Say what?
The right way to think about rights | The Heritage Foundation
The Constitution doesn’t grant us freedoms; it prohibits government from taking them.
Nearly all of us, at one time or another, refer to our “constitutional right to free speech.” While this common phrase may seem harmless, it points to a larger misunderstanding of where our rights come from — a misunderstanding that undermines many of our most fundamental policy debates.
The fact is, the U.S. Constitution protects our God-given rights from government. The government does not (as the phrase above implies) grant those rights to us as citizens. This is perhaps the most widely misunderstood aspect of our system of government.
Many people refer to this amendment, and their right to free speech, as though it is the First Amendment that grants them the right to say what they like. That is looking at it the wrong way.
Were the Constitution the granter of the right to free speech, religion, assembly and so forth, the First Amendment would not start out, “Congress shall make no law.” That part of the sentence clearly states that the government has no rightful authority over those things and is blocked from infringing upon them. This is the concept of negative rights.