[jltsiren]

That's a prescriptive view of what the rights should be. According to a more descriptive view, rights are just social constructs with an effective enforcement mechanism. That mechanism is often regulated by laws, which means the legislator can effectively create new rights and revoke old ones.

My pet hypothesis is that the US perspective is prescriptive, because the ability of the state to enforce the rights has not been seriously compromised in a long time. The rest of the world is more familiar with the idea that the guy with a bigger gun may one day show up and take your rights away.

[actionablefiber]

The term is certainly ambiguous - I don't think anyone would argue that the right to legal counsel is 'God-given' and people arguing for universal single-payer healthcare aren't saying that the right to access a national healthcare system is an innate human freedom. And many things we call 'rights', like voting or owning a gun, can be revoked by the government under certain conditions.

In practice in the U.S. we pretty much call things 'rights' any time we believe that people should have them by default.