Human rights are indivisible and interdependent. Everything obviously depends upon the right to one's life; however, the right to one's life is inadequate if a person is enslaved or falsely imprisoned. And to be free is a cruel sham if one lives on the edge of starvation. Human rights need to be enjoyed in their entirety, as an indivisible and interdependent whole, in order that people may truly live the good life as human beings in a peaceful and just world.
In the United States, constitutional rights are those rights found in the federal Constitution. But not all constitutional rights are human rights and not all human rights are spelled out in the Constitution. Specifically, First Amendment rights and the prohibition against slavery are both human rights and constitutional rights. However, most of the other constitutional rights are procedural devices designed to enhance equality and the franchise and to protect life, liberty, and property. For example, habeas corpus and the right t the right to a trial by a jury of one's peers are not human rights; they are procedural safeguards for human rights.
Clearly, then, there are very few human rights--life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness--but they are basic to our ability to live as human beings. Basic to all is the right to one's life. The right to liberty includes liberty of the body--that is, freedom from slavery and false imprisonment-and liberty of the mind--that is, freedom of conscience, in spoken and written communications, and in association with others. The concept of ordered liberty adds the right to marry and to raise a family and educate one's children according to one's best lights. The pursuit of happiness includes the right to acquire and own property and the right to a minimum standard of living. In recent years, the right to privacy has been added to the short list of human rights.
How do we resolve the apparent conflict between unalienable rights and government by the consent of the governed? Self-government ultimately boils down to government by the majority of those voting. The issue is whether human rights can be abolished or abridged by a majority in Congress, a majority vote in a public referendum, or a supermajority through the process of amending the Constitution.
The philosophy, history, and Supreme Court decisions of the United States have consistently held that human ri9hts--including First Amendment rights--are not subject to a majority vote. Unalienable means unalienable. As Ralph Ketcham states in The Anti-Federalist Papers and the Constitutional Convention Debates: American political thought and experience after 1776 in fact highlighted a tension built into the Declaration of Independence which proclaimed in one clause that certain rights were "unalienable," and in another that "Governments ... derive their just powers from the consent of the governed." Rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness were not to be submitted to a vote or to depend on the outcome of elections; that is, not even the consent of the governed could legitimately abridge them. But it was nonetheless possible that the people, through their elected representatives, might sanction laws violating