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“The enumeration in the Constitution of certain rights shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.”
Other than life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness (which can be just about anything depending upon a person’s morality or lack thereof), the founders did not specify what these “other” rights are:
The House Select Committee, consisting of one representative from each state in the Union, reviewed and revised [James] Madison’s proposal [for the Ninth Amendment] until it gradually evolved into its present form. The debates in both houses of Congress add little to the original understanding of the Ninth Amendment. The Senate conducted its sessions in secret, and the House debates failed to offer a glimmer as to what unenumerated rights are protected by the Ninth Amendment, how such rights might be identified, or by what branch of government they should be enforced.1
In 2000, Harvard historian Bernard Bailyn gave a speech at the White House on the subject of the Ninth Amendment. He said the Ninth Amendment refers to “a universe of rights, possessed by the people – latent rights, still to be evoked and enacted into law … a reservoir of other, unenumerated rights that the people retain, which in time may be enacted into law.”2
According to the Preamble, it is the sovereign WE THE PEOPLE who “establish justice, ensure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty” for themselves and their posterity. According to the Declaration of Independence, it is also WE THE PEOPLE, through governments that derive their “powers from the consent of the governed,” by which these rights are secured. Consequently, under constitutional government, the people determine the unenumerated rights. The Ninth Amendment is inclusive of any and all rights, at any given time, claimed or allowed by a majority of the people – and sometimes by a minority.
These rights include natural rights, human rights, civil rights, political rights, and women’s rights. They also include the right to murder your unborn child, the right to commit sodomy, and the right to openly worship and promote gods other than Yahweh3 – to name just a few. (Actually, First and Second Commandment violations were made legal by the First Amendment. As such, the “right” to violate these Commandments is not unenumerated, but a constitutionally legislated right.)
Anyone who thinks this list of “rights” misrepresents Amendment 9 needs to consider that the Ninth Amendment was employed in Roe v. Wade to legalize infanticide:
In ROE V. WADE, the federal District Court for the Northern District of Texas ruled that a state law prohibiting Abortion in all instances except to save the life of the mother violated the right to privacy guaranteed by the Ninth Amendment (314 F. Supp. 1217 [1970]).4
Justice William O. Douglas … joined the majority opinion of the U.S. Supreme Court in Roe, which stated that a federally enforceable right to privacy, “whether it be founded in the Fourteenth Amendment’s concept of personal liberty and restrictions upon state action, as we feel it is, or, as the District Court determined, in the Ninth Amendment’s reservation of rights to the people, is broad enough to encompass a woman’s decision whether or not to terminate her pregnancy.”5
Former Assistant Attorney General under President Ronald Reagan, Stephen J. Markman substantiated that the Ninth Amendment has been used for some of the rights enumerated above:
Professor Thomas Grey of the Stanford Law School has suggested, for example, that the Ninth Amendment constitutes a “license to constitutional decisionmakers [sic] to look beyond the substantive commands of the constitutional text to protect fundamental rights not expressed therein.” Rights to abortion, contraception, homosexual behavior, and similar sexual privacy rights have already been imposed by judges detecting such rights in the Ninth Amendment.6
One often hears something to the effect that “our rights come from God, not from the state. Therefore, the state cannot take them away. What Uncle Sam gives, Uncle Sam can take away. But our nation’s birth certificate, the Declaration of Independence makes clear that our rights are unalienable because they come from God.”7 This sounds wonderful, but is it true? The state has certainly taken away the right to life of infants in their mother’s wombs? The state has incrementally taken away gun owner’s Second Amendment rights? The state has taken away the right to happiness, in particular the right to own property. Therefore, although many claim our “rights,” allegedly protected by the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, come from God, they are obviously mistaken. Rights come from the state, which the state can take away at its pleasure. As pointed out in Chapter 11, Yahweh’s law does not recognize rights, God-given or otherwise, but only God-given responsibilities:
The biblical concept of justice has more to do with shaping and encouraging social duties in protecting the weak, the poor, the widows, and the orphans, than it does with asserting the protecting individual rights or liberties. In other words, the underlying jurisprudence of the Bible is more based on principles of duty than on concepts of rights.8
In The Farmer Refuted, Alexander Hamilton so much as admitted that unalienable rights (what he described as “the sacred rights of mankind”) did not originate in the Bible:
The sacred rights of mankind are not to be rummaged for, among old parchments, or musty records. They are written, as with a sunbeam, in the whole volume of human nature….9
Hamilton quoted Blackstone’s Commentaries, in which Sir William Blackstone identified from where these “sacred rights of mankind” (what Blackstone depicted as “absolute rights”) originate:
…the principal aim of society is to protect individuals in the Enjoyment of those absolute rights, which were vested in them by the immutable laws of nature…. Hence it follows, that the first and primary end of human laws is to maintain and regulate these absolute rights of individuals.10
It is also evident that Blackstone (who was very influential upon the Constitutional framers) promoted government of, by, and for the people rather than of, by, and for Yahweh.
The theory of unalienable or natural rights can also be traced back to Age of Enlightenment and nature’s God. Neither nature’s God nor natural rights can be found anywhere in the Bible.
Deuteronomy 28 does not say that we have a natural, human, or civil right to the blessings enumerated therein, but instead that we will not receive the blessings unless we obey Yahweh our God:
And it shall come to pass, if thou shalt hearken diligently unto the voice of YHWH11 thy God, to observe and to do all his commandments which I command thee this day, that YHWH thy God will set thee on high above all nations of the earth: And all these blessings shall come on thee, and overtake thee, if thou shalt hearken unto the voice of YHWH thy God. (Deuteronomy 28:1-2)12
In other words, instead of endowing us with rights, Yahweh expects righteousness. People who demand their rights, like children, are focused on themselves. People who pursue righteousness are focused on Yahweh. The former promote a government of, by, and for the people; the latter promote a government of, by, and for Yahweh.
Rights without responsibilities amount to antinomian licentiousness, which Jude warned against:
Beloved, when I gave all diligence to write unto you of the common salvation, it was needful for me to write unto you, and exhort you that ye should earnestly contend for the faith which was once delivered unto the saints. For there are certain men crept in unawares, who were before of old ordained to this condemnation, ungodly men, turning the grace of our God into lasciviousness [licentiousness, NASB], and denying the only Lord God, and our Lord Jesus Christ. (Jude 1:3-4)
Licentiousness is the license to sin, and sin is a transgression of Yahweh’s law (1 John 3:4). Consequently, Jude is describing antinomians who turn the grace of God into a license, or right, to break Yahweh’s law. This is often the consequence of pursuing alleged rights instead of righteousness.
The “rights” already mentioned, along with so many other legal and yet immoral improprieties, can be traced back to the Constitution. Had the framers provided for a government established upon Yahweh’s perfect laws, the “rights” claimed by so many people, as provided by the Constitution, would be recognized and punished as crimes or moral aberrations.
Demanding rights is a confession of slavery to the one from whom those rights are petitioned. A right is a debt. Every United States citizen who looks to the Constitutional Republic to grant or recognize his rights is acknowledging the government’s sovereignty above Yahweh’s sovereignty:
The emphasis on human rights demands the rejection of Divine Revelation in favor of human legislation. Man thinks he is capable of legislating rights. Human legislation seeks to supplant God and make statutes in areas that only God can regulate. And the rule of iniquity is framed into law. The actual trade that is made in this deal is the exchange of true freedom for human bondage. This bondage is then called freedom…. Man’s fiat law is then made into an instrument of rights. Man is presumed to be sovereign instead of God in a doctrine of rights. Human rights is a false doctrine that seeks to make man the lord of all. The end result is the rule of rights rather than the rule of law.13
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End Notes
1. The Free Dictionary, “Ninth Amendment,” <http://legal-dictionary.thefreedictionary.com/9th+Amendment>.
2. Bernard Bailyn, Remarks at White House Millennium Evening, http://www.constitution.org/911/schol/pnur.htm, quoted in “Ninth Amendment to the United States Constitution,” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ninth_Amendment_to_the_United_States_Constitution>.
3. YHWH (most often pronounced Yahweh) is the English transliteration of the Tetragrammaton, the principal Hebrew name of the God of the Bible. For a more thorough explanation concerning the sacred names of God, “The Third Commandment” may be read online, or the book Thou shalt not take the name of YHWH thy God in vain may be ordered from Mission to Israel Ministries, PO Box 248, Scottsbluff, Nebraska 69363, for a suggested $4 donation.*
4. The Free Dictionary, “Ninth Amendment,” <http://legal-dictionary.thefreedictionary.com/9th+Amendment>.
5. Roe v. Wade, 410 U.S. 113, quoted in “Ninth Amendment to the United States Constitution,” <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ninth_Amendment_to_the_United_States_Constitution>.
6. Stephen J. Markman, “The Coming Constitutional Debate,” Imprimis (Hillsdale, MI: Hillsdale College, 2010) vol. 39, num. 4, p. 5.
7. David Gibbs, Jr., David Gibbs III, Understanding the Constitution: Ten Things Every Christian Should Know About the Supreme Law of the Land (Seminole, FL: Christian Law Association, 2006) p. 21.
8. John W. Welch, “Biblical Law in America: Historical Perspectives and Potentials for Reform,” 30 September 2002, <http://www.contra-mundum.org/essays/theonomy/WEL1.pdf>.
9. Alexander Hamilton, The Farmer Refuted, 23 February 1775, <http://press-pubs.uchicago.edu/founders/documents/v1ch3s5.html>.
10. Sir William Blackstone, “Of the Absolute Rights of Individuals,” Commentaries on the laws of England (New York: E. Duyckinck, G. Long, Collins & Hannay, Collins & Co, O.A. Roorbach, and John Grigg, 1828) vol. 1, p. 89.
11. Where the Tetragrammaton YHWH – the four Hebrew characters that represent the personal name of God – has been unlawfully rendered the LORD or GOD in English translations, I have taken the liberty to correct this error by inserting YHWH where appropriate. For a more thorough explanation concerning the sacred names of God, “The Third Commandment” may be read online, or the book Thou shalt not take the name of YHWH thy God in vain may be ordered from Mission to Israel Ministries, PO Box 248, Scottsbluff, Nebraska 69363, for a suggested $4 donation.*
12. All Scripture is quoted from the King James Version, unless otherwise noted. Portions of Scripture have been omitted for brevity. If you have questions regarding any passage, please open your Bible and study the text to ensure it has been properly used.
13. Dr. H. Rondel Rumburg, Foreword (21 February 1998) to Dr. Robert L. Dabney, Anti-Biblical Theories of Rights, which first appeared in the Presbyterian Quarterly, July 1888, (Hueytown, AL: Society for Biblical and Southern Studies, 1998) pp. 4-5.
*We are admonished in Matthew 10:8 “freely ye have received, freely give.” Although we have a suggested a price for our books, we do not sell them. In keeping with 2 Corinthians 9:7, this ministry is supported by freewill offerings. If you cannot afford the suggested price, inform us of your situation, and we will be pleased to provide you with whatever you need for whatever you can send.
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