We Don’t Need More Rights—We Need to Defend the Ones We Already Have

Every few months, it seems like a new "right" is demanded: the right to housing, the right to healthcare, the right to a guaranteed income, the right to Wi-Fi. The list never ends—and neither does the assumption that the government has the power (and responsibility) to provide all of it.

These demands are often well-meaning. No one wants people to go hungry, be homeless, or suffer without care. But the minute we call every social need a "right," we've lost what a right is. Because for the government to give something to one person, it has to take something from another.

That's not freedom. That's not justice. And it's not what the Founders meant when they spoke of unalienable rights.

We are witnessing a dangerous shift: people now look to the government as the source of their rights instead of their protector. And as history has shown repeatedly, the moment the government becomes the grantor of rights, it also becomes the one that can take them away.

We use the word "right" so casually today that it almost loses meaning. However, as our founders defined it, a true right is something you are born with, not something the government creates or hands out.

A natural right doesn't require someone else to give up their time, money, or freedom. You have the right to speak, but you don't have the right to be provided a microphone. You have the right to worship, but not to have a taxpayer-funded church. You can defend yourself, but not with a government-supplied weapon.

Compare that to these so-called "new rights" being promoted today. A "right to housing" means someone has to build and maintain a home for you. A "right to healthcare" means someone has to treat you, pay for your treatment, or be forced to provide a service. That's not right—a mandate on someone else's labor.

At that point, it's not about rights at all. It's about entitlements disguised as liberty. And when "rights" come at the expense of others, they stop being rights and become tools of control.

While people march and lobby for new "rights," they seem blind to the fact that the most essential rights we already have are being stripped away—quietly, methodically, and often with public approval.

Freedom of speech is under assault like never before. It's not just censorship from big tech—it's government agencies colluding with platforms to suppress stories, silence critics, and label dissent as "misinformation." When the government pressures private companies to silence speech, that's not moderation—it's violating the First Amendment in spirit, if not in letter.

Many in power treat the Second Amendment—your right to defend yourself—like a nuisance. Every tragedy becomes an excuse to chip away at it further. They don't even hide it anymore: the goal isn't "sensible reform," it's disarmament by a thousand cuts.

Due process is no longer applied equally. Political opponents are raided, arrested, and tried in the court of media, while violent protesters and repeat offenders walk free. Justice is no longer impartial—it's partisan.

And then there's privacy—a right all but erased by warrantless surveillance, government data collection, and digital tracking. The Fourth Amendment still exists on paper, but when agencies can spy on you under national security or "public health," what good is it?

We're not losing our freedom all at once. We're giving it away—right now, while we're distracted chasing rights that were never ours.

The Constitution wasn't written to grant rights but to protect the rights we already have. The Founders believed those rights didn't come from government but from God. As Thomas Jefferson wrote in the Declaration of Independence, we are "endowed by our Creator with certain unalienable Rights."

They were crystal clear: government exists to secure those rights, not to redefine or replace them.

James Madison, the father of the Constitution, warned us of the government's natural tendency to expand its power. That's why he helped draft the Bill of Rights—not as a list of government-granted privileges but as a series of limits on what the government could do to the people.

Even Alexander Hamilton, who supported a strong federal government, wrote in Federalist No. 84 that listing rights was almost unnecessary because the Constitution limited the government's reach. He feared listing rights might one day give politicians the false idea that those were the only ones people had.

And yet today, people treat the Constitution like it's a suggestion—something that should bend with the culture or political trends of the moment. They call it a "living document," as if truth evolves with every election cycle.

But the Founders didn't build this country on shifting sand. They built it like a tree—deeply rooted in timeless truth, with branches meant to reach into the future. A living document changes with the wind, but a rooted one protects through the storm.

One of the most dangerous ideas in modern politics is that the Constitution is a "living document"—something that evolves with the times and is reinterpreted to fit the moods and movements of the moment.

It sounds harmless, even progressive. But in reality, the "living Constitution" mindset is a Trojan horse for limitless government power. If the meaning of the law can be stretched or redefined at will, then no right is secure, and no protection is permanent.

The Founders didn't embrace this idea. It would have horrified them. They understood that liberty required a stable foundation. If the government could reinterpret the Constitution whenever it was politically convenient, then the people would no longer be governed by law but by opinion, pressure, and power.

Rights are not supposed to change with the culture. They are supposed to anchor the culture, to remind us of what government can't do, no matter how popular an idea becomes.

A Constitution that "lives" in the way some people mean can also die—and when that happens, so do your freedoms.

The problem with these modern "rights" is that they don't protect freedom—they often destroy it. Every time the government creates a right that requires someone else to act, it must also restrict someone else's liberty to make it happen.

Take the idea of "hate speech" laws. Sounds noble on the surface, right? But once you grant the government power to decide what speech is "acceptable," you've just given it the power to silence any opinion it doesn't like. That's a direct attack on the First Amendment.

Or consider the "right to healthcare." To provide that right, someone else must be forced to work, pay, or comply—whether they want to or not. That infringes on personal choice, property rights, and the doctor-patient relationship. It's not compassion—it's coercion dressed up as virtue.

Even emergency powers—declared in the name of health, safety, or equality—have been used to override constitutional protections. During COVID-19, churches were closed while liquor stores stayed open. Protesters were praised in the streets while small business owners were punished for trying to stay afloat. And people still want to hand the government more control?

These so-called rights are often just political tools. They shift the definition of freedom from "government can't touch this" to "government must provide this"—and the moment you accept that, you're not free anymore. You're dependent.

Absolute freedom isn't a list of things the government hands you. You can do it when the government gets out of your way.

It looks like speaking your mind without fear of cancellation or surveillance.

It looks like defending your home and your family with the means to do so.

It looks like working, building, creating, worshiping, and raising your children without permission from bureaucrats who think they know better.

Freedom doesn't mean everything will be easy. It doesn't guarantee comfort or safety. It guarantees opportunity—and the right to own the consequences of your choices.

A genuinely free nation doesn't rely on politicians to fix every problem. It leans on families, communities, faith, charity, hard work, and personal responsibility. That's how America was built. And that's how it must be preserved.

The farther we drift from that vision, the more we trade freedom for dependency and the more power we give to those who want to control us in the name of "helping" us.

America doesn't need a new Constitution. It needs a generation bold enough to return to the one we already have and actually live by it.

We're not suffering because the Founders failed. We're suffering because we've ignored their warnings. We've let freedom become confused with comfort, and we've let government sell us dependency disguised as compassion.

It's time to stop pretending that the Constitution is outdated or flexible. It was never meant to evolve with cultural whims. It was built to resist them—to hold the line when everything else is shifting. It doesn't need to be rewritten; it needs to be re-read.

If we want to preserve what's left of our liberty, we don't need more laws, entitlements, or top-down control. We need to return to the foundational truth that rights come from God, not government, and that the role of government is to protect those rights, not manage our lives.

Because once we lose sight of that, we don't just lose freedom.

We lose America.