Yes, certain rights and freedoms should be restrained or even taken away given the appropriate circumstances. These circumstances, granted, are extreme, and should only be acted upon in cases where there is no other choice--liberty should be the ideal for which all of society strives in unison. That, however, cannot be achieved without the ability of the State to modify or restrict certain rights and freedoms for the good of the collective.
#1: A right is only as effective as one's ability to exercise that right. Equal Opportunity can only be achieved if thresholds and equalizing mediums are created and maintained so that those in the poorest and most disenfranchised groups of society can start climbing the ladder. If businesses are allowed to discriminate based on colour, sexuality, gender, and creed, you end up with a fractured society where the majority can bully the minority into silence or non-existence.
#2: Rights often overlap and conflict, and their extremes can cause bodily or mental harm, thus requiring quantifiable limitations on those rights. Which right is more important: The Right to Private Property, or Freedom of Religion? An atheist buys a bar and sticks a sign on it that says "no Bibles allowed." Who is in the wrong: The Christian who walks into that bar and practices his Freedom of Religion, or the Atheist who is practicing his right to Private Property? Does Religious Freedom extend to allowing adults to send their children out of country to Bible Camps in places like South Africa and Cuba, where they get viciously starved and abused against their will as pseudo-prisoners in foreign lands? Does Freedom of Speech extend to explaining, in detail, how to kill the President while he sits in the Oval Office, or in making threats of rape to a woman on the subway?
#3: Human Rights are a Human Invention, and can only be practically enforced by the State. Without the State--without Police, without Military, without the ability to enforce the rules of society forged in the bonds of Social Contract--you have no rights. Mother Nature doesn't care about your right to private property, animals will walk into it. Mother Nature doesn't care about your right to religious freedoms, she'll murder you while you're praying to God for help. The very State that is often spat upon is the very entity that creates, enshrines, and maintains the rights and freedoms that people practice every day.
#4: In times of great emergency, there has been justification to revoke rights and freedoms temporarily. During World War 2, we (the western democratic world) were facing an enemy like we had never seen before. The Fascists had no regard for the rights and freedoms we exercised every day and mass conscripted their own people to commit mass murder on a scale none had ever witnessed before. The Draft became a required evil that the State enforced against the male population in order to achieve a military strength significant enough to not only defend itself, but eventually to push back and defeat the very enemies that had sought to destroy our way of life. During mass riots and violence, in order to protect the civilian population, Martial Law has been invoked many times across Western Countries to great effect in ensuring that local populations were not harmed or killed by violent protesters or against terrorist threats. A specific example comes to mind in how Martial Law was declared in the 1970's by Canada to deal with the FLQ crisis.
#5: The Founding Fathers are not the most morally sound people to take advice on running a modern country from. The Founding Fathers never thought that any of you should get a vote. They thought that only white, land owning males should get the vote, because they honestly believed that the common population was too stupid to run its own affairs. They wrote about "liberty for all men" on paper and ink afforded to them by the labour of slaves. Thomas Jefferson cheated on his wife with one of his slaves for
years. When it came time for the first elections, after Washington, the very same people who worked together to defeat the British ran smear campaigns against each other in newspapers
they fucking owned that makes Trump look positively kind hearted and restrained in comparison.
Granted, these people were born in a very different time. They lived by very different rules in a very different country. I respect and admire them for what they are: Progress-makers, in a backwards time. Hell, they were surrounded by monarchies, and natives who scalped prisoners of war after raping the women--the fact that they came through with as many powerful human rights as they did is stunning. They are, by all rights, heroes. The Americans and the French paved the way for others to follow, and for that, I--as a Canadian, no less--will admire all the sacrifices and painstaking struggles these countries endured during their flirtations with enabling the common man to greater heights than ever before.
A new, raw country, with many great ideas, that eventually molded into a world superpower. However, even the Founding Fathers thought they maybe perhaps fucked up a bit with their original documentation and created a Bill of Rights that added not one, not two, but
ten amendments to the US Constitution--including the right to keep and bear arms, which Republicans are super duper fond of whenever they masturbate to the unrealistically perfect image they have for their Founding Fathers. After that, there was another 17 amendments added over the years, for a total of 27 amendments to the US Constitution.
The Founding Fathers made mistakes. They even knew that they made mistakes--mistakes they argued about how to fix. They're not perfect people, the laws they made are not perfect, the statements they made--however wise--are not always true. The only two truths in the world are taxes, and death, and not necessarily in that order. However, the Founding Fathers
knew they were not perfect, and admitted as such multiple times. They created a State that was capable of changing and adapting to the world around it, and as such, their original dream grew. The disdain for the common man changed when white men gained the right to vote, then all men, then women. Laws were made to ensure that the right to vote could not be taken away by majority bullies. Freedom of Expression was expanded upon, The Great Awakening saw the rebirth of Christianity--some crazier, some more chill--and this amazing country evolved over time to reflect the values and needs of its citizens of the time.
Change is necessary for survival. Change sometimes means adjusting how we look at Rights and Freedoms. The State is bound to the will of the people, and so long as it remains united in cause and purpose, no man--no matter how wealthy or cruel--can sap away the united power of the united people.
Which is why today is such a depressing state of affairs. So many groups, divided on so many petty lines. Stirred into identity politics, stirred into looking at each other not as Americans, but as blacks, or women, or white men. People scared of each other, instead of holding their government accountable for what it does in their name.
Liberty dies with the sound of a thousand voices, all selfish and fearful of one another.
tl;dr: I think I've made my points clear. Rights and Freedoms can be sacrificed for Security, given the right circumstances. This has been historically proven time and again. The problem is less security--because no government, no matter how tyrannical, can maintain power over the people if the people choose to reject it. The problem is rampant fear and hatred. The classic strategy of "divide and conquer" applied by the classes against the masses.
Also, the fetishizing of the Founding Fathers needs to stop. It's distorting history and their real accomplishments--and, more importantly, their real flaws and failures.
