A flood of Supreme Court opinions spawned under the 14th Amendment over the last 140 years or so have extended rights, privileges and entitlements into every nook and cranny of our society – many of them places for adults only. With all the legal effort spent to define what the state will protect on behalf of citizens, and what it won’t – most notably unborn lives – you’d think the question would be settled. It has not.
In fact, the opposite lesson has been taught. Rights are not inalienable. They can be taken away, given to someone else, even found lurking in the rarified air of “penumbras and emanations,” provided there is sufficient “due process” to ferret them out. Gamers of the system know this all too well. They know which machineries to rev up to create a right, and which ones work to destroy a right.
Locally, the Toll Road Warriors [TRW] are masters at this game. If a right is not readily visible, this only means that “due process” has not been sufficiently explored. With enough effort, with enough “due process,” any right can ultimately be found, or undermined. For example, they fight developers and road-builders with property rights, but their interest in property rights ends when property owners attempt to use their property in taboo activities. Trouble is, no one really knows when the TRW will discover a new taboo. Their taboos are contextual, circumstantial, subjective, even mercurial. They require an interpreter, a social shaman, and the TRW excel at this. It is their cup of tea.
One question all this begs is how people such as the TRW develop the subjective moral sense necessary to selectively allocate the rights and powers they deal in. What school teaches that what’s right for one person is not also right for another person? What school rewards self-aggrandizement as a value? That’s where the problem lies.
RE:
Property: Rights or privileges
. . .Simply because we outnumber the property owner, we have no right to impose our will on someone else’s property.
Mark Hillman served as Colorado’s State Treasurer and Senate Majority Leader. His e-mail address is mh80807@yahoo.com.