2020: The Year of Rights Violations

2020 is only about half way through but it will be known as the year of fundamental rights violations. Let me give you the premise of my book Defending Freedom of Contract. The Constitution protects the fundamental rights of everyone equally. In his lone dissent to Plessy v. Ferguson (the segregation case) Justice John Harlan said the Constitution is "color blind". Harlan's dissent is widely accepted as the law today. In fact, the Constitution is gender blind and socioeconomically blind. Thus, everyone is protected equally. What is a fundamental right. It is either enumerated or unenumerated rights that everyone can agree on with 100% certainty or they are undisputed. Thus, abortion is not a right because it is disputed. So what our rights? Here are some I outlined in my book: any lawful profession, to play, justice, life, liberty, freedom to contract, to travel, to own and sell property, marriage (including gay marriage), to pursuit happiness, to pursuit health, obtain knowledge, speech, religion, self defense, to vote, to safety, among the many.

Pursuit means we can pursuit these rights but they are not guaranteed. In fact, freedom of contract is powerful because it protects many of these rights and is redundant protection such as work contracts, property contracts, marriage contracts, travel contracts and so forth. Of course, many of the rights I mention are not found in Constitution such as the right to play, travel, obtain knowledge and so forth. However, these rights can be protected by the Constitution using either the Ninth Amendment or through the privileges and immunities or due process clauses of the Fourteenth Amendment. Self defense and safety are not listed, but I think that these fundamental rights that protects the Second Amendment.

The government does not create rights because rights existed before governments were formed. Instead, it is the function of government to protect the rights of American citizens equally unless there is some compelling reason to violate those rights. For instance, Covid 19 brings about a dilemma because the government may restrict the rights of some to protect the fundamental rights of others for safety concerns. That said, when implementing laws that violate the rights of some to protect the rights of others it must be done least restrictive manner and it must be consistent. In other words, the law cannot discriminate. For instance, Covid 19 guideline against religion are in most cases discriminatory because it does not treat the church similar to other businesses or practices. For these reasons, the government has been unnecessarily violating the rights of citizens all throughout the Covid 19 lockdown rules.

Of course George Floyd's rights were violated, but like the Covid 19 response, the response to Floyd's death has been violating the rights of thousands of Americans each night with unnecessary violence, travel disruptions, property violations, safety violations, justice violations, work violations, life violations and so forth. In the Covid 19 government response, they went overboard to violate the rights of citizens including meaningless things such as preventing persons from doing yard work. However, the government response to Floyd's death was the opposite and they did very little to protect citizens and their businesses from violence and destruction.

Understanding the Constitution and rights is not rocket science but we seem to violate these rights in the name of moral and social justice when no such thing exist. In fact, it makes little difference that George Floyd was black because regardless of his skin color his rights were violated and that injustice needs to be corrected. Until we start viewing events through rights violation then polarity and division will continue to exist. If everything is a social injustice and racism then the Constitution has no meaning and the country will spiral in anarchy and providing one group of people more rights than others. What is happening today is no different than injustices that happened due to slavery. How is targeting police and whites with violence any different than whites did blacks and men did to women in our early history? Violating rights is violating rights.