Liveblogging Obama at Saddleback

But do you really believe that every civil right ever created by a government is a human right?

Except that I don't believe that civil rights are created by the government. I believe they just exist by virtue of us being sentient beings. (And they, like sentience, is a gift from God, but that's getting off topic, and I don't expect others to agree.)

Others may not agree with that, but I have the Declaration of Independence on my side. It's interesting, you could ask 100 Americans if the US had an 'official philosophy', and 95 of them would say no...but they'd be wrong.

Kingdoms often believe in 'divine right', we believe, officially, in 'divine rights', that somehow we have rights. They don't come from the government, they don't come from the people, they come from 'the creator', and just exist, period.

It’s not a human right to own a gun, but it’s a civil right in the U.S, for example.

I believe it is, indeed, a human right for people to protect themselves, and to alter or abolish an unjust government. Inability to interfere in arms ownership is just a way to prevent the government from interfering in that human right.

Same with a right to a speedy trial and due process and a trial of their peers. Human beings have the human right to only have their rights restricted when they have actually committed a crime, and those things are the best system we've come up with for separating the guilty from the innocent. The civil rights might change from place to place, some implementing the system better and some worse, but that doesn't change the fact that humans have the human right to not be falsely imprisoned.

Likewise with freedom of speech. In fact, that's the best example. There is no 'freedom of speech' as a right defined in the first amendment. There is just a requirement that this already existing freedom, this human right, cannot be restricted. And the inability to restrict it is a civil right.

Civil rights aren't about people at all. They're about the behavior of governments. They are, in a sense, human rights viewed from another direction, as negatives the government can't do, instead of positives people can do. A human right says you can do X, a civil right says the government can't stop people from doing X, or can't do Y because that would harm the right of X.

We refer to civil rights when we're explicitly talking about the government's behavior, as those are a lot more specific about what the government can and can't do, instead of total abstractions.

And when talk about 'civil rights' in the context of people, we are referring to the rights of people to require that their government not infringe on their human rights in a specific, illegal way. Which is just a somewhat indirect and roundabout way of talking about human rights.

Or, to put it another way, human rights are the concept, and civil rights are the implementation of that concept by each government.

I’ll say again I don’t know what all rights Warren includes in the category of human rights. For all I know he really just meant “right to life”. This is beside the point. The question wasn’t phrased in such a way to prohibit Obama from interpreting it to include any and all human rights he thinks humans possess. It could be as broad or as narrow as he wanted, but he chose not to give his opinion on at what point a human being is entitled to whatever he thinks “human rights” include. This is a cop-out.

The fact that the question was deliberately vague is what I was trying to point out. If Obama had spent time defining what 'human rights' are, and time making sure that, by 'baby', the questioner meant 'unborn', he's 'weaseling' out of an answer, like Clinton did when he tried to define 'is'.

If someone wants clear answers, they should ask clear questions. And not present terms that could be defined any way, and then expect Obama to define the question he's being asked, which either makes him look like a weasel or, if he chose the route of interpreting either of the poor terminology in that question other than 'unborn' and 'right to life', look like an ass. (Why, no, I don't think small children should have the right to vote. Next question?)

The question could been phrased as 'Do you think that there is an inherent right to life, and, if so, when do humans get it? When they are born, or before, and if before, when?'. I know that's what people are pretending that's what the question was, but it really wasn't.

Obama a great actor with a script and a teleprompter. He came across as weak!!

Based on what I saw I'm changing my preference from Obama to McCain...looks like he can lead where Obama need handlers to tell him what to say without stuttering.