Who Owns Our Rights?

The religious claim that a God owns our rights (top-down). Secular opinions on rights essentially hold that they come from the people (bottom-up) in a social contract that fosters maximum human flourishing (link). The US Constitution is a secular document, with a clear separation of government and religion (link). 

Many conservatives claim that there are no rights not explicitly enumerated in the US Constitution, as can be seen in the recent Dobbs abortion ruling: unwritten rights should be recognized only if they were "deeply rooted in this Nation’s history and tradition" and "implicit in the concept of ordered liberty". However, this approach effectively freezes an 18th- or 19th-century understanding of rights in place. The Obergefell case in 2015 not only made marriage equality the law of the land and transformed tradition's role in discerning unwritten rights but that the court rejected the idea that the rights inquiry could be “reduced to any formula.” It instead embraced an approach that “respects our history and learns from it without allowing the past alone to rule the present” (link). Essentially, the Originalistic view of the US Constitution (link) has been debunked.

Click on the link below for a brief video showing clearly that the 9th Amendment to the US Constitution (in the Bill of RIGHTS!) supports the claim that the federal government doesn’t own the rights that are not listed in the Constitution, instead, they belong to the people, thus supporting the precedence leading up to Roe v. Wade:

The Constitution and Marriage