By Douglas V. Gibbs
A car seat does not protect a child. That is not its job. Its job is to keep the child in place relative to the frame, so that in a collision the child does not become a projectile. The seat doesn’t give the child a body. It doesn’t grant the child the right to ride. It restrains motion, and it is bolted to something that will hold. A parent’s arms can protect a child. At forty miles an hour, the arms fail. That is the whole difference, and it is the difference between two words we use as though they were the same.
The Founders used the word secure. It appears twice in our founding documents, both times about rights: in the Declaration, “to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men,” and in the Preamble, “secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity.”
The word protect appears once in the entire Constitution, in Article IV, Section 4, and it is not about rights at all. It is about states. The United States “shall protect each of them against Invasion.” Legal bodies against an outside force. Not one word of the Constitution says government protects your rights.
The use of the word secure was no accident, and the sentence itself proves it. The Preamble’s fourth purpose is to “provide for the common Defence.” Its sixth is to “secure the Blessings of Liberty.” Two different words in one sentence. If securing were protecting, the sixth purpose would merely repeat the fourth. Men who counted words for four months in Philadelphia did not waste one.
So what does secure mean? The Latin is se and cura. Without care. To be secure is to be free from anxiety about a thing. Notice whose condition that describes. It is the state of the one who holds, not an action performed on the thing held. Security is rest.
Webster, in the 1828 dictionary, gives the senses plainly: to secure a debt by mortgage. To secure a creditor. To secure a door. To secure a rafter to a plate. Every one of them presupposes something already owed, already owned, already standing. You do not create a debt by securing it. You make certain of a debt someone already owes. And Webster’s own illustrative sentence is the argument in miniature: “Liberty and fixed laws secure to every citizen due protection of person and property.” Liberty and fixed laws. The laws are the restraint.
Now put that back into the Declaration, where the grammar is doing the work: men are “endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights,” and then, “to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men.” Endowed, then secure, then instituted. The order is the argument. The endowment is first because it is the source. Government arrives third, and arrives derived. Instituted, not creative, with powers “derived from the consent of the governed.”
Government holds a responsibility regarding our rights, but it does not own them. The day it begins to think it owns them is the day it can begin to repossess them.
This is why protect is the weaker word, and it is worth noticing that Blackstone used it. We could have used protect. His Commentaries say the aim of society is “to protect individuals in the enjoyment of those absolute rights, which were vested in them by the immutable laws of nature,” and that the view of human laws is to “explain, protect, and enforce.” Explain, protect, enforce. The vocabulary was right there. The American drafters of the Constitution reached past it. They decided to use the word secure, instead – for good reason.
They reached past it because protection implies a protector larger than the threat, and government is not larger than its own appetite. A government that protects your rights must be trusted to know what threatens them, and the standing temptation is to name itself the threat’s remedy and then to grow. A government that secures your rights is doing something more modest and more difficult: it is restraining itself, and then restraining you when you trespass on your neighbor. It investigates, it prosecutes, it judges; and otherwise it stays out of the way and lets you keep what was already yours.
Read the Constitution that way and it stops being a charter of programs and becomes a set of restraints on the restrainer. Enumerated powers. Separation. A Bill of Rights that says “Congress shall make no law,” “shall not be infringed,” and “shall not be violated.” None of that is protection language. All of it is security language.
And when the vocabulary shifts, the thing shifts with it. Nobody says secure anymore. We say access. Entitlement. Benefit. Program. Every one of those words locates the right in the dispenser rather than the possessor. What is accessed can be closed. What is a benefit can be reduced. What is granted can be withdrawn. And nobody has to argue about God to make it happen. They only have to change the verb.
The seat is bolted to the frame. The frame is the Constitution, and it was built to hold. The child was in the car before the seat was installed, and will be in it after the seat is replaced. The seat’s whole dignity is that it does not pretend to be the reason the child is there.
Secure the Blessings. Not protect them, not grant them, not define them. Hold them in place for the ones who already own them, and for their children after them.
— Political Pistachio Conservative News and Commentary
