We Do Not Protect Individual Rights On Our Own
Most of us believe we have rights, as individuals.  Many of us even agree on a specific list of rights we all share, just by virture of being an individual, a person, human.  We call these human rights.  If you are interested in examining for yourself a few of the most important specific statements describing what these rights are, see the final portion of this post.

As a heterosexual, white, male American the defense of my individual rights sits in perhaps the most priviledged position on the planet, with the world's most powerful public and private forces able to mobilize nearly inexhaustable resources in defense of my political, economic, and cultural rights.  So, this guy's poster caught my eye today.

When we say these are human rights we mean that these are universal.  And when we look back on our founding fathers critically and note they excluded some humans on the basis of race and gender and wealth and religious affiliation, we are expressing this global committment to the universality of these shared values.  Sometimes we forget that this is what we mean by individual human rights...and the importance of both achieving and perserving the agreement that these are the rights we all share.

Because our failure to protect these rights for all individuals, all the members of one human family, is not only a moral failure to help our neighbors; it is a threat to our own families and communities as well.

This is what Dr. King meant when he said that 'injustice anywhere is threat to justice everywhere.'  It is what Jesus meant by 'love your neighbors as yourself,' explicitly including within that call to 'love our enemies,' because we are all children of god.

One widely supported list of human rights can be found in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.  This expression of a common list of shared values was achieved through multi-national deliberations and adopted in 1948 in response to the atrocities of WWII.  It has been translated into 406 languages. In 1948 forty-eight nations stood together behind these values.  None opposed.  Eight nations abstained; six of these nations within the former Soviet Republic, the seventh Saudi Arabia, and the eighth from apartheid imprisoned South Africa.

The basic idea here is the same at the idea expressed in our Declaration of Independence: we are each entitled to these rights by virtue of being alive...these are inalienable rights, meaning that to deny these rights is the equivalent to denying an indvidual like you or me our humanity, our existence, our lives and liberty.  And you cannot fully understand this document without also reading the Seneca Falls Declaration.

FDR's famous 1941 'Four Freedoms' radio address is another statement of the basic freedoms we all share that is worth revisiting from time to time.  You might also want to read the specific list contained in the US Bill of Rights, which make up the first ten amendments to the US Constitution.

Reading the specific descriptions is important, but to fully understand these we need to examine what they mean, how this meaning is negotiated and struggled over today and over time, and ongoing challenges to preserving (or expanding) these as expressions of a universal set of human values.  But reading the specific descriptions is a very good start.