Live from Music Row Tuesday morning on The Tennessee Star Report with Michael Patrick Leahy – broadcast on Nashville’s Talk Radio 98.3 and 1510 WLAC weekdays from 5:00 a.m. to 8:00 a.m. – host Leahy welcomed official guest host Grant Henry in the studio for another edition of Grant’s Rants.
GRANT HENRY:
Do you all remember back in 2015 when Chris Cuomo said on a CNN broadcast that our rights do not come from God? They come from man, they come from government. Conservative media, constitutional scholars, and historians dragged his name through the mud for the weeks following.
How could Chris have gotten it so wrong? How could he be so obtuse? Was he maliciously misleading his audience or was he willfully ignorant? Had he never read the Declaration of Independence, where it clearly states that all men are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights?
Listen, one of the most fundamental, undeniable truths of our American version of governance is that our rights do not come from government. Our rights are given to us by God the Father, by virtue of our very existence.
Our own Andrew Jackson said that the Bible is the rock upon which our Republic rests. Unfortunately, some of our state legislators from the Republican Party have forgotten that simple lesson as easily as Chris Cuomo did.
Last week in Criminal Justice Committee, our legislature considered a marriage bill, House Bill 233. I’m sure you’ve heard quite a bit about it. The bill intends to recognize that our right to marry comes from God and not the government, and allows a man and woman the right to enter into a marital contract at common law.
House Bill 233 does not change anything about our current marriage laws or deny the rights of anyone. Nevertheless, in an attempt to kill the bill, a few legislators were essentially making the argument that the right to marry, a right as old as human history itself, is only available to us because the state of Tennessee allows it.
They think that the right to marry comes from the government. And in the great state of Tennessee, some of our legislators believe that you can only get married because they say so.
Ladies and gentlemen, that kind of political worldview is a toxic ideology that is directly opposed to what the Founding Fathers stood for. I’ll say it again: Our rights do not come from the government.
The Supreme Court recognized this in a case called Meister v. Moore, where it said, ‘Statutes in many of the states, it is true, regulate the mode of entering into a marriage contract, but they do not confer the right to marry.’
And going further, to say that marriage by contract constitutes a marriage at common law, there can be no doubt. Further, the Texas Supreme Court recognized this truth in the Grisby case when it stated, ‘Marriage was not originated by human law.
When God created Eve, she was a wife to Adam. They, then and there occupied the status of husband to wife and wife to husband. Now, listen, the truth is that civil government has grown out of marriage, which created homes and populations and a society from which government became necessary.
Government became necessary due to marriage, because of marriage. Government did not bestow the right to marry. Tennessee did not invent the institution of contract, nor the institution of marriage.
The rights and duties inherent in both institutions are part of our immemorial customary law. They are not so fragile as to depend for their existence on a license from the state.
Husbands and wives enjoyed a myriad of legal privileges long before states began issuing marriage licenses. The marriage license was not the source of those rights and there is no reason to believe that the privileges and immunities of marriages must dissolve if Tennessee decides to employ a different form of marriage recognition.
So one last time, never let anyone, whether it be the Democrat, Republican, Independent, or Green Party, tell you that our rights come from the government.
For, as Alexander Hamilton said, our rights are not to be rummaged for among old parchments or musty records. They are written with a sunbeam in the whole volume of human nature by the hand of Divinity Itself and can never be erased or obscured by moral power.
Listen to the interview:
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Tune in weekdays from 5:00 – 8:00 a.m. to The Tennessee Star Report with Michael Patrick Leahy on Talk Radio 98.3 FM WLAC 1510. Listen online at iHeart Radio.
