Sarah, as much as I would like to think we are somehow born with rights, independent of culture or society, I just don't see that concept supported anywhere in history. Even if it's just a general unwritten agreement among the members of a group, rights do have to be identified and agreed upon by the members of any group.
In the USA, we do recognize that we had pre-existing rights at the time of the creation of our Constitution. Long before there was a nation here called the USA, there was a culture, and we had already assumed certain rights for ourselves. The way the Constitution is worded, it often recognizes those pre-existing rights (free speech, the right to arms, etc.) rather than assigning new rights. Typically, amendments to the Constitution assign new rights.
Most of the founders of our nation considered those pre-existing rights as God-given rights, but they were coming from a more religion-oriented frame of mind. History tells me that whoever carries the largest club decides what the rights are and who has them. Theoretically, "we the people" have control of that figurative club (brute force) now, so we decide for ourselves what rights members of our society will have. In practice, we still have control of that club, but there has been a scary tendency among our citizens to hand over control of that club, slowly, but steadily, to a central government, and if we continue down that path, rights might become a thing of the past.
Anyway, Sarah, it looks like we agree on much of this.