Right Wing Whingers
12 June 2008 - 10 סיון 5768 by Huw
It was predictable. When I read of the Supreme Court’s recognistion of the legal rights of our illegal prisoners, I needed only to click into the Right Wing side of my RSS feeds to find a blogger (two, actually) who says the court should be ignored by Bush. Ah yes, no rights for anyone, thanks, unless we like you.
The rights of Americans are based on the odd idea (from the founders) that these rights define justice and are from Our Creator - not from the state. It’s not within the State’s powers to take them away.
I see that some on the right are appealing to some mythical “absolute power” of the president “in wartime”. Just Freakin’ Great. Like I’ve said: there’s a reason I don’t think there will be an election this year - and I imagine it will be people who believe in Bush’s “Absolute Power” (and who delude themselves that we are “in wartime”) that will most support that action.
You can agree or disagree with the Founders if you wish: but you need to rewrite the entirety of US constitutional law if you wish to “so deem a class of persons a stranger to [our] laws”. That is because, as I said, our rights are not imagined to come from the state, but from a higher source - not the Christian God, per se, but an agnostically defined “Creator” and “Nature’s God”.
That’s why we had to wrestle with the personhood of the slaves: if they were human persons, they were not to be chattel. We had to deny their personhood to remove their rights. And we have to do the same to Muslims in Cuba.
The court was not willing to do that.
Thank God.
Ahem,
Correct, it was the inclusion of God in the State that gave us the rights that we enjoy as Americans. In other words, when Church and State are working correctly together, then the rights of all are upheld.
Huw, you love to cite all the occasions in which the Church / State mixture failed. It is good of you to finally cite an instance in which a Church / State mixture has had lasting success.
Fair and Ballanced