In my experience, the Conservative Cat has a habit of making crucial distinctions and clarifications in something that had seemed to be basic and elemental. Last Wednesday, February 21, he made an interesting observation:
To a conservative, a right defines something you can do. To a liberal, a right defines something you can expect. The problem is that a liberal right is always purchased by depriving others of conservative rights.The existence of two types of human rights can be traced back to Franklin Delano Roosevelt, whose four freedoms included two conservative rights (freedom of speech and freedom of worship) and two liberal ones (freedom from want and freedom from fear).
In the ensuing years, freedom of worship has morphed into a liberal right. Rather than being able to choose your own church, it's become the expectation that you will not be offended by seeing someone else's religion on government property.
Pretty cool. And, after a short, cogent discussion he went on to draw some necessary conclusions, and proffer an important warning. It’s well worth reading.
During the past few days, one of the things that stayed in my mind is: What does it mean that there are two “kinds” of rights? I’ve seen Norman Rockwell’s paintings, The Four Freedoms, all my life. I’ve always loved them. The fact that we Americans have rights is taught to us from our earliest childhood. Actually, it’s been so much a part of us that we hardly ever think about what it actually means to “have rights”. Now that it’s been pointed out to me that there are these two different kinds of rights, it forces me to think about “rights” themselves.
Looking back at the Four Freedoms, and thinking about the separation into behavior and expectations, it hit me. If I’m lost in the woods, I can enjoy all my conservative, behavioral “rights”. I can speak, pray, carve newsletter messages into trees or the ground, assemble as I wish and even petition redress at the top of my lungs with a loud, “Help!” I can carry a gun. But in order for me to enjoy the liberal “rights”, I’m in a totally different position. In order for me to be free from want, someone else has to give me food and water. In order for me to be free from fear, someone else has to protect me, rescue me, guard me. It occurs to me that maybe liberal “rights” aren’t rights at all, but rather privileges. And not just any privileges, but the kinds of privileges that liberals want to make into entitlements of law. One of the reasons they want to make them into entitlements of law is because they want to take any moral judgments out of the process. Another is that they want to make the government the power that fulfills the entitlement, and not the private sphere or religious institutions.
Can it possibly be that the liberals have attempted to elevate the privileges they want to the rank of “rights” so that they can force us to give in to them and to allow our money to be taken from us for them and allow our time and effort to be taken from us for them, all to use as they wish? So they can sue us and arrest us and tax us and intimidate us and send us to “sensitivity training” classes, and even make public pariahs of us if we object to their “rights”. This “human rights” bit is trickier than I thought.
I notice that in the Declaration, our forefathers wrote about life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, but when they came to writing up a Constitution, a matter of law with handcuffs and police officers and courts and prisons, they specified which concepts they considered it important to declare as human rights. A dictator, through tyranny, may prevent a human being from enjoying such a right, but the right must yet inhere to the individual, waiting to be recognized by a liberating force. They are unalienable. But as the Conservative Cat points out, liberals speak of a species of rights that can force other, enumerated, rights to be taken away from individuals because of something as simple and commonplace as “giving offense”. Since there are at least two sides to almost everything, giving offense is a popular human pastime. So what’s going on here?
And even worse, only one side of an issue is to be allowed the kind of privilege the liberals want to disguise as rights. It used to be a tradition in movies and novels to have someone in authority in a tyrannical country somewhere threaten a tourist with some dire punishment or cruel official demand and the tourist would draw himself up to full height and declare, “You can’t do that to me! I’m an American!” Of course, liberals will get all huffy about this and say it spoke of arrogance. But it didn’t, really. It was the unspoken, confident recognition that rights worked to protect certain behavior against the tyranny of oppression, and Americans had these rights. But what do we have now? You have to look at a Politically Correct list to find out, and it better be up-to-date: “Group A members can do thus-and-so to Group B members, but not the reverse. Should a Group B member do thus-and-so to a Group A member, then the Group B member shall be forced to take sensitivity training and may even lose his or her livelihood.”
The reason we have been so easily trained to think of entitlements as rights is that at the same time that liberals were raising certain privileges to the rank of “rights” they were working to secularize society and to downgrade the idea that all of us have “moral obligations”. Liberals believe that certain groups of victims have no moral obligations, and that therefore they are entitled to demand privileges. Conservatives believe that all individuals have moral obligations to fulfill in a society. One of these moral obligations is to recognize the true human rights of all citizens in the society. And this last is why the liberal “rights” cause great harm.
In order to take by force assets or time from one person A to give to another B, the law must declare silently that A is less worthy than B. Orwell put it this way: Everybody is equal, but some are more equal than others. This was the ugly, pernicious message of Jim Crow and other such laws. We usually say it means that someone is being treated as a “second-class citizen”. Over time, some individuals who believed in moral obligations worked to establish that there were no second-class citizens in America. The problem with this was, some liberals wanted there to be second-class citizens; they just objected to which people these second-class citizens should be—hence ideas like forced sensitivity training to teach the second classers who the first classers are. Person B takes offense at person A putting a Christmas tree in the library foyer, and at the same time Person A takes offense at person B’s demand to take the tree down. Only person B’s feelings count. Person C removes and disposes of all campus newspapers because person C takes offense at an article by person D. Before anyone can tell whether this is a “campus crime, calling for apologies and sensitivity training and perhaps even expulsion from the campus”, the Politically Correct list must be consulted. If C is a liberal and D is a conservative, destroying the papers is an admirable act, and the article writer is in trouble. It is no longer a simple fact that destroying another person’s property is a crime.
In any face-off, modern liberal “rights” demand that conservative First and Second Amendment Rights be ignored. Liberal “rights” are restrictive, not expansive; they disgrace and punish, not enhance; they are a drive to control, not a call to achievement.
Norbert Wiener said:
Any use of a human being, in which less is demanded of him and less is attributed to him than his full status, is a degradation and a waste.
So-called liberal “rights” cause precisely this degradation and waste by forcing the non-politically correct to be second-class citizens.
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