If those rights had always existed, there would have been no need to create them. The founders wrote a great deal as rhetorical flourishes. ("We hold these truths to be self-evident" indeed. Had they been, why would they have had to fight for them? And if it was really self-evident that "all men are created equal", what was slavery about?) But what they really did was (after a failure with the Articles of Confederation) come up with a very good set of basic rules, and a nifty way to change them as the circumstances and intellectual advances warranted. Rights that are unenforced don't exist; they're just hopes. But apparently I'm dealing with people way too naive to consider rethinking what they were told in 6th grade.