Redneck
"society's rights are important as well"
This statement is flawed. Broken, actually.
Groups -- especially fuzzily described groups -- do not have rights
as a group.
Now, I understand that there are arguable exceptions to this, but "society" doesn't have rights.
Individuals have rights. Society only "has rights" as a function of the rights of its individual members.
A
specific grouping -- a unit, platoon, congregation, company staff, or the citizens of Ohio, only have rights as the aggregate expression of the rights of its members.
Right to life. A group doesn't have to right to life, its members do. Right to free speech. A mob doesn't have this right. Individuals do.
It's easy to attempt to confer individual rights upon a group, but it's only possible within narrow boundaries. "Mankind" doesn't have the right to own a gun, each individual man does.
"Mankind" only has the "right to survive" to the degree that individual men have the duty to ensure its survival. Wolves and lions and bears and cockroaches acknowledge no such right of humanity.
The "rights" of man are only valid to the degree they are acknowledged and sanctified by men.
When you begin to arbitrarily assign "rights" to blobs and globs of people, you impose tyranny to a greater or lesser degree on individuals.
I am a Big-Endian. I declare that all Big-Endians have the right to open the big end of a boiled egg rather than the little end. It shall be an offense against Big-Endians to be caused to witness the opening of an egg by its smaller end. Violators shall be prosecuted. (Apologies to Jonathan Swift.)
So then you carve up "society" into little sub-groups: blacks, natives, gays, women, Zoroastrians, Buddhists, farmers, urbans, and "immigrants." And you assign special rights, like the "right" not to hear a specific word, the "right" to have a special prayer moment in school, the "right" to a special holiday, and so on.
And every "right" granted to the group infringes the rights of individuals.
Did you catch that subtle mistake above? ". . . every right
granted to . . ."
Every right GRANTED??
There's where it breaks. "Society" only has "rights" when a body superior to it "grants" them. And what's superior to society? Why, government, of course.
Natural rights are not granted. They can be acknowledged, protected, guarded, and enshrined, but not granted.
Once you admit of the possibility that government "grants" rights, you've bought the tyranny package.
Society is a construct, not a natural entity.
Society, thus, has no inherent natural rights.
Individuals have natural rights.
An individual's rights protect him from society's impulse to enforce conformity, to subsume the identities of its members into its own "greater identity," to subordinate the individual to the "greater good" of the whole.
Oh, gosh. This has turned into something of a rant. Sorry about that.
One final thing. In a nutshell:
Rights cannot be granted, only guarded.