I suppose you didn't do very well in high school civics. Clearly you don't have a grasp of what the word meant to the men who acknowledged those unalienable rights.
There is only one unalienable right and that is the right to be free from aggression. That is, you have a right to not have force initiated against you. The unalienable rights described by the founders all flow from this one unalienable right. When someone is murdered, someone else initiated force against their life. When someone is enslaved, someone else initiated force against their liberty, and theft is an initiation of force against someones personal property (the pursuit of happiness refers to property rights).
Capital punishment is a defensive force, but rather than aggression, it is a just and valid response to it. When we kill those who have been aggressors against us (murderers) we are not violating any unalienable right that they can claim. We are not violating their right to be free from aggressive force, rather we are protecting our own right to be free from that force. The punishment of the law is a response to aggressive force, not an initiation of it. Defense and punishment in proportion to the crime committed in no way violates an aggressors unalienable right to be free from the initiation of force.
Let me refresh your memory of highschool civics, if I may be permitted:
"Inalienable" (or "unalienable") is a term borrowed from English common law. Some property rights were alienable (they could be sold or granted) and some were inalienable (they could only be inherited according to fixed rule).
History
The idea that certain rights are inalienable was found in early Islamic law and jurisprudence, which denied a ruler
"the right to take away from his subjects certain rights which inhere in his or her person as a human being." Islamic rulers could not take away certain rights from their subjects on the basis that
"they become rights by reason of the fact that they are given to a subject by a law and from a source which no ruler can question or alter. These ideas may have influenced John Locke's concept of inalienable rights through his attendance of lectures given by Edward Pococke, a professor of Arabic studies.
In 17th-century England, philosopher John Locke discussed natural rights in his work, and identified them as being
"life, liberty, and estate (or property)", and argued that
such fundamental rights could not be surrendered in the social contract. These ideas were claimed as justification for the rebellion of the American colonies. As George Mason stated in his draft for the Virginia Declaration of Rights, "all men are born equally free," and hold
"certain inherent natural rights, of which they cannot, by any compact, deprive or divest their posterity."
The distinction between alienable and unalienable rights was introduced by Francis Hutcheson in his A System of Moral Philosophy (1755) based on the Reformation principle of the liberty of conscience.
One could not in fact give up the capacity for private judgment (e.g., about religious questions) regardless of any external contracts or oaths to religious or secular authorities so that right is "unalienable." In discussions of social contract theory,
"inalienable rights" were said to be those rights that could not be surrendered by citizens to the sovereign. Such rights were thought to be natural rights, independent of positive law. Natural rights date back at least to the Roman Empire, and were recognized during medieval times, but in this context are an element of the classical liberalism of the 18th and 19th centuries.
Classical Liberal thinkers reasoned that each man is endowed with rights, of which the rights to life, liberty and property were thought to be fundamental. However, they reasoned that in the natural state only the strongest could benefit from their rights. Each individual forms an implicit social contract, ceding his or her rights to the authority to protect his or her right from being abused. For this reason, almost all classical liberal thinkers, for example, accepted the death penalty and incarceration as necessary elements of government.
"Jefferson took his division of rights into alienable and unalienable from Hutcheson, who made the distinction popular and important."[4] In the The 1776 United States Declaration of Independence, Thomas Jefferson famously condensed this to:
"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable Rights. . ." This was changed to unalienable by John Adams at the time of printing the Declaration.
In the nineteenth century, the movement to abolish slavery seized this passage as a statement of constitutional principle, although the U.S. constitution recognized and protected slavery. As a lawyer, future Chief Justice Salmon P. Chase argued before the Supreme Court in the case of John Van Zandt, who had been charged with violating the Fugitive Slave Act, that:
"The law of the Creator, which invests every human being with an inalienable title to freedom, cannot be repealed by any interior law which asserts that man is property."
Many scholars now argue that the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution, enacted after the Civil War and the abolition of slavery, wrote the principles of equality and natural rights into the Constitution for the first time. However, it can also been argued that the axiom of inalienable rights was written into the Bill of Rights as the Ninth Amendment rights “retained by the people”.
Obviously, you are WRONG.
If you favor locking away criminals then you are just as guilty of violating their (in your view) unalienable rights as those who favor the death penalty because the right to be free is as unalienable as the right to live.
LMAO.
There is a difference between natural rights, personal rights and civil rights. From wiki:
Liberty
Liberty is divided into four types : natural, personal, civil and political.
The first two are inalienable, the latter two are government granted. Natural liberty is absolute freedom, limited only by the laws of nature. It is exercised upon one's private property or upon unclaimed property (anywhere else would be a trespass). Personal liberty is the right of locomotion, the freedom to travel upon public roads and waterways; limited only by the requirement to not infringe another's right to travel. Civil liberty is the permission from government to do that which would otherwise be a trespass, a tort or not allowed by law. A license to practice medicine is an example of a civil liberty (inflict injury without criminal liability). Political liberty is the permission to vote and hold office. In countries with socialist / communist governments that abolish private property rights, natural and personal liberty do not exist. Permission (license) is required for most activities and actions.
So, what type of right do you suppose is the state witholding from a convict as punishment for his crime, hmmm?
