Are inalienable rights ever certain?

On a planet ruled, often by whim, by kings, czars, emperors, ayatollahs, popes, sultans, rajas, caliphs and warlords, the very notion that "all men are created equal" and had "certain inalienable rights" such as "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness" was radical in the extreme.

That those populating a relatively tiny slice of the seemingly boundless and omnipotent British Empire should not only make that declaration but also risk their lives to defend it was even more bizarre. And yet that's what happened on July 4, 1776, profoundly altering the course of human history.

Yes, those signing the Declaration of Independence were an imperfect lot. They were all white men of property, many of them slaveholders, and their concept of political liberty pretty much began and ended with those of similar status. But they lit a fire that still burns 232 years later, even if "inalienable rights" is still a concept, rather than reality, in too much of the world.

We Americans, and especially we Californians, also continue to wrestle with defining individual rights in an era of cultural and economic complexity that the Founding Fathers could not have imagined. We constantly ask, and attempt to answer, whether limits should be placed on our right to pursue personal happiness when such pursuits discomfit others in a polyglot society with seemingly as many moral codes as fingerprints.

Just a few weeks ago, the California Supreme Court rocked the nation by declaring that same-sex couples had just as much right to have their unions legally recognized through marriage as opposite-sex couples.

For all their talk about human rights, the Founding Fathers, one is certain, would not have sanctioned gay marriage, but the court's decision is a logical extension of what they declared nearly a quarter-millennium ago.

By the same token, the U.S. Supreme Court finally declared that when many of those same men wrote into the Constitution an amendment guaranteeing the "right to bear arms," they meant it, no matter how many contemporary critics decry the wide ownership of firearms. A right is a right, whether it's to marry someone of one's choice or own and use firearms for sport or self-defense.

The same-sex marriage and gun ownership cases were flip sides of the tendency of those on the left or right to inhibit those on the other ideological side. We see it all the time in politics with the two major parties fixing the game through convoluted election laws, gerrymandered legislative districts and other devices to repress third-party movements or disenfranchise independent voters. We see it in the proliferation of "nanny bills" in the Legislature to dictate personal conduct deemed to be socially suspect or injurious, often on supposition without empirical evidence, such as California's new law on using cell phones in cars.

Just this week, the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals -- a court the right loves to hate, by the way -- declared that the free speech rights of anti-abortion demonstrators were violated when they were ordered to stop showing photos of aborted fetuses near a middle school in Southern California.

The graphic displays were "permitted until the students and drivers around the school reacted to it, at which point the speech was deemed disruptive and ordered stopped," Judge Harry Pregerson wrote. "This application of the statute raises serious First Amendment concerns."

The case illustrates the point that if individual rights are, indeed, inalienable they should not be abrogated simply because somebody in power doesn't like someone else's conduct. That's what happens in dictatorships, whether of the tin pot variety such as Zimbabwe or the world power variety such as China, where dissent is being rooted out and suppressed in preparation for the Olympic Games.

(E-mail Dan Walters at dwalters(at)sacbee.com)

(Distributed by Scripps Howard News Service, http://www.scrippsnews.com)