oddeye
Seriously, fuck Glenn Beck.

Hooper_X
Correction: The best thing he could ever do for humanity is to build a giant ark, gather all his followers together, and shoot them ALL into the fucking sun.

But that would be a collective effort, and everyone knows that shit is for commies. So encouraging them all to INDIVIDUALLY shoot themselves into the sun.

oddeye
The notion that my rights come from god is deeply offensive to me. I can't quite put my finger on why, it just wont sit right.

Hooper_X
Not from any god, but from Glenn Beck's god. Who is totally one of those vengeful fuckers who will give you hives and put a shitton of toads in your basement if you piss him off.

Hooper_X
Wait, no. I figured out why it's ridiculous - because how, then, am I supposed to know what my rights are, exactly? Ask a priest? At least if the gummit is telling me what rights I have, I KNOW WHAT RIGHTS I HAVE.

If all I have are the rights that are given to me by god, then I can pretty much claim anything I fucking want, and who are you to deny me? GOD GAVE ME THE RIGHT TO HAVE A BILLION GUNS AND MURDER QUEERS AND WHO ARE YOU TO TAKE AWAY THOSE RIGHTS?!?!?!?!?!? (note: he did not give me the right to educate myself. otherwise, i'd probably question the entire setup.)

Camonk
It won't sit right because it's a deeply vacuous claim, which is the whole point. The god stuff, the stuff with the chair is just a smoke screen for him saying, "Our government didn't give you the right to education. But the Soviets did AND THEY WERE EVIL RIGHT GUYS"

cognitivedissonance
God also gave me the right to own slaves.

The Great Hippo
If Glenn Beck believes that rights come from God, and Glenn Beck believes that terrorists do not have certain rights from God that the rest of us have, then Glenn Beck believes that he knows who God gives rights and who God doesn't.

Rights are rights; either everyone has them or everyone doesn't. We violate (not *remove*) your rights only as a function of protecting the rights of others. We kill so others won't be killed. There is nothing you can do to lose the right *not* to be killed, or *not* imprisoned--we violate it only as a means to prevent a *greater* number of violations. In discussions about human rights, this simple fact is often forgotten.

Whether or not our rights come from God is irrelevant. God isn't here telling us what our rights are. Our rights are our own to determine, as a collective whole. We can do that based on what guidelines we may think God has set forth for us, but to think that God laid out our rights in clear terms--and that any man has a monopoly on the interpretation of those terms--is stupid.

TLDR: Glenn Beck is that angry loudmouth crackpot uncle at your family reunion.

Meerkat
Glenn Beck makes a living by telling stupid people that they are not alone.

Randroid
"Please change the channel if this will... if this will offend you..."

BorrowedSolution
I think the whole concept of rights smacks of some sort of outside influence, be it a god or a government. We seem to forget that there must be some sort of mechanism that keeps humanity from spinning off into anarchy, or we wouldn't be here after thousands of generations before we even had the ability to write down such a thing as a law or a right. There's some very basic laws that I think are self-evident, and they all have fairly good regulatory systems, on a small scale.

There is always going to be a force of able-bodied peace-keepers in a given population. If the population is small enough (either by sheer lack of numbers or tight social groupings) a murderer, a thief, a cheating partner can't hide what they've done for long. Everybody finds out, and everybody deals with it, sometimes through the peace-keepers (ie. somebody loses their shit and starts going cut-crazy with a machete).

Why would they do the peace-keeping? Because they know everybody, and everybody knows them. Inaction in the face of a direct violation of the peace of the grouping would be construed as a crime unto itself. Humans know enough right to survive in the absence of a codified set of instructions.

And Glenn Beck's really just making the same mistake most of us do in assuming that without some sort of super or suprahuman entity is all that's keeping us going.

BorrowedSolution
*assuming that some sort of...
Kinda got turned around at the end, there.

pastorofmuppets
Maybe I was too young during Clinton to notice all of the far-right bellyaching. But I feel like the limit of acceptable craziness has moved really far in the last 5 years or so. Coulter used to be controversial, but in retrospect her main thing is silly name-calling. Malkin, otoh, is downright violent. If Billo ever shocked people, those days are over. But Beck consistently calls for the destruction of most US institutions (and with the flag waving behind him). And it seems like Rush used to be seen as more of a fringe guy than he is now.

The tea partiers claim to want is a government resembling the one we had close to 100 years ago. That in and of itself is not weird, but the fact that a large amount of Republican congressman are involved with it is.

pastorofmuppets
* congressmen

pastorofmuppets
He's saying (albeit in a very roundabout way) that we should call Russian dressing "freedom condiment."

pastorofmuppets
"Nature's God." Not "Glenn Beck's God" (who happens to be a polygamy-practicing deity called Elohim).

IrishWhiskey
Those rights specifically are "Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness". You can try walking into the court and demanding those rights be enforced based on the authority of God, but I don't think you're going to have much luck. There's a reason that the actual document we base our rights doesn't include that phrase.

fluffy
That requires knowing how to read, which requires getting an education, and his education makes him a SLAVE to the government so obviously he doesn't want to use that.