Christopher Hitchens: Wrong on the Origin of Rights

In his analysis of the ongoing Henry Louis Gates embroglio, Christopher Hitchens makes a startling assertion (which Jason Kottke approvingly quotes). In defense of Prof. Gates, he writes (emphasis added) that

It is the U.S. Constitution, and not some competitive agglomeration of communities or constituencies, that makes a citizen the sovereign of his own home and privacy. There is absolutely no legal requirement to be polite in the defense of this right.

Superficially, this is quite correct. The Constitution does protect an individual’s right to free speech and the sanctity of his home.

But the Constitution is not, as Hitchens suggests, the origin of these rights. Even were they not mentioned in the Constitution, these rights would still exist: an individual would remain “the sovereign of his own home and privacy.” These “unalienable Rights” derive not from a simple document written by fallible men, but, as Thomas Jefferson put it, from “the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God.” And it is “we the people” that grant the Constitution its powers, not the other way around.

Hitchens is right to revere the Constitution and the rights it protects, but he must remember that the Founders crafted the document to protect the existing natural rights of individuals. To argue that the Constitution is what “makes a citizen…sovereign” is in fact to diminish these rights and make man not sovereign at all but just another subject.