A bakery in Buckhannon, West Virginia, made headlines this week when its owners openly defied an order from the governor requiring that masks be worn in indoor public spaces. The bakery’s two owners were relying on some non-specific “rights” they believe were granted to them by an unidentified god which empowered them to ignore the governor’s order and break the law.
In their statement issued to the public and the media, the owners said, “We still believe in freedom and our US Constitution and the rights guaranteed by our creator.”
Apparently, they are referring to the line in the Declaration of Independence (not the Constitution) which reads, “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”
And that has inspired me to offer two points of view.
Point #1: The Declaration of Independence is not a collection of laws. It is a collection of grievances against the King of England written to explain why the colonies in America had chosen to separate themselves from the motherland. In fact, the well-known statement above about unalienable rights is followed in the Declaration by these words: “That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed….”
In other words, “We’re waving goodbye to England now, and we’ll be back to write down our laws at a later date.”
That said, let’s re-read the Declaration of Independence and break down these so-called “rights” one at a time.
First, the right to life, in the context it was written, seems to expand on the idea that all men are created equal, and thus all men are “endowed by their creator” with an equal right to exist. That’s a nice thought for sure, but it was just a thought until it was codified years later in the Bill of Rights. It was never intended to mean that decades later, during a deadly pandemic in the 21st Century, a business owner has the right to endanger the lives of countless other people by violating laws intended to protect them from harm.
Next comes the right to liberty. The signers of the Declaration were notifying the king that our citizens were “endowed by their creator” with the right to be free from the tyranny imposed on them by the monarchy of England. Again, who can argue with that? What it doesn’t say, however, is that in America, anything goes. The word “liberty” is defined in part as “the quality or state of being free; the power to do as one pleases; (and) the positive enjoyment of various social, political, or economic rights and privileges.”
But liberty without restraint leads to chaos. The “power to do as one pleases” without some form of regulation is pure anarchy. No matter how you read the Constitution, none of us has that right, and that is surely not what the framers had in mind. In no way does this statement apply to a defiant bakery shop owner who doesn’t like wearing a mask.
And finally, the right to pursue happiness is an ambiguous feel-good phrase that can’t be quantified as a matter of law. How does one even attempt to legislate happiness? By passing the Happiness Act of 2020? We all want to be happy, but when one person’s idea of happiness collides with another person’s conflicting idea of happiness, somebody has to yield.
So listen…if you read the documents that formed this country – the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution and the Bill of Rights – it’s clear that our laws are set forth in the Constitution and its subsequent amendments and not in our declaration of separation from England. And that brings me to Point #2: Nowhere in the Constitution is there a law endowing any rights by any creator to any citizen of the United States, and not one single word of the Constitution or the Bill of Rights was written by any god.
The Constitution was written 11 years after the Declaration of Independence and ratified two years after that. While the framers might have been inspired by the words “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness,” they didn’t write any laws to specifically address those “unalienable rights,” nor did they attribute any of their work to a creator of any kind. A word search of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights did not find the words “god,” “creator” or “unalienable rights” at all, and the sole reference to the word “religion” appears only in the First Amendment.
So my conclusion is this: If people believe they have a god-given right to walk into a Walmart or a supermarket or a bakery shop without a mask in defiance of a state mandate to do so, they are flat wrong. The Constitution, which they like to flaunt, doesn’t give them that right, and the Declaration of Independence, which does mention rights to freedom and such, was never put into an actual law.
Besides, it said my creator gave me the right to live, but what does that really mean? Do I have the right to live a life of crime? It said I had the right to freedom, but not the absolute freedom to murder, steal, set fires, drive 100 miles an hour or abuse children. It said I have the right to pursue happiness, but not if my happiness means violating the happiness of others. For those rights that are granted to us, we turn to the Constitution and other local laws and not a document full of grievances that merely said goodbye to English rule.
I have read the Constitution and the Bill of Rights more than once, and I guarantee that not one word of those laws was written by anybody’s god.
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