Do Our Rights Come From God, or the Government?

Over the past few years, Fred Thompson, Glenn Beck and Sara Palin have saying something that I've been trying to figure out.

I'll paraphrase:

"Our rights come from God, not the Government.  Liberals will have you believe that rights come from Government, but that belief leads to tyranny, because Government can take those rights away."

This week during the conformation hearings for Supreme Court nominee Elena Kagan was asked if she felt the Second Amendment was one of the rights granted by God, or a mere Government-created right.

Well, how do we know that rights come from God? Which rights are these?   What is the source of this information???   The cited source is the Declaration of Independence, which begins:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.

We all like the sound of that, but since we're talking about the Declaration of Independence, not the Bible, where did the Founding Fathers get it?

Did it come from the Bible?   While I'm no Biblical scholar, I'll give it a try.   The First Amendment?   Well, Freedom of Speech is contradicted by at least three of the Ten Commandments.   Most Americans would consider taking the Lord's name in vain and dishonoring your parents to be covered by the First Amendment, even if such speech is rude or disrespectful.  Even lying is illegal only under oath and other specific circumstances, and legally protected free speech in all others.

And as Kagan was asked, what about the Second Amendment?   There may be something in the Bible about the right to defend one's self and family, but I don't think you'll find the distinction between legal arms like handguns and illegal arms like rocket-propelled grenades anywhere there.

And what about other rights written into the Constitution?   If I have an unalienable right granted by the Creator to travel from my home to Oregon and back without having to show citizenship documentation to authorities, did the Creator not also give me the same unalienable right when I visit British Columbia?

Wait, maybe the Founding Fathers were inspired by God when they wrote the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, in the same manner that Christians believe the authors of the Bible were.  Someone should ask Glenn Back or Mitt Romney if maybe Moroni helped write the Founding Documents a few decades before revealing the Golden Tablets to Joseph Smith.

Seriously, our rights are social constructs, which vary from culture to culture and over time.  What the Founding Fathers built was an ingenious multi-tiered system of laws ranging from local ordinances to State and Federal Laws, and finally the Constitution.  The Constitution and Bill of Rights are not from God, they are from men.   They are not "carved in stone," but can be altered through the amendment process spelled out in the Constitution itself.   The men who designed the Constitution wisely made the Amendment process very difficult  - so difficult that it has happened only sixteen times in the past 200 years.  Any proposed change to the Constitution should be so important that two thirds of the State legislatures will ratify it.  Even then, it is possible for something loony get get through, as the 18th (prohibition) and 23(repeal of) prove. 

The language in the Declaration of Independence was an example of people projecting their own ideas onto their image of God.   This was done to invoke a power higher than the authority of European monarchs.   The more modern notion that the rights in the US Constitution "come from God not Government" is one of those false truisms that seems true when people repeat it enough times, but has no factual, or even theoretical basis.  Or as Stephen Colbert would put it - it has "truthiness."

So the next time someone says "our Rights Come From God," ask them to back the claim up!