Rights And Beliefs

That may sound like double-talk, but what we call rights in our democracy comes with a kind of fence around them. Think of a sports field with boundary lines. A penalty is usually attached to an act if you go out of bounds or violate the law. The rights guaranteed by our Constitution are no different.

For instance, you may believe that Trump is the second coming; that is your right. You can blast your opinion all over social media, hang banners from the eves of your house, print flyers, and hand them out to people on the street. Or mount a soapbox and belt out your message to anyone who will listen.

What you can’t do is accost people on the street. You can’t block their path and try to force them to take one of your flyers. That constitutes assault, or at minimum, a public nuisance, which can land you in the slammer.

You can't scream obscenities at people from your soapbox or scare little kids with your angry outbursts. Once again, you’ve become a public nuisance. 

A nuisance is a problem created by someone else that negatively affects one or more people. When a nuisance unreasonably interferes with the public right to property or freedom of movement, it can qualify as a public nuisance.

You are entitled to hold any opinion your little heart desires, but there are limits to how you can try to coerce others into believing as you do. You do not have the right to force them to hear your message or agree with them.

And rights can change over time as our society evolves. There was a time in our not-too-distant past when you did not have the right to marry someone of a different race. More specifically, people of African descent.

Centuries before the same-sex marriage movement, our colonial predecessors tackled the controversial issue of “miscegenation,” or mixture of races. The Deep South banned interracial marriages until 1967; other states did the same. California, for example, prohibited these marriages until 1948. Politicians made three brazen attempts to ban interracial marriages nationally by amending the U.S. Constitution.

Maryland passed the first British colonial law banning marriage between White people and Black people—a law that, among other things, ordered the enslavement of White women who had married Black men.

Most anti-miscegenation laws targeted interracial marriages between White people and Black people or White people and American Indians. 

The climate of anti-Asian xenophobia that defined the early decades of the 20th century meant that Asian Americans were also targeted. The Cable Act retroactively stripped the citizenship of any U.S. citizen who married “an alien ineligible for citizenship,” which—under the racial quota system of the time—primarily meant Asian Americans.

Even today, not everyone agrees with some of the rights that have been established, but it is now the law of the land. The problem we face today is the dismantling of civil liberties under the Trump administration. 

Trump and his crime family from Project 2025 are hellbent on ending human rights, or at least the ones they don’t personally like or believe in. This is where they are trying to equate beliefs and rights. They feel they have the right to tell the rest of us what we can do and who we are.

With the flourish of his Sharpie and issuing Presidential Executive Orders, Trump is declaring that his personal beliefs and those of the other extreme-right-wing, mainly White conservative religious people in his inner circle override civil liberties. These human rights have been established over decades of hard-fought debate and legislation.

With their attacks on the DEI initiatives, Trump and his ilk are saying that inclusion is optional, equality is negotiable, and discrimination is permissible, so long as you call it “deregulation.” The struggle for human rights is almost as long as the history of humans. This is the latest fight for human rights of people who have historicallly been discriminated against.

What is the litmus test for human rights? Does it help people who are being oppressed, and by helping those people, are we hurting other people? Not “Are we hurting their feelings or bumping into their beliefs, but are we physically threatening them in any way?”

In summary, beliefs are not rights. They can be if a majority of people want that, and legislation is enacted. You may not believe that individuals are confused about their sexuality, but you have no right to deny them their beliefs and feelings. You may not believe in a woman’s right to choose or reject motherhood, but it is not your right to restrict her healthcare.