Rights are not bestowed, not even by kings. Rights are asserted, not given. Rights come from human nature, not divine nature. Most of all, natural law is a product of “liberal and expanded thought,” not of divine revelation. In the draft language of the Declaration that condemned the “Christian king,” Jefferson wrote that violations of natural law, such as slavery, are not violations of divine law; rather, they amount to “cruel war against human nature itself, violating its most sacred rights of life & liberty.”32 In the Declaration, Jefferson appealed to a natural law founded in human nature
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