What are civil liberties? explain please.?

Question

What are civil liberties? explain please.?

Answer 1

Civil liberties, are freedoms that help protect ordinary people from government interference and allow the people to hold governments accountable to them.

So for example, the right to vote is in fact, a civil liberty. It allows ordinary people to have some control over who and who will not govern over them.

You could argue the right to bear arms is a civil liberty, since one could argue an armed population is harder for a government to exploit and control.

Other civil liberties include the right to assembly, the right to free speech, the right to a fair trial, and the right to privacy.

They are a treasured part of any democracy. They are not however a "liberal" idea. At least, they are not a "modern liberal" idea, they are more of a "classic liberal" idea. A classic liberal looks more like Ron Paul, and a modern liberal would look more like John Edwards.

I don't advocate either candidate, I just use those two to illustrate the difference.

Modern leftism often places the concept of social justice and the drive for utopia as having a higher value than civil liberty. In some cases the extreme right feel the same way, especially when it comes to social morality. Both extremes want the government to enforce standards, to bend civil liberties into the direction they feel is best for society as a whole.

An example of how both sides of the spectrum will distort civil liberties are:

1. The left condones laws that define how you can and cannot punish your own children, in your own home. An example of this is a law that bans "spanking" in your own home. Laws that allow the government to remove children from your own home and place them under government care, under the name of "stopping abuse" are often condoned by the left.

The left also condones laws that often censor or penalize video games and movies that contain content that the left find as offensive. They also condone laws that do not permit certain political parties to hold rallies, or advertise. They also condone laws that don't allow liquoir and cigarettes to advertise.

2. The right condones laws that often prohibit social behavior. In particular the right often wishes to prohibit same-s*x marriage, prohibit the consumption of drugs/liquour and will often condone the suspension of civil liberties in the name of 'security'. You will often see the right condoning wire taps, and other government "snooping" to help allegedly improve the security of the country.

You might think the left and right are correct. You might think some civil liberties wish to be suspended to keep a country safe, moral or vigilant against child abuse and racism.

That's the beauty of a democratic country, that we can barter and legislate how much civil liberty we want, and how much we are willing to give away, via the electoral process.

However, at some point, it becomes very hard to get certain civil liberties back, and in general once you suspend the right to a fair trial and the vote, you seldom - if ever - get them back.

Answer 2

Those are things liberals claim to have lost under GW Bush.

(Gaffaw-Gaffaw )

Answer 3

Rights not explicitly mentioned in the Constitution like freedom of association and equal rights and relating to common interactions.

  Those opposed to civil rights tried to argue that because they weren't spelled out in the constitution, that the local and state governments didn't have to enforce them.  The problem was that most rights are logically infered by others that ARE in the constitution and the fact that the constitution also states what the government CAN do but unmerited discrimination is NOT one of them.

that's the difference between civil rights and  constitutional rights.