Jefferson vs. the Democrats: the definitive political debate of our age

It shouldn't be surprising, perhaps, that the Left doesn't really "get" human rights.

It shouldn't be surprising that they find it objectionable when an imaginary "right" to have one's birth control paid for by one's employer is compromised by the discovery of an inconvenient "freedom of religion" in the Constitution which excuses employers for whom doing so would violate their First Amendment rights from having to pay for it.

It shouldn't be surprising that when the Government decides that it's "discrimination" stand by the centuries-old understanding of the legal nature and function of religion, that religion should give way to the dictates of government.

Thomas Jefferson would never had made that mistake. "We hold these truths to be self-evident," the putative father of the modern Democratic party wrote,

...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 – That to secure these Rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed..…

There are really only two philosophies that matter when it comes to human rights. Jefferson's is one of them. The other is Mao's: the aphorism that "power grows out of the barrel of a gun," that might makes right, and that none of us have any rights, finally, than those the kindness of those bigger and more powerful than we are deigns to recognize.

Those are the two options as to the origins of human rights. There is no third option. Conservatives side with Jefferson. Modern "Progressives" side with Mao.

And that's really the end of the story. The bizarre objection CNN's Chris Cuomo raised to Alabama Chief Justice Roy Moore's citing of Jefferson's position- and that which has finally ended up lying at the heart of every theory of liberal social democracy in history, regardless of the religious beliefs (or lack of them) held by their adherents- only goes to illustrate the fundamental and irreducible conflict between the "progressive" movement and the very humanist, liberal impulse it (falsely) claims to embody.

What Barack Obama and Chris Cuomo and the rest on the Left really mean is that your rights are only those the government chooses, out of the goodness of its heart, to allow you to (temporarily) exercise. What the social Right is saying is that our rights have their origin in God, and that nobody has the right to take them away.

Not even Big Brother.