A Thought About Human Rights

The old film, Judgement at Nuremberg, reminded me not only that good people in Germany let their government get so far out of hand as to start a World War and conduct the holocaust, but it also reminded me that the U.S. Supreme Court had issued a decision (authored by the great jurist Oliver Wendell Holmes) upholding Virginia's statute imposing enforced sterilization of "the unfit".

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. --That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.
Declaration of Independence

It is taking a long, long time to get a government that does indeed secure a reasonable set of rights for all people, as the current battles over securing rights to health care and gay rights indicate, not to mention the battles over permissible interrogation techniques and the extension of rights to habeas corpus and trial by jury.

The "founding fathers" of the United States, due in part to the importance of Virginia among the original colonies, did not see freedom from slavery as a human right. Sharing the imperialistic ideas of their European peers, as a group they did not recognize the rights of Native American peoples to the lands that they had occupied for thousands of years. It was only on the occasion of the Civil War almost a century after the Declaration of Independence that slavery was abolished, and there is still a problem of involuntary servitude in the country that has not been totally stamped out. Tribal reservations seem to remain under pressure.

Who knows what rights our descendants will recognize, and how they will regard our failure go get our government to secure those rights now and for all!