Charles Milliken: Defining what exactly is a ‘right’ – Monroe Evening News

Charles W. Milliken| The Daily Telegram

Now that Roe has been overturned, once again the right to privacy has come to public attention.These two words open up a whole can of worms that the Supreme Court has wrestled with and come down on all sides of the issue.

Back in 1965, the Supreme Court ruled a Connecticut law banning contraception was constitutionally invalid(Griswold v. Connecticut). Justice Hugo Black wrote in that decision, Privacy is a broad, abstract and ambiguous concept.

The court, in this instance, ruled that privacy involving intimate relationships negated the power of the state to intercede or regulate. From the acorn of that ruling grew the mighty oak of the right of a pregnant woman to terminate her pregnancy. Afterwards came rulings leading up to the right to gay marriage, among other rulings dealing with aspects of sexual morality.

There appears to me to be two large questions in thosewords. What is a right? And what is privacy? Today Ill focus on rights,and next week on privacy.

In the Declaration of Independence, the signers opined that we …are endowed by (our) Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. They stated that rights came from God, not from man. How could there be anything called a right that did not come from God? Otherwise, any right which depends on the sufferance of a government, no matter how constituted, is not a right at all, but a more or less temporary permission to do some thing, or possess some thing, subject to change or withdrawal at any time the governing authorities so wish.

Consider the Bill of Rights. In order to get the Constitution approved, these 10 amendments were passed since the main body of the Constitution didnt deal with rights adequately. Having listed a number of rights, the Ninth Amendment made clear the rights so enumerated were not an exhaustive list. In other words, the writers of these amendments thought there were many rights too numerous to be included, and that everyone, practically, took for granted. The right to privacy, for example,was nowhere listed.

The Fifth Amendment, following on the Declaration, stated that no one could be deprived of life, liberty or property without due process of law; nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation. It is immediately apparent in the text that due process of law and just compensation provide loopholes large enough to drive a truck through.

Consider the right to private property. You may think you own your own home, but you only own it if you comply with myriad government regulations specifying what you can do with that home and, indeed, whether or not you can even live in it. Back in the day, Bonnie and I bought a fixer-upper, but even after having it fixed up, and bought and paid for it, we could not live in it until the local Michigan authorities issued us a Certificate of Occupancy,and they took their sweet time. It was our only home, and we had to pretend not to live in it until the certificate was forthcoming. We are thankful down here in South Carolina such certificates are not necessary.

The courts have held again and again various authorities have the right to intrude on your property rights anytime they feel like it. They can also take it any time they feel like it, provided it is for a public purpose,very elastically defined, and just compensation is whatever the government says it is, not what you think it is. Also, the courts have permitted your property to be taken, without being taken.Say a new environmental regulation destroys half the market value of land you own. Sorry. Thats not a taking.No compensation.

What about the right to life, which IS enumerated? Does the baby in the womb have any such right?

If a constitutionally enumerated right to property can be so thoroughly ignored, what about unenumerated rights? Privacy, unenumerated, Ill consider next.

Charles Milliken is a professor emeritus after 22 years of teaching economics and related subjects at Siena Heights University. He can be reached at milliken.charles@gmail.com.

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Charles Milliken: Defining what exactly is a 'right' - Monroe Evening News