DEFINING RIGHTS

What is a right? I recently heard Bernie Sanders state that “health care is a right.” I have always found it so hard to wrap my head around the left’s perception of the definition of the word “right.” Health care is care, the word health describes the type of care but at the core, the idea seems to be that care, the performance of an act to be provided by others is something that everyone has a right to. So that makes compulsory, the providing of service from those who have the ability to provide it, regardless of free will or compensation. That is the definition of slavery. So, slavery is now a right.
Put simply, a right can not be defined as something someone else has to provide for you. A right is something you possess, not something that is provided by man. Our founding fathers were clear about our inalienable rights and credited them as being granted by our Creator. Clearly, they are not granted by man and cannot be taken away. The Bill of Rights was created to guarantee protection of those rights from being violated by other men, and man made institutions, particularly the government.
If health care were literally a right, then I could go in to a clinic and demand services and refuse to pay, and this would be legal.
Needs are not rights. I believe we are obligated as a society, particularly as a Christian, to do everything we can to address the needs of all people, particularly the poorest in our society. But how are we going to foster a society that is driven to be charitable if at the same time the message is we are entitled to what others have with no responsibility or obligation?
Food being a right might sound pretty good too but taken literally-if anyone bothers to consider the definitions of words anymore-that would mean that I can walk in to the grocery store and grab a pile of ribeye steaks and just walk out of the store. You simply can not prosecute someone for stealing something they own. A right is something you own, not something given or granted artificially. You have a right to free speech, it does not require a purchase nor someone else’s labor.
Further complicating things, those who claim these things as rights believe they should be able to restrict your right to free speech, and your right to practice your faith openly, claiming false interpretations of the constitution to support another peculiar right, the right to not be offended. Ironically, my practicing these rights requires nothing from man, government, or any institution.
Rights only exist as an acknowledgement of God, as do all morals and moral absolutes. In the purest form of true atheism, there are no rights. An atheist would have to give some sort of a basis for the existence of rights, and unfortunately “just because” is not adequate. With no moral absolutes, in an atheist world, you can just invent rights as you go, perhaps like the socialists perceived right to other people’s earnings, labor, and the product of other people’s labor, forgetting that the spicket will soon dry up when those “other people” become less than enthusiastic about producing other people’s “rights.”