“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.” This is one of the most famous passages from the Declaration of Independence, written by Thomas Jefferson and aimed directly at the British government and King George III. At the time, in 1776, this was a very revolutionary idea, mainly because it was highly philosophical rather than realistic. While it was commonly embraced among intelligent free-thinking people of the late 18th century, today I mostly hear it from right-wingers who don’t seem to know what irony is, as well as very religious people who are most likely right-wing anyway.

The idea of God-given rights is fundamentally flawed because we don’t know if there’s a God to begin with. But let’s say, for the sake of argument, that the Christian God is real. The rights the Bible says you have are definitely not the same rights that are enshrined in the American Constitution. Take freedom of religion, for example. The freedom to not be a Christian (or a Jew) is in direct conflict with the Ten Commandments, which leave no room for dissent or free thought.

But let’s go back to a more secular perspective. Thomas Jefferson wrote that these unalienable rights are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, and that all men are created equal. However, he himself did not live by that philosophy. Like many of the Founding Fathers and early American leaders, Thomas Jefferson was a slaveholder. So, for all those American slaves, did they have a right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness? There is a lot of hypocrisy in government and throughout history, but this is definitely one of the clearest examples of irony. Despite how libertarians and right-wingers talk about the Founding Fathers, they were not Newton-level geniuses who were incapable of error. Some of them were much more wrong than they were right.

It is kind of ridiculous that some people believe the rights Americans have today are all God-given rights. Throughout history, we gained the right to have our own opinions, the right to practice whatever religion we want or no religion at all, the right to vote in free and fair elections, the right to enjoy alcoholic beverages after Prohibition was repealed, and so on. Most of these rights are actually very recent in human history. During the Middle Ages, for example, freedom of religion was especially dangerous in Europe, where you could easily be persecuted or executed simply for rejecting Jesus Christ.

I think the late, great comedian George Carlin said it best: rights aren’t rights if somebody can take them away. We just have temporarily existing privileges, and the list gets shorter and shorter, especially when Republicans are in government. If there truly is a right that nobody can take away, then we only really have one set, and that’s the right to death and taxes, just as Benjamin Franklin once famously said.