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5: Civil Liberties

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    204106
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    Liberty is arguably the most cherished American value. It features prominently in our Declaration of Independence (“Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness”), our Constitution (“the Blessings of Liberty”), our Pledge of Allegiance (“liberty and justice for all”), and our National Anthem (“land of the free”). Both the tiniest copper pennies — LIBERTY has appeared on every U.S. coin minted since 1792 — and the giant copper statue watching over New York Harbor — whose official name is Liberty Enlightening the World — testify to its importance.

    Photograph of the Statue of Liberty in New York Harbor
    The Statue of Liberty guards New York Harbor, where she has stood since 1886.

    Liberty to Americans is more than just a word or symbol. We are fiercely protective of our liberties, also called freedoms or rights. A right is a privilege to which a person is entitled by virtue of who he or she is. Americans often refer to their rights as God-given, inalienable, or natural. Whether or not you believe these rights were actually given by God — “endowed by their Creator,” in the words of the Declaration of Independence — is beside the point, which is that these rights are not simply permissions granted by the government. If they were, the government could in principle revoke them whenever it wished. Rather, the rights we have are inherent in our nature as humans and citizens, which means the government cannot take them away from us without a very good reason.

    Rights are often controversial because they must be limited for society to function. If my rights to do things were unlimited, they would interfere with your rights to not have things done to you, and vice versa. As philosopher Zechariah Chafee put it, “Your right to swing your arms ends just where the other man’s nose begins.” To protect the rights we treasure most, the government must take away or restrict other rights that would interfere with them.

    The question of how much rights should be limited becomes especially contentious when applied to civil liberties. A civil liberty is a protection from government overreach so fundamental that it is considered essential to the functioning of a liberal democracy (liberal meaning “free” in this context). The United States aspires and purports to be a liberal democracy, so it must take care not to unnecessarily curtail the civil liberties of its citizens. But civil liberties, like all rights, are not absolute. Some curtailment will always be necessary, lest the country descend into anarchy.

    The Constitution does not always provide clear answers on the question of which civil liberties Americans have and how far they extend. As a result, America’s history of rights is a long and contested one, beginning before its independence and continuing to the present day. The rights afforded to American citizens have been expanded, contracted, refined, and redefined many times in the United States’ quest to determine how best to live up to its hallowed value of liberty.


    This page titled 5: Civil Liberties is shared under a CC BY-NC 4.0 license and was authored, remixed, and/or curated by Benjamin R. Kantack (Tekakwitha Press) via source content that was edited to the style and standards of the LibreTexts platform.

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