Author: Tony Perkins, The Patriot Post

“Human rights” is a popular term. No one really thinks it’s a bad thing. That’s why even North Korea and China try to justify their behavior in terms of human rights. If one can claim this mantle, they are nearly unassailable.

Hence the many groups and international organizations trying to cloak their policy and advocacy goals in terms of human rights. Likewise, if they can frame their policy goals in this way, they’ve claimed the moral high ground. For decades, they’ve been successful in doing so. But this doesn’t mean they are correct.

The genesis of human rights goes back centuries, and is uniquely religious — and Christian — in origin. Indeed, how can the notion of rights that belong to all human beings and bind all governments have legitimacy except through appeal to a higher authority?

Reforming and re-grounding such rights is exactly what Secretary Pompeo and the Trump administration’s State Department hope to accomplish through the Commission on Unalienable Rights — which held its first public hearing Wednesday.

As Secretary Pompeo observed when appearing with me Wednesday on Washington Watch, “what we’re hoping to do is to take this idea of rights, which sometimes becomes confusing or turns into simply personal or political preferences, and reground it — reground it in the history and tradition of the United States so that we are moored to something more than someone’s fancy of the moment and we come to understand that these incredible cherished, fundamental rights are at the very core of the American experience.”

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