[Cross-posted at In a Blog's Stead]

Today's Opelika-Auburn News contains a piece from the Mississippi Press of Pascagoula discussing the Jose Padilla and Guantanamo Bay cases. The piece affirms that"the right to counsel is sacred and should be granted to every American citizen," but notes that"not all the detainees are American citizens," and concludes:"In no way are they entitled -- nor should they be -- to legal representation."

This is a very different theory from that on which the United States was founded. The Founders embraced the Ciceronian and Lockean theory that the rights enshrined in the Constitution are natural rights, inherent in human nature per se, and so are universally applicable to all human beings; they are not the products of parochial legislation or the privilege of a select few.

In The Rights of Man, Thomas Paine wrote:

Natural rights are those which appertain to man in right of his existence. ... His natural rights are the foundation of all his civil rights. ... Every civil right has for its foundation some natural right pre-existing in the individual.

Alexander Hamilton, in The Farmer Refuted (a debate with authoritarian conservative Samuel Seabury), likewise wrote:

The fundamental source of all your errors, sophisms and false reasonings is a total ignorance of the natural rights of mankind. Were you once to become acquainted with these, you could never entertain a thought, that all men are not, by nature, entitled to a parity of privileges. [Emphasis mine -- RTL] You would be convinced, that natural liberty is a gift of the beneficent Creator to the whole human race, and that civil liberty is founded in that; and cannot be wrested from any people, without the most manifest violation of justice. Civil liberty, is only natural liberty, modified and secured by the sanctions of civil society. It is not a thing, in its own nature, precarious and dependent on human will and caprice; but is conformable to the constitution of man, as well as necessary to the well-being of society. ...

The sacred rights of mankind are not to be rummaged for, among old parchments, or musty records. They are written, as with a sun beam, in the whole volume of human nature, by the hand of the divinity itself; and can never be erased or obscured by mortal power.

(Yes, Hamilton had his libertarian side!)

Two centuries later, Americans now apparently believe that those liberties they still enjoy are a special gift they have been granted by a generous government. Those liberties are now seen as a privilege of birth, not a right of all humanity; hence they may be denied to those outside the charmed circle of U.S. citizenship.

Thomas Jefferson had harsh words for this style of thinking. In the last letter he ever wrote, Jefferson observed:

All eyes are opened, or opening, to the rights of man. The general spread of the light of science has already laid open to every view the palpable truth, that the mass of mankind has not been born with saddles on their backs, nor a favored few booted and spurred, ready to ride them legitimately, by the grace of God.

Too many eyes are closed again these days. Magnesium, anybody?