More on the Importance of Our Rights

I wrote a post yesterday on the meme here whose point is that government and other people owe us nothing.

A point I failed to make at the time is that Americans who hold this belief know nothing about civics.  There is a reason that there are three branches of government, and, in particular, that the judiciary is among them.

The legislative branch makes our laws, but those laws sometimes violate our rights as citizens, and as human beings.

An example: Until recently my mother lived in Hawaii, and we frequently discussed the case in which our government sought to put a telescope on the land that the indigenous people believed to be sacred.  She asked me, “Since there are more of us than there are of them, why doesn’t the majority rule?”  I responded, “It’s a matter of rights, not votes.  If the majority of people in my little cow town want me tarred and feathered for my progressive beliefs, shouldn’t I be protected, not by local laws, but by the judiciary?”

Our founding fathers designed our government to protect our rights, regardless of popular opinion.

Another interesting example is embodied in Our Children’s Trust, aka “Children v. the U.S. Government,” a group that works to force the federal government to take action on climate change mitigation, on the basis that young people have rights to a stable climate.  The group argues, with mixed success thus far, that the oil companies, as generally supported by the federal government, have violated their plaintiffs’ rights.  Big Oil has known since the late 1970s that the ongoing consumption of fossil fuels is assured to cause grievous harm to young people, as their home planet will lose an ever-increasing portion of its capacity to support life.

We’ll see where this is going to go.

In the meanwhile, we have rights, regardless of what the idiots claim.