The Maryland General Assembly is considering overriding Governor Hogan's common sense veto of a bill that would provide CURRENT felons with voting privileges. In Maryland, convicted felons who have COMPLETED the terms of their sentence and release can have their voting privileges restored. The General Assembly is seeking to allow CURRENT felons, who have not yet completed their sentence, the ability to vote.
Do you support providing CURRENT felons, including those on parole and who have not completed their sentences, with voting privileges?
To take the survey click HERE
14 comments:
No matter what they are still citizens of the US and have the right to vote.
12:57 They lost that right when they committed their crimes, Democrat.
Some rights are temporarily (or permanently) suspended when a person is incarcerated for a felony crime, like keeping and bearing arms, freedom of assembly, etc.
Anonymous said...
12:57 They lost that right when they committed their crimes, Democrat.
February 1, 2016 at 2:57 PM
Exactly!
Anonymous said...
No matter what they are still citizens of the US and have the right to vote.
February 1, 2016 at 12:57 PM
Are you serious!! You are too dumb to vote!! I hope you are the victim of a serious crime some time soon!
If it is a right, it cannot be taken away. A privilege can be taken away. When someone has completed their "debt to society" all rights should be restored. Excluding perhaps murderers, that should include 2nd amendment rights.
It is a natural right, not one given by the gov't or the constitution, but from our creator.
Felons, upon serving their sentence, and no longer on parole or probation, should be able to petition (free) for restoration of their voting privilege. Also would stipulate that if they got an early release opportunity to petition would come after the original sentence would have ended.
Don't do the crime if you can't do the time. That includes loss of RIGHTS...not privileges. TFB.
@ Unknown 12:35 AM
How can a right be a natural right when the right is part of something that was created by man?
Sand Box John
How can a right be a natural right when the right is part of something that was created by man?
Sand Box John
February 2, 2016 at 8:29 AM
Your thinking is incorrect. Certain rights came from our creator (God). Right to life and the defense of life is one of them.
The idea that certain rights are natural or inalienable also has a history dating back at least to the Stoics of late Antiquity and Catholic law of the early Middle Ages, and descending through the Protestant Reformation and the Age of Enlightenment to today.
The existence of natural rights has been asserted by different individuals on different premises, such as a priori philosophical reasoning or religious principles. For example, Immanuel Kant claimed to derive natural rights through reason alone. The United States Declaration of Independence, meanwhile, is based upon the "self-evident" truth that "all men are ... endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights".[7]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_and_legal_rights
Locke wrote that all individuals are equal in the sense that they are born with certain "inalienable" natural rights. That is, rights that are God-given and can never be taken or even given away. Among these fundamental natural rights, Locke said, are "life, liberty, and property."
Locke believed that the most basic human law of nature is the preservation of mankind. To serve that purpose, he reasoned, individuals have both a right and a duty to preserve their own lives. Murderers, however, forfeit their right to life since they act outside the law of reason.
Locke also argued that individuals should be free to make choices about how to conduct their own lives as long as they do not interfere with the liberty of others. Locke therefore believed liberty should be far-reaching.
By "property," Locke meant more than land and goods that could be sold, given away, or even confiscated by the government under certain circumstances. Property also referred to ownership of one's self, which included a right to personal well being. Jefferson, however, substituted the phrase, "pursuit of happiness," which Locke and others had used to describe freedom of opportunity as well as the duty to help those in want.
The purpose of government, Locke wrote, is to secure and protect the God-given inalienable natural rights of the people. For their part, the people must obey the laws of their rulers. Thus, a sort of contract exists between the rulers and the ruled. But, Locke concluded, if a government persecutes its people with "a long train of abuses" over an extended period, the people have the right to resist that government, alter or abolish it, and create a new political system.
Jefferson adopted John Locke's theory of natural rights to provide a reason for revolution. He then went on to offer proof that revolution was necessary in 1776 to end King George's tyranny over the colonists.
http://www.crf-usa.org/foundations-of-our-constitution/natural-rights.html
Natural rights,” on the other hand, are the rights that all men possess, because of which they may be obligated to act, or to refrain from acting, in certain ways. According to the teaching developed primarily by Hobbes and Locke, there are many natural rights, but all of them are inferences from one original right, the right that each man has to preserve his life. All other natural rights, like the right to liberty and the right to property, are necessary inferences from the right of self-preservation, or are conceived as implicit in the exercise of that primary right. Similarly, the natural law founded upon natural rights consists of deductions made from the primary right and its implications. The sum of these deductions is the state of civil society. The doctrine of natural rights teaches primarily, then, that all obligation is derived from the right which every man has to preserve his own life. Conversely, it teaches that no man can be bound to regard as a duty whatever he regards as destructive to the security of his life. Thus slavery is wrong because no one can reasonably be asked to place his life at the mercy of another, and not, as in classical natural right, only when it constitutes a wrongful appropriation of one man’s life and labor by another.
The modern concept of sovereignty can be deduced quite strictly from the proposition that all men are created equal. This proposition does not mean, as we have noted, that men are equal in virtue or intelligence, but that they are equal in certain rights. Each man has a natural right to preserve his life, and no man has a natural obligation to defer to any other man, in deciding what does, and what does not, tend to his own preservation. Government, accordingly, does not exist by nature. The state of nature is the state of men without government. In the state of nature, men’s rights are perfect, and they have no duties. The ground of sovereignty is the complete right that every man has to everything in the state of nature, a right which is unlimited because, every man being equal in authority to every other man, there is no one who can prescribe any limits to anyone else. There are limits in the state of nature to what a man may rightly intend to do, since he may not naturally or reasonably intend his own destruction. But these are limits implicit in the inclination to self-preservation, not limits upon what may be done from that inclination.
Thus the natural right each individual possessed alone, the unlimited right to everything he deemed necessary to his preservation, is transformed into a legal or conventional right possessed by the whole people acting by the majority. However, just as the surrender of the individual’s right led to the right of the majority, so the majority may, according to its judgment, surrender its right to a minority. Many forms of government may be legitimate, according to the doctrine of natural rights, yet simple majoritarianism is the only form which is necessarily legitimate. Moreover, while legal or conventional sovereignty may devolve first to a majority, then to a minority, the natural right to life and liberty remains inalienable in the bosoms of individuals, whose consent to be governed is always conditional.
http://www.encyclopedia.com/topic/natural_rights.aspx
Hope that helps. There are many more examples online but I don't want to clutter Joe's blog.
@ Unknown
You will get no argument from me on everything you quoted, however none of that has anything to do with the right to vote. The right to vote can not be defined as a natural right because political systems are a creation of man.
Sand Box John
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