Certain, unalienable rights

Maybe it's time we stopped talking about constitutional rights. The phrase implies that the rights affirmed in the first 10 amendments to the U.S. Constitution did not exist before the document was written.

As in: The reference to the Supreme Court's "declaring for the first time that Guantanamo detainees have a constitutional right to a hearing in U.S. courts," as written in this article about this week's ruling that, for once, indicates at least five justices read the Constitution.

It's pretty clear the Bill of Rights doesn't protect only the rights of U.S. citizens. The Sixth Amendment, for example, reads, "In all criminal prosecutions, the accused shall enjoy the right to a speedy and public trial, etc." (my italics) So the decision should have been a no-brainer, although four justices still had a problem sussing that out.

But in the hours following the ruling's release, I happened upon a couple of radio talk shows that made reference to the rights granted by the Constitution and whether they were intended to be granted to non-citizens or, in this case, "enemy combatants." That's such a common goof that I think the shorthand needs to be dropped.

The shorthand calls these "constitutional rights." We need four more syllables, as inconvenient as that might be. They are "constitutionally protected rights," if words on paper have any power to protect someone from a determined tyrant.

The U.S. Constitution is not the source of these rights, and they are not conferred only upon U.S. citizens. The document was written by folks who, 12 years earlier, had rallied around a document that asserted: "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 ..." Notice, again, that word all.

The rights affirmed in the Supreme Court ruling are not constitutional rights; they are certain, unalienable rights that apply to every human being. The writers thought that by writing them down in the Constitution, they would be protecting these rights from the whims of an oppressive government, but pre-existing rights could not be created by the Constitution. They come with the package: We are created with these rights built into our nature.

Much of the world hasn't caught up with the folks who wrote those founding documents — sadly including, of course, the vast majority of the people operating the government founded by those documents. But that doesn't change or reduce the self-evident truths affirmed by those 18th-century writers.