6.1: The Difference Between Civil Rights and Civil Liberties

“Laws passed after years of untiring effort, guaranteeing married women certain rights of property, and mothers the custody of their children, have been repealed in states where we supposed all was safe. Thus have our most sacred rights been made the football of legislative caprice, proving that a power which grants as a privilege that what by nature is a right, may withhold the same as a penalty when deeming it necessary for its own perpetuation.”

—National Woman Suffrage Association in 1876 ⁽¹⁾

Americans are accustomed to using “civil rights” and “civil liberties” interchangeably. However, the terms have different meanings. Both civil rights and civil liberties ultimately originate from the idea of natural rights. In addition, mankind went through a civil liberties revolution between the Medieval period and the nineteenth century. We all continue to benefit from that revolution.

Civil Liberties

Your civil liberties are essentially your natural rights of life, liberty, and property translated into specific guarantees by the United States Constitution, especially the Bill of Rights and the due process clause of the Fourteenth Amendment, which says that no state may “deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law.” These guarantees were designed to protect each individual from the potentially abusive power of government. However, civil libertarians are growing increasingly concerned about the ability of large corporations to infringe on individual rights today.

The bulk of your civil liberty guarantees are located in the Bill of Rights. These include freedom of speech and the press, freedom of religion, freedom from unreasonable searches and seizures, procedural guarantees if you are accused of a crime, freedom from cruel and unusual punishment, and property rights. Some civil liberties protections are included in the body of the Constitution itself, including the privilege of

• habeas corpus, which literally means “you have the body,” and refers to a court ordering state or federal authorities to bring a detained person to the court and show cause for the detention or incarceration.
• bill of attainder is when a legislative body acts as a judicial body by passing a law that declares a person or a group guilty of a crime and punishes them. Congress and state legislatures are forbidden from doing that.
• Ex post facto means “after the fact.” This law declares an action illegal after it has already happened and subjects the person or group who did it to arrest and trial. It would also refer to a law that increased the penalty for a crime if the legislature tried to apply the stiffer penalty to those who committed the crime before the law was passed.

Civil Rights

In addition to life, liberty, and property, natural rights philosophers were concerned that individuals be treated equally. Of course, those very same philosophers had a fairly limited notion of “the people” for whom they sought equal treatment. The same is true for the Constitution’s framers, who did not concern themselves with equal treatment of women, men without property, and non-whites.

Our modern notion of civil rights—freedom from discriminatory treatment based on some characteristic—is tied in large part to the civil rights clause of the Fourteenth Amendment, which says that no state may “deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.” The verb “to discriminate,” in its generic sense, brings to mind someone who is making fine distinctions between two things that are otherwise similar. For instance, a wine connoisseur with a discriminating palate might be able to tell whether a German wine came from the Rhine Valley or the Mosel Valley. In the political arena, discrimination occurs when people—who are otherwise quite similar—are not receiving equal protection of the laws or equal access to liberties based on a characteristic such as their gender, race, religion, national origin, sexual orientation, age, or disability.

Civil Rights and Civil Liberties Issues

The presence or absence of discrimination determines if something is a civil rights or a civil liberties issue. Were a state to pass a law stripping all citizens of the right to possess firearms, that would be regarded as a civil liberties issue. If that same state passed a law forbidding African Americans from possessing firearms, then that would be a civil rights issue. In the latter case, a person’s freedom from government intrusion is contingent upon his race, which is an idea that is no longer constitutionally acceptable in the United States.

References

1. National Woman Suffrage Association, Declaration of the Rights of Women. July 4, 1876. In Timothy Patrick McCarthy and John McMillan, The Radical Reader: A Documentary History of the American Radical Tradition. New York: The New Press, 2003. Pages 191-195.
2. A. C. Grayling, Toward the Light of Liberty: The Struggle for Freedom and Rights That Made the Modern World. New York: Walker & Company, 2007.