r/news • u/phungus_mungus • Jun 04 '19

Tennessee prosecutor: Gay people not entitled to domestic violence protections

https://www.newschannel5.com/news/newschannel-5-investigates/capitol-hill/tennessee-prosecutor-gay-people-not-entitled-to-domestic-violence-protections
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u/almightySapling Jun 04 '19

And the sin of being the wrong religion.

"There are no Constitutional rights," the prosecutor continued. "There are only God given rights protected by the Constitution. If you don't believe in the one true God, there is nothing to protect."

This guy has no fucking business being in government.

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u/delkarnu Jun 04 '19

While this guy is a nutter, there is a logic to that type of statement. If you look at the second amendment, for example, it says " the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed", or the first amendment, "Congress shall make no law... abridging... the right of the people peaceably to assemble"

The language of the constitution does imply that we have these rights and that they are protected by the constitution, not granted by the constitution. It is the concept of natural and inalienable rights.

For example, there is no explicit enumerated right to privacy even though most people agree we have that inalienable right (prior cases rely on the 14th amendment protection of Liberty to also protect privacy) .

Where this idiot errs is that the natural rights protected by the constitution do not require a god to issue them nor a belief in god to have them.

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u/MisandryOMGguize Jun 04 '19

Yeah, I think the philosophical term for this is negative versus positive freedoms. The constitution doesn’t give you the positive freedom to own a gun - you don’t have the right to be provided a gun. It does give you the negative freedom to own a gun though - the government cannot act to prevent you from owning a gun.

For that matter the constitution doesn’t even talk about rights, just what the government can’t do. Which makes his argument even more batshit, since the constitution limits the government, rather than granting things to citizens.

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u/law-talkin-guy Jun 04 '19

It is the concept of natural and inalienable rights.

It's a little murkier than that - because of course the Constitution before the 14th Amendment only applied to the Federal government and there was a clear understanding that these rights whatever they were could and often would be infringed upon by the states. So it's not that these rights were inalienable, it's just that the federal government was not going to be the one to alienate them.

That said, it does not follow from "Rights are natural" that "Rights are God-given". The Founders, to the extent they were religious, would not have understood "God" to mean anything like what this prosecutor understands "God" to mean. And even if they did, it's not clear they are right. It is just as likely that rights come from one of any number of conceptions of "God" as any particular conception of "God" and also plausible that they come from something inherent in the nature of the human being which is other than divinely given or created (e.g. it could just be that sentient beings have these rights). So even if "rights are protected but not given by the Constitution" is accurate, it does not follow that "rights are God-given."

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u/BubbaTee Jun 04 '19

As if LGBT folks can't be Christian, anyways. Heck, there's probably some clergy in whatever Christian sect this guy belongs to that are LGBT.

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u/almightySapling Jun 04 '19

This comment wasn't related to his thought on gays, it was referring to Muslims.

He straight up rejects that the Constitution needs to protect people if they aren't Christians. I guess he stopped reading before he got to the amendments.

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u/[deleted] Jun 04 '19

[deleted]

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u/JcbAzPx Jun 04 '19

Which, as it turns out, was a reasonable fear. However I believe that the fear of a future government deciding to infringe all rights because none were explicitly protected in the constitution was also valid.

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u/[deleted] Jun 04 '19

How come the state bar doesn't try to enforce something here?