An important belief behind the creation of the Declaration of Independence was the notion that there are human rights which cannot be alienated by positive law. If civil law opposes those rights, then civil law has lost its authority. One of the sad things we see today is that many people believe these rights are given to us by the state, so that if someone is not a citizen of a given state, they no longer are granted them. This is the basic error which we see being practiced by the United States today as justification for man abuses against the dignity of the human person.
Abortion Is accepted because the woman is a citizen with a right to her body, but the child within her womb is not a citizen of the United States, and so is not given human rights. Illegal immigrants, because they are neither citizens within the United States, nor registered to the United States so that they are given a protected status by the state, are thus seen as free game who do not need to be accorded basic human rights – this is the foundation behind the controversial Arizona State Law. Terrorists, because of their unusual status, are seen as not being protected by the Geneva Conventions, and so once again, justification is made to deny them basic human rights. It is interesting to see how suspected (not even convicted) terrorists are now becoming targets of the state; if they are American citizens, the state now wants to strip them of their citizenship, all so they can be mistreated and their basic human rights ignored. After all, once we can see they are not citizens given protection by the civil state, they are free game and can be tortured.
We must return to our roots, and remember it is not because one is a citizen that one has inalienable rights, but because one is a human person. The state must be judged by these rights, and if it fails to grant the non-citizen their basic human dignity, the state has failed and has become a tyranny. The issue of life is united to the issue of torture and immigration reform. All three have as their basis the dignity of the human person. Sadly, very few people think this through, and so they will argue inalienable rights for some cases, and fall for the “citizens rights” the next. We need to move beyond this before we find out more of our human dignity is seen as merely a boon given to us by the state. What will it be next?
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