Protect your property! PEROG Fundamental Rights Petition for Pennsylvania

A Petition for Redress of Grievances

We the people of Pennsylvania petition the Pennsylvania legislature to approve and declare the following proposed amendment to the Pennsylvania constitution, whereby the inalienable nature of our rights will be plainly decreed as unalterable irreversible.

Be it resolved that we the people of Pennsylvania hereby declare and affirm that the inalienable rights of life, liberty, and property (or the pursuit of happiness) set forth in the Declaration of Independence and the Fifth Amendment (Bill of Rights) to the Constitution are fundamental rights which were derived antecedent to the existence of the state (as manifest in both the United States federal government and the State of Pennsylvania). As such, the state does not grant rights to life, liberty, or property. On the contrary, the primary reason that government is formed is to protect rights to life, liberty, and property, and no South Carolinian or American holds his fundamental rights at the pleasure of the state.

Furthermore, we the people of Pennsylvania declare and affirm in particular that:

All human beings are equal sharers in the right to life, and that the state may not abridge the right to life of any particular human being (or class of human beings) without due process of law and subsequent conviction of a capital offense;

All human beings are equal sharers in the right to liberty, and that the state may not forcibly enslave, conscript, or incarcerate a human being without due process of law and subsequent conviction of a crime;

All human beings are equal sharers in the right to hold and enjoy property, so long as their pursuit of happiness does not infringe upon the rights of other human beings, and the state may not take private property without due process of law or take it for public use, without just compensation. Such public uses include highways, dams, bridges, government office buildings, military installations, and similar public projects. Other uses such as increasing local tax revenues, clearing urban blight, removing church buildings, promoting urban development, and similar proactive public interest or public welfare schemes are not contemplated in the phrase for public use. The phrase just compensation refers to market value based on comparable properties, and would not preclude the government from paying relocation expenses.

With steadfast determination: