Debate on rights in the Keene Sentinel

For the past year, Pam Martens has been on a rampage against the Free State Project and anyone associated with it. It all started with a smear piece in a political newsletter containing so many factual inaccuracies that it took nearly 3500 words to rebut the big stuff. That didn’t stop Mrs. Martens from writing a second piece shortly thereafter.

Earlier this year, her husband, Russ, joined the war. He wrote about a candidate for selectman in Westmoreland, saying, “It’s Foolish to say [he] is Not a Free Stater.” The individual in question isn’t actually a participant in the Free State Project, but that fact didn’t slow the Martens’ guilt-by-association assault. What followed was an attempt to claim said candidate espouses the views Mrs. Martens ascribes to all Free State Project participants, mostly based on the grossly inaccurate ideas she presented a year ago.

All this raises the important question. Why? Why are the Martens’ so bent on vocally opposing the Free State Project? I could speculate, but it would be just that, and I don’t wish to stoop to their level by assuming I know what they believe. As luck would have it, Mrs. Martens (maybe unknowingly) answered the “why” question in her latest letter to the Keene Sentinel. It appears the answer is simply that she believes government (she calls her version ‘participatory democracy’) has all the rights and doles them out to individuals at its pleasure. She must see the Free State Project as a credible threat to her crusade against the idea of inherent individual rights, so she understandably attacks.

I expose this conflict of rights in my reply to her letter which was published in the Sentinel today:

READER OPINION: Where our rights come from is key, by Varrin Swearingen

Published: Sunday, April 11, 2010

Pam Martens calls for an “untrammeled debate” on the issues (“We have a right to speak our minds,” Keene Sentinel, April 4), but before getting into any specific topic, we need to address the elephant in the room: Where do our rights come from?

Mrs. Martens writes, “rights are derived … from engaged citizens in a participatory democracy.”

She believes rights are granted by society, and denies individuals any natural rights of their own; what some might call “human rights.”

Her opinion conflicts with the simple idea that each of us has our own inherent, unalienable rights, and that government, democratic or otherwise, should be limited to protecting those rights.

The founders of our state and nation understood that idea and wrote it into the New Hampshire Constitution and America’s Declaration of Independence.

The Free State Project’s Statement of Intent adopts part of that idea, too:

“… the maximum role of government is the protection of life, liberty and property.”

That is the extent of the Free State Project’s “platform”: encouraging engaged citizens to move to New Hampshire and work to protect everyone’s rights.

If Mrs. Martens wishes to criticize that “platform,” or claim “most people don’t agree,” she’s certainly free to do so, but I have a hunch that most good and honest people in New Hampshire believe they have rights that not even a democracy can legitimately take away.

Note: I write herein on my own behalf, not on behalf of the Free State Project as its president.

VARRIN SWEARINGEN