Only two remain

It seems not long ago there about a dozen senators whose entry into the body was before I was paying attention. Well, Biden's still in office, but not that office. I think Inouye and Leahy are the only senators whose predecessors I don't remember.

Debate on political fundamentals

I recently re-joined a historical fantasy baseball site, in part because I miss the forum. Both the baseball topics and the often political off-topic board. It keeps me sharp to have to answer reasonably intelligent and honest people who have serious misconceptions about liberalism.

Someone posted

How many in the left will stand up and agree that our rights as men are endowed by their Creator and that it is only governments role to secure these rights to us?

I responded

"By their creator" was a term of art that quite consciously allowed one to see nature or (as Jefferson himself believed) an absent God indistinguishable from nature as that creator. The purpose of the whole statement, character of the creator notwithstanding, is to say that these rights exist at a more fundamental level than any government, rather than being granted by a government that happens to choose to grant them.

I know many liberals who would say that the rights are endowed by the kind of Creator I suspect you are asking about. I am not among them. But I fully subscribe to the statement as Jefferson wrote and intended it.

And later in the discussion, I continued

I think Dan is playing cutesy, slipping by "only role" as part of another argument. IMO, some of our inherent rights are already infringed when we move from a hunter-gatherer society to one with titled land. It is among government's roles to mitigate that as best it can, though no solution will be perfect, and abolishing civilization to return us to a state of nature is neither desirable (by a long shot) nor possible.