A thread at Experts Exchange led to the assertion that people had a “right to eat pork.” This was later clarified as “a right to do whatever you please within the law.”

I’m not at all sure that I believe that there IS such a right, but in order to decide that, I needed to know exactly what a “right” is. My first instinct is to define it as a basic freedom so inalienable that the government has no legitimate reason to restrict it. However, I believe very strongly in the right to “freedom of speech”, and yet believe that the government has a very good cause to punish those who yell “fire” in a crowded theater or reveal extremely private details of another person’s life, so think I need to revise that definition.

From “The Smallest Minority” (a site that will likely be added to my sidebar soon. I’ll give it a few days, though.), I found a post dedicated to just this topic: What is a “Right”? (You may have to scroll down for it. It’s about 3/4 of the way down the page.)

The conclusion of that essay is that “A ‘right’ is what the majority of a society believes it is.”

While I understand what he’s getting at — a legal right is indeed what the majority of society believes it to be — I think the ideal of a right is something different. The more I think about it, I think that we need to go back and re-examine the definition of right I used above.

A right is a freedom so basic that the government has no ground to stand on when it tries to remove it from you. Invariably, the government will try to remove your rights. By its very nature, government will eventually begin to pass laws that infringe on rights, and it is the duty of the people to stop it from doing so.

What are your rights? Not the rights listed in the Bill of Rights, but truly unalienable rights? Well, in my opinion, there are only two rights:

1. The right to live (and its corollaries, which involve protecting one’s self, one’s loved ones, and one’s property)
2. The right to form one’s own ideas and share them with others. (Instead of a base “freedom of speech”, which implies you can say anything you want anywhere and anytime you want)

All other “rights” are corollaries to those two. However, neither the “right to eat pork” nor the “right to do whatever you please within the law” fits the bill. In fact, there are a lot of “rights” that, quite simply, aren’t. The right to marry is the first that comes to mind. While it’s a MUCH better soundbite to say that gays are being denied a Right than to say they’re being denied a privilege, it’s simply not true. (As I’ve stated before here, I do think that, if the government is going to give certain benefits to a union of two people, it shouldn’t care what the genders of those two people are. I think that homosexual acts are immoral, but, really, it’s none of my business (nor the government’s business) what two (or more) people do in the privacy of their own homes.
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