Barack Obama declared his world citizenship yesterday. If I am a "citizen of the world" merely by living on the planet, I renounce my citizenship. As a citizen of the United States, I am entitled to certain rights--freedom of speech, religion, gun ownership, trial by jury, a representative government, etc. So far as I can tell, "citizens of the world" have the right to get the bag beaten out of them by their own governments. Most people, at least outside of Western Civilization, aren't entitled to the rights I have. No doubt they would renounce their "world citizenship" for a chance at U.S. citizenship. It's only delusional Western liberals who engage in such nonsense talk as proclaiming themselves "citizens of the world."

"There is such a thing as good international citizenship, and America must be a good citizen of the world--leading the way to address the danger of global warming and preserve our environment, strengthening existing international institutions and helping to build new ones, and engaging the world in a broad dialogue on the threat of violent extremists, who would, if they could, use weapons of mass destruction to attack us and our allies." - John McCain, May 27 2008.

His speech employs iconography around his past much as some 19th century politicians leaned heavily on their log cabin roots to sell their candidacy. Obama wants us to buy into the drama of the goatherder's boy growing up to be president. I just want a president who will protect and defend the Constitution, first and foremost, and leave me to pursue my happiness with my money intact.

This is one of the reasons that Barack Hussein Obama scares the piss out of me. He will let the U.N. and World Court dictate to us. That should scare every freedom loving American out of their wits.

First black president, huh? Oh well...here's hoping for the best....

http://media.monstersandcritics.com/articles/1240143/article_images/thepresidentismoreprowrestlerthanpolitician.jpg

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uDGAiWA7g2A

Obama and his paternal 1st cousin Odinga, wanted to bring the whole of Kenya under Sharia law. Obama campaigned for Odinga in August of 2006,just before he filed with the US Federal Elections Commission for his presidential candidacy.

The idea was simply to have the Luo tribe, mostly Muslims, to take over Kenya from the inheritors of colonial power, the Kikuyu, and bring the country under Sharia law, kick out the Western investors in the nation that had made it one of the most stable nations in Africa, and supplant those Western investors with wealthy Arab oil money.It all failed.Then Odinga yelled election fraud, and put his Luo Islamofascists into the streets of Nairobi to “protest” by murdering, raping and maiming Kikuyu people, including the recent burning alive of a church full of Christians.

If Obama and Odinga had succeeded, the next step in the plan would be for president Obama to help Odinga consolidate his power over Kenya by international recognition and trade. That will NOT happen. Obama wanted to expand Islamofascism, and annex Kenya to Somalia and the Sudan in an Islamofascist axis.

This puts both Obama and Odinga right up there in a pantheon with Idi Amin.Obama hates America, and the basis for America’s wealth. His actions show this.

Dan,

I know where you are coming from and what you mean, but it is just not accurate and is confusing to say that "as a citizen of the United States, I am entitled to certain rights..."

Rather, as our Founders emphasized, we have those rights by nature. What we do enjoy as an entitlement in America is the freedom to exercise those rights.

This is a nuance, but it is a nuance of the utmost importance, imo. No government grants these rights; all men have them by nature. In America, though - and thanks be to our Lord in Heaven - our rights are respected. Further, they are specifically protected (at least in name, if not always perfectly in practice).

THAT is what makes being an American citizen so special. And it is what makes being so so much more important that this empty or tyrannical idea (its realization will determine which it is) of being a "citizen of the world."

Eric: According to our "founders" (do we want to count the Declaration as a founding document?), we have the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness "by nature"/from our creator. First, as concrete practices these rights simply do not belong to most people living in human history. Most citizens of the world have not enjoyed them. In principle, but not in fact, are these rights of all citizens of the world.

Second, the rights Flynn listed here are from the constitution (e.g., tiral by jury), and they are not purely natural rights. They are rather American rights. Do you really think gun ownership is a natural, God given right?

"Scully",

Re: your first point, that's exactly what I am driving at. And of course I consider the Declaration a Founding doc, even if it doesn't carry governing authority like the Constitution. It informs the context, the "original meaning".

But according to our Founders, everyone in the world have certain unalienable rights: life, liberty, and property ("the pursuit of happiness" is the natural extension of these). They have these rights by nature due to their inherit dignity as fellow human beings. (These rights are in relation to other people; they are of course not binding on our Creator, who has graciously given them as a gift.)

Yes, the freedom to exercise these rights are unique and rare in history, which was my point. Our experience in America is almost unheard of in the history of the world, and is relatively rare even today. But this fact does not make any of these rights "American rights." America, our government, our Founders, etc, have not given and do not give to us these rights. We already have them by nature.

What we do have as Americans is a Constitution that puts express limits on the central government's power, thus respecting our natural rights. And we have express protections for certain enumerated rights, as found in the Bill of Rights (though, a la Madison, our rights in truth are innumerable). Again, these are expressly protected in -- and NOT bequeathed by -- the Bill of Rights. The Founders went to great lengths to emphasize this nuance, and I am arguing we should do the same. To fail to do so (as we have failed to do for most of a century) is to fundamentally and dangerously alter the nature of our regime.

To your last question, the right to bear arms is a natural right. Or rather, it is a specific application of that right we have by nature; the right to life and the corresponding right to defend ourselves. To be banned from the means to defend ourselves is to be denied the freedom to exercise our right to self-defense. Hence the Second Amendment.

Eric: The rights enumerated in the bill of rights are neither natural rights nor rights granted by the constitution. Your mistake is actually quite dangerous. To view the Bill of Rights as an enumeration of natural rights (this is a philosophical concept) gives great power to the "philosophers" (=justices) who claim to be able to see the philosophical essence of, e.g., the right to freedom of speech (self-expression? pardon me? Topless dancing? Flag-burning?). The right to bear arms, e.g., is simply not a natural right at all. It is not _required_ by the natural right to self-defense, but is one possible expression of it. I think if you look at the Bill of Rights, each right is like this (except perhaps for free exercise of religion).

I guess we could put the point this way: everyone may have human rights to life and liberty, but it does US good, and not many people elsewhere, because we have specifically American non-universal rights (=sets of practices informed by principles) that are good because they concretize the more basic, but vague and rather ineffective, human rights.

we are the world, we are the children, oh well you know the rest. BO is a typical Dem. he longs for the worlds pat on the head.

Scully,

Your objections here don't touch upon the historical reality. Madison, Hamilton, Jay and other initially opposed a Bill of Rights b/c they viewed them as superfluous. Further, their concern about such a "declaration of rights" was not anything like what you say here, but that by enumerating some, the gov't could conceivably come to see those enumerated rights as all the rights the people possess. But the people possess innumerable rights. Hence the Tenth Amendment. Further, Jefferson was able to prevail upon Madison to go along with the anti-federalists plea for a bill of rights by saying it was better to secure "half a loaf" than none at all, superfluous though their generation saw it. I strongly encourage you to read his letter, here:: http://press-pubs.uchicago.edu/founders/documents/v1ch14s49.html.

Er, if I might correct my own sloppiness here at a couple points in the foregoing: second sentence should be "...b/c they viewed IT as superflous." And in the middle of the paragraph, I meant to refernece the NINTH Amendment, not the Tenth.

My humble apologies for my sloppiness and the confusion that may have caused.

I understand the general point you are making Eric, which I take to mean that certain rights are merely affirmed by the Constitution. In other words, if the government still took the protections of those rights away we would still hold them as rights.

Eric, I agree with your basic view of the Bill of Rights and the 9th and 10th amendments here as not creating any rights, but _you_ are missing the historical reality, in my humble opinion. The Bill of rights didn't create any rights *because* it articulates some (and only some) of the implit infinity of limitations on the federal government inherent in the Constitution (*not because* it was articulting universal human rights). Because the Constitution exhaustively defines the powers of the federal government, what they are not allowed to do (the rights of the people and the states) are infinite and innumerable.

Here is the historical fact you are overlooking: the Rights they chose to articulate are rights of Englishmen, as developed further in the American experience and as purified a bit by the Founders as thinkers. The right to a jury is the perfect example here (a development of the English right to jury _by one's peers_). They are simply not universal human rights. Any number of juridical procedures could serve the same human good that juries do. Juries are extremely rare in the world, in fact. Moreover, these rights were not necessarily guaranteed by the several states. Thus, the Founders did not think they were articulating universal human rights in the Bill of Rights, or else Connecticut would have had to make being a Catholic priest legal when they ratified it (which they did not).

Again, in the basic moral, philosophical sense, all people have a right to liberty, etc., but most people in the world simply do not possess these "human" rights as concrete political realities, because they do not have concrete practices to protect them. The Founding is very much a development of a specifically Anglo-Saxon understanding of government, and we would be fools to think it is simply the result of philosophizing about "natural rights" and the way things should universally be.

P.S. Thomas Aquinas's distinction (when discussing "Human Law" in Summa Theologiae II-II Q64-- see www.newadvent.com for easy reference) between what follows directly from the natural law and what requires "determination" by creative application of natural law to particular situations is crucial here to appreciating what the right to a jury (etc.) is.

Scully,

You simply are not "hearing" me. Most of what you just said I've been saying; esp. in your first paragraph. And I actually agree with much of what you are saying about the "rights of Englishmen" and the Bill of Rights, etc. Though I don't have time to go into that aspect of it right now. But you are only part right, historically, which is why I leave now to sleep while encouraging you to read Jefferson's words, linked above, which provide a strong example of the historical context I've been talking about here.

Oh, and I'm 99% with you in your fourth paragraph, too, as seen in my first comment to Dan almost exactly 12 hours ago.

'til manana...

Eric, Perhaps we are mostly talking past each other -- it seems so, and I'm glad for that. But if so, if what you meant in your original post is that we have certain rights by being human and that the specifically American rights are in some sense mere protections for these God-given universal ones, that's cool. I agree. Perhaps I misunderstood you because in taking exception to the wording of this post made me think that you thought that the rights listed are natural rights rather than conventional rights protecting certain much vaguer natural rights. I for one don't think that the American version of these rights (which are listed in this post) are natural or universal (hence my strong opposition to the current Wilsonianism among American conservatives). I have a feeling we agree mostly at the abstract level, but that at the concrete level you probably want to hold that American-style freedom of speech and gun ownership and elected government really are natural rights that must be, for the sake of justice, universalized.

Thanks to both Eric and Scully... It is exactly this type of discourse that is SO missing in the MSM.
I long for venues that encourage meaningful exchange of ideas , as you both demonstrate. We need more of this in our society NOW.

And thanks Dan Flynn.