King:

The definitions of Natural Law provide for few things.

My pursuit of happiness is a natural right until I collide with someone elses pursuit of happiness. As someone, I wish I knew who said :"My right to freely swing my fist ends at the tip of someone elses nose."

"Slavery" is not a natural right, at least not according to Hobbes and Beccaria and Locke.

I am not responsible for the ignorance you encountered in Georgia, no matter what banner it flew. In the Bible, reference to slavery and slaves necessarily mostly refers to Saxons and Angles and Ostrogoths and Visigoths and Medes and Greeks and Gauls and Jutes as these are the folks who lost wars with the Romans and were therefore enslaved. I call to mind Onesimus in the Epistle to Philemon - Onesimus is a Greek.

St. Pauls comments merely acknowledge the existence of slavery, and neither condemn it nor commend it. Please note he didnt have anything bad to say about the Roman Empire, either, even though his people were oppressed by it.

This is a digression, however.

The gents who wrote the US Constitution believed in Natural Rights, ( referred to as Inalienable Rights in the Declaration ) and the reason they wanted to give 'ol King George the heave ho, was because Georgius Rex and his parliamemnt was trampling on them. Like it or not, the whole of American Constituional jurisprudence is based on it - if there were no natural Rights, rebellion against the Crown was unlawful and immoral.

Regards

GKT

Texas Declaration of Independence 1836 -The Indictment against the dictatorship, Para.16:"It has demanded us to deliver up our arms, which are essential to our defence, the rightful property of freemen, and formidable only to tyrannical governments."