I don't really know what anyone means by "objective" anymore. Objective like this chair? Objectivity, as Woody Allen said, is subjective. :P I believe that every human has rights that come as part of his nature as a human. To say, "would humans have rights if they couldn't reason or understand what rights are," is a little like saying, "would a orange taste like chicken if it had feathers, clucked and laid eggs."

My belief is rooted in theology, as was Jefferson's and most liberal philosophers. We are endowed with certain rights by our Creator and governments are charged with the securing of those rights and administering justice. However, I know this is unsatisfactory for many people. Locke, gratefully, gives us a good secular basis for understanding natural rights in his Two Treatises on Government.

Ultimately belief in something like natural rights is a something of a matter of faith. You can't locate rights in the DNA, you can't distill it in a test tube. But if we have no natural rights, if it is all a fiction, then that is a pretty scary prospect. What rights we are given can all be taken from us. We have no expectation that a dictatorship should be in any way less natural than a representative government. In many ways, it becomes preferable to have a system that subjugates individual desires to the will of the collective, as in French Jacobian, fascist or Marxist ideology.

I'd encourage you to right the post. I dare say few others will agree with me.