Our rights are grounded in God

You will recognize the following sentence from the Declaration of Independence:

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.

This language acknowledges that the origin of our rights is in our Creator, i.e. our rights are given to us by God.  Also, this language indicates that our rights are unalienable, i.e. our rights cannot be taken from us.  Moreover, the inherent logic contained in this statement is that the only reason our rights cannot be taken from us is that they find their origin in God.  This means that our rights are objective facts, not subjective human opinions. Because our rights are not given to us by men, they cannot be taken from us by men.

If our rights find their origin in God and not merely in the opinions of men, it necessarily follows that we can only know what our rights are through divine revelation, i.e. through scripture (the Bible) or through God’s general revelation, nature. The Declaration acknowledges this in its reference elsewhere to “the laws of nature and nature’s God”.

Accordingly, any action which God expressly prohibits cannot be a right and the Pennsylvania legislature cannot make any such action a right by expressing its opinion on the subject, e.g. homosexual practice.

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