Reply #19: In the purest sense, people are born as nothing more than biological life forms, yes?

[stopbush]

It's not a matter of "government" granting rights, its a matter of humans evolving to the point where a common consensus emerged that individual human beings have rights.

You could call it natural law in the sense that we humans are creatures of nature who have evolved to the point where we intellectually conceived of human rights. I have no problem with that. But I don't think that humans as a species have had "inalienable rights" from the get-go, ie: for the past 125,000 - 200,000 years that we have walked this planet. Do you?