rather forcefully removed from the gene pool. If God meant for us to have a right to life, I think, then he'd have made it a lot harder for these morons to attack their own children at any point in their lives, and maybe - just maybe - He'd be a little more forceful about retiring those among us who think they have the right to remove life from anyone at all.

Liberty is a gift as well. We have the right to make our own choices for good or ill, and this is purchased by resistance, often salted with blood, because many with any kind of power presume that they have the right to make your choices for you. Political resistance is not a sin. It's a mandate. If you disagree with someone in power, in the USA, you should have the right to say so - provided you're willing to back up your claim to that right. The current trend - started in the 1950s, oddly enough - toward accusing those who oppose the government of being traitors and miscreants is misled. Nobody has the right to make up my mind for me - not Michael Moore, not John Ashcroft, not Howard Dean, not Tom Ridge, not Ralph Nader, not Donald Rumsfeld. Likewise, I don't have the right to tell you what to think beyond my powers of persuasion - and if my persuasion doesn't work, that's the way it is.

Inalienable rights? Bah! People separate themselves and others from those rights in the USA all the time, sometimes with good reason and often with nothing. It's the way things go, and pretending otherwise is folly.