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bdickens wrote:The Constitution doesn't give any rights.

Correct. It presupposes natural, or "God-given," rights to exist, and it enumerates those rights. But it does not grant them. There was even a rather significant debate between various founders as to whether or not a bill of rights ought to be included — one side arguing that to enumerate them would be to put them at risk because of government's natural tendency to violate them; and the other side arguing that if they were not enumerated, government would routinely violate them. But both sides of the argument understood that these rights exist; that they predate the existence of the Constitution; and that it would be the tendency of government to violate those rights.