More Thinking About The Superstition Of "State Rights"

IT MIGHT BE A  useful exercise to go over one of the better thought out arguments about rights, where they come from, what those are and the relationship between rights which inhere to living, natural beings, in this case People, and the state, governments, the artificial entities which People form for their own purposes into which future generations just happen to be born, like it or not.  That argument was made in the beginning of the Declaration of Independence, the thing which declared the state that would become the United States of America.

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.--

I am certain that Jefferson, Adams, Franklin, Sherman and Livingston would like to have credited "nature" with endowing "all men" with equality and "certain unalienable Rights" they were good enough at reasoning to know that there is nothing in nature they could credibly assert does that.  Nor do I think it's possible to articulate a claim that such rights are real except as an endowment from God.

I will note that in their argument they place among the self-evident axioms on which the freedom they assert is founded, they found it necessary to place equality before rights.  No one would have any reason to find any assertion of such rights credible on an unequal basis, not for any good purpose.  This was at the most idealistic phase of the founding of the United States, when they were trying to appeal to the largest number of people so they had to give everyone a stake in it.  While they almost as soon as they obtained power for themselves pulled the rug out from under equality, that is the unpaid promissory note that The Reverend Martin Luther King jr. called for payment on and which has yet to be honored.  Without that equality, nothing else that follows is anything anyone needs to accept, including the rights of the privileged to form a state that would serve their purposes.

I would further note that it is on the basis of these individual, endowed rights that their argument for forming a new state rests, claiming that only through the "just consent of the governed" does any state obtain or retain legitimacy.  The state does not have the rights, the People have those.  As they continue:

That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, --

Remember, this is a reasoned argument for throwing off the old state which claimed to rule by right, law, custom, etc. and forming a new state that never existed before it was formed. If states have rights, then there would be no rights for the new state, any such "right" would belong to the existing state.  The same would be true of any place where a new state is declared or formed.   You have to believe in magic to believe that any real entity to be that "right" could magically inhere to a new state, that it would have to come into being with that new state.   Which would be to deny the reality of rights as a real thing.

That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. 

This is a very good argument that the only legitimacy that a government has is to serve The People and to serve their rights but to mistake that legitimacy for a "state right" starts out by being absurd and, as in Nazi Germany,  the USSR, etc. inevitably puts the "state rights" over those of The People.  It think that's happened long enough and often enough that it would be as close as one of the social sciences can come to making a scientific law, that whenever People widely believe that artificial entities, states, corporations, organizations, syndicates, ideological or religious sects have rights that that superstition will be destructive of real Peoples' lives and real Peoples' real rights.  It has happened in the United States when "states rights" were used to enslave, oppress, murder and steal from minorities and even majorities living under corrupt state governments.  Absurdly, though the slave holding Confederacy asserted the "rights" of individual states, it forbade any state in that abominable state to abolish slavery sometime in the future.   Once you go down that road moral integrity goes first but intellectual integrity will have to soon follow it into oblivion.  

The argument, taken to its logical destination and the goal of the signatories of the Declaration, based on those antecedent arguments the logical conclusion is that, far from the state having rights, they can be thrown over and abolished entirely.  You have to wonder where the "state's rights" go when that happens, and if they are destroyed in the process, they couldn't possibly have been real to start with.

Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.--Such has been the patient sufferance of these Colonies; and such is now the necessity which constrains them to alter their former Systems of Government. The history of the present King of Great Britain is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute Tyranny over these States. To prove this, let Facts be submitted to a candid world.

When states were embodied in the person of a monarch, many of whom, around the world, have claimed to rule by divine right, it was easy to see the folly of the claim that such a state has rights to do what it does or even to stay in existence.  One of the wisest and most self-evident of truths as to the folly of that kind of state, maybe the first in the history of the human species, is contained in the First Book of Samuel, the warning God tells Samuel to give to The Children of Israel, when they ask him to anoint their first king for them:

¹⁰ Samuel told the people who were asking him for a king everything that the Lord had said to him. ¹¹ “This is how your king will treat you,” Samuel explained. “He will make soldiers of your sons; some of them will serve in his war chariots, others in his cavalry, and others will run before his chariots. ¹² He will make some of them officers in charge of a thousand men, and others in charge of fifty men. Your sons will have to plow his fields, harvest his crops, and make his weapons and the equipment for his chariots. ¹³ Your daughters will have to make perfumes for him and work as his cooks and his bakers. ¹⁴ He will take your best fields, vineyards, and olive groves, and give them to his officials. ¹⁵ He will take a tenth of your grain and of your grapes for his court officers and other officials. ¹⁶ He will take your servants and your best cattle^[a] and donkeys, and make them work for him. ¹⁷ He will take a tenth of your flocks. And you yourselves will become his slaves. ¹⁸ When that time comes, you will complain bitterly because of your king, whom you yourselves chose, but the Lord will not listen to your complaints.”

¹⁹ The people paid no attention to Samuel, but said, “No! We want a king, ²⁰ so that we will be like other nations, with our own king to rule us and to lead us out to war and to fight our battles.” ²¹ Samuel listened to everything they said and then went and told it to the Lord. ²² The Lord answered, “Do what they want and give them a king.” Then Samuel told all the men of Israel to go back home.

So many things could be pointed out in that, the first is that, though slavery under the Mosaic Law was far less terrible and enduring than slavery in the American South, it was still a moral failing, perhaps the origin of the Children of Israel's troubles that led to them wanting a king who would, as warned, enslave them.  

The second is that despite the warning FROM GOD THROUGH HIS PROPHET SAMUEL, God honors the right of The People to make that decision for themselves, something I doubt any of the classical gods would do to anyone they care about.   Just as God leaves it to us to reap what we sow in choosing  liars, crooks, gangsters and thugs [CELEBRITIES!]in our elections. Just as the series of rotten kings and the disasters they brought was as a result of their right to choose, our rotten governments, especially in "red states" is a result of our immoral exercise of our rights.   It's not as if we didn't get a warning.  Jesus, in his parable that I've discussed here recently, told the rich man that the destitute, disempowered man, Lazaraus would rest with Father Abraham but he and his brothers got The Law of Moses to warn them, that was the warning they got.  Maybe we should take that as filtered through 1 Samuel 8 because I think it's more apt for today.  

I'd trust that a lot more than I'd trust anything that has ever come out of the Supreme Court, even in its best and all to brief period of lesser depravity.  Even a lot of the "rights" rulings made by the Warren Court led to the depravity that we have now because they endowed lies and the liars who tell them with "rights" of "free speech" because of "The First Amendment" and that right is getting us mowed down by Covid now.   God gave The People the right to make a bad choice, no where in the Bible do I see any place where it makes lying a right, our courts have done that on the basis of secular rationalism. 

We fucked it up by our ill considered blather about "rights" Just as Samuel warned, God isn't going to fix it for us.  He gave us the right to do that, ourselves.  God didn't endow a king with a right to rule, God didn't make the state, it has no right to exist as would be proven when later prophets comment on the catastrophic late stage of the kings in that line and their ultimate dissolution along with the nation of Israel due to injustice and a corrupt, unjust state.  That prophetic tradition is a glory that no other tradition I'm aware of has.