Comment by bofadeez
2 months ago
A law cannot remove a natural right. A law can protect a natural right or oppress people by using violence against them if they exercise their natural right.
One stark example is the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 in the United States. This law required that escaped slaves, even if they reached free states, be captured and returned to their owners. It went further by mandating that citizens and law enforcement in free states assist in this process, effectively making it illegal to help runaway slaves. Penalties for non-compliance were harsh—fines and imprisonment loomed over anyone who aided a fugitive.
By today’s standards, this is widely seen as abhorrent because it not only upheld slavery but forced people to actively participate in it, stripping away any moral or legal refuge for those seeking freedom. It’s a glaring relic of a time when human beings were legally treated as property, clashing hard with modern values of liberty and equality.
That’s great, but not what I asked about. Free speech protections in the US are based on laws and not natural rights.
Well that's not how it reads in historical documents to me. But you're free to have that opinion if you want to.
Which historical documents are you referring to? Are you talking about the Declaration of Independence, which doesn’t mention free speech, nor define what natural rights are, nor provide any protection from any governments when asserting natural rights?
I’m talking about the First Amendment, which does mention free speech. That’s a law and not a natural right, which you already know since you quoted it above. Additional laws and court decisions have defined what the free speech protections are, and what types of speech are not protected by law.
The important thing to know about free speech in the US is that because it’s a legal right, it comes with legal protections from the government itself.
The important thing to know about natural rights is that they don’t come with any protection whatsoever, because they are not laws or legal rights. Asserting natural rights may come with consequences that include violence, imprisonment, or death. Indeed, the Declaration of Independence was asserting the natural right to start a war against oppressive government, specifically to justify breaking with British colonial rule. If there are no legal rights protecting you, the government is under no obligation to respect your perceived natural rights.
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