Rights, real and imagined

My best liberal friend (there's a narrow superlative) has a sticker on his laptop that decrees "health care is a human right."

Well, let's leave aside the difference between care and coverage, which all too often eludes people on both sides of the aisle. Let's talk about rights.

This will shock pretty much anyone who is under the impression that the Supreme Court can invent- I'm sorry, "interpret" new rights any old time they please, but our actual Constitutional rights come from God. Human beings, per the Declaration of Independence, are "endowed by their Creator" with these rights, and "to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed." In other words, our Creator gave us rights, governments are there to protect those rights, and just governments only have the powers that the governed want them to.

Our Constitution is a protection of rights, not a grant of rights. This is a key distinction. Until the Supreme Court, in its infinite wisdom, decided that the right to legal counsel meant not that the government couldn't bar you from having a lawyer, but rather that the government had to provide you with a lawyer, our rights were protections from the government.

To put it another way; if you honestly think there's a Constitutional right to abortion, there's still no way you can compel anyone else to provide you with one. All it means is that the government can only place reasonable restrictions on your access. The right to keep and bear arms does not mean I can march down to Springfield and demand a taxpayer-funded assault rifle. The right to free speech does not mean that I get my own government-sponsored website.

Now we have an abortifacient mandate ("contraceptive" doesn't cover what this mandate does) in front of us. The government is claiming that free access to a made-up right (as if God would grant us the right to butcher the unborn in the womb) trumps an actual right - freedom of religion.

Nobody on the right, with the possible exception of one wealthy Santorum backer, is talking about outlawing contraceptives. We're talking about making people pay for their own contraceptives. Heaven forbid.

Why the hell are contraceptives even covered on health insurance? Insurance is a gamble, a bet that at some point you'll need treatment for something unexpected and expensive, like cancer. There's a pretty easy way to figure out if you're going to need contraceptives - they explained it back in middle school - and they're pretty damn cheap.