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MYTH: One of the most common myths in civilization is that rights are conditional, so the big argument is only who gets to decide who gets what rights.
BUSTED. You can see that this debate had been raging for 4,000 years, or maybe 40,000, depending on how long your historical perspective is. But you can also see that any distinction between "rights" and "privileges" evaporates when we get bogged down in debates over who gets to "define" rights.
FACT: The concept of "rights" is an unconditional. It is so basic that we gasp and sputter when asked to define it. For most of us, there is good reason to gasp and sputter. Rights are as central to our being in a society as nutrition is to food. Asking "what are rights?" sounds suspiciously like Bill Cosby's old record album, "Why is there air?"
Obviously, not everybody agrees on the definition of rights. If they did, we wouldn't have had the first two World Wars. We wouldn't have had the Spanish Inquisition. And we probably wouldn't have had the Dark Ages. We certainly wouldn't have had slavery. And yet the struggle for "civil rights" continues, even in this century.
What ARE rights? It's not likely we're going to resolve that four-millennia debate here. For now, let's just say that rights are a universally understood code of ethics which society expects to restrain us from doing harm to the person or property of others. Many people think of rights as a social contract: if I agree to enter your society, you agree to leave me alone in these areas. If you agree to enter our society, I agree that you have the same rights I do, and I agree to respect your right to exercise them as being as basic and central as my own to do the same.
WHO SAYS SO? Rights are universal, unequivocal and irrevocable. Who says so? You mean, besides the Founding Fathers? Chances are, after you think about it, you say so too. Understanding what rights are doesn't change what you and your neighbors do or don't get to do. It only helps you understand how to identify and protect your rights against threats or challenges when you encounter them.
We're going to "bust" a number of myths about rights. You will do well with it, if only you can remember and accept a couple of facts about the following simple, straightforward but very egregious historical perversion: slavery.
Slavery
Mankind always had the right to freedom, serfdom and slavery notwithstanding. This isn't just because the American Constitution and Bill of Rights happens to say so. As United States founding fathers framed it, rights are "inalienable" and this fact is "self-evident". This view of rights is the idea of natural rights, as opposed to legal or legislative rights by dictate: we don't have rights because the authorities say we do; we have them because we are humans.
This means for example that, before the Emancipation Proclamation, before the Civil War, and most certainly before the 1960's Civil Rights Movement, African-Americans had all of the following rights as everybody else, including:
- The right to vote
- The right to buy, sell and own property
- The right to freedom of action and enterprise
- The right to work for anyone they please, including themselves
- The right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness
Considering all the horrendous wrongs committed over the course of two centuries in the name of "States Rights", how can it be said that the rights of America's largest minority existed all along? Let's turn that question around. If you can't believe that they did, how can you imagine that your own rights are secure today?
The point you want to understand is not the obvious truth that these rights were brutally, systematically and horribly violated. The point is not the obvious truth that the scale of these violations was without parallel in the history of the United States. The point is not that the rights of many other racial and ethnic groups in the United States were also systematically violated, and still are. The point is not that history records even worse mass racial and ethnic subjugation and destruction all over the world. The point is not even that the engine which aided and abetted, condoned and permitted these systematic violations of the rights of African-Americans was the government of the United States of America, and, by either deed or complicity, the governments of most of its various and respective States. The point is that those rights, which were violated, also existed all along, just like all other rights. That means the violations were both immoral and illegal from inception, not just after they were outlawed.
MYTH: another example of dangerously confused thinking about rights was popular during the Cold War. A common sentiment held that, here in America, we enjoyed the right of free speech, whereas, in the bad old USSR, they did not.
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BUSTED: Soviet citizens under the USSR had the same rights as Americans do, and they still do, Mr. Putin.The problem was the failure of that government to recognize those rights. |
MYTH: "Group rights" trump individual rights.
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BUSTED: Rights have their source in the needs and requirements of individuals, whether you view them as god-given or inherent in the nature of mankind. While rights are assumed to have a "social context" - we all need them to get along with one another and to protect the fruits of our labors - rights don't go away when you're marooned on a desert island. Rights won't help you figure out how to build a fire or gather nourishment to survive and get off your desert island, but they do protect your ability to keep doing so if another fellow comes ashore and claims it all for himself.
"States Rights" are only a legal concept for reserving unto member states those rights which may not be addressed explicitly under a federal constitution. They only mean that the federal documents can't possibly enumerate all rights, and so don't take away from legacy rights individuals enjoy; it is a kind of "grandfather clause." But that doesn't mean one person can have a "right" that violates other's rights; it also doesn't mean that states may have rights not also reserved to individuals.
Federal governments may have armies, and states, militias - whereas you and I may not. Controlling an armed force is not an example of a right, but of aresponsibility invested by common consent to the greater body for the security of all. An army, by the way, is rooted in the individual right of self-defense, not in the self-perpetuating desires of certain regimes to stay in power or even to occupy others' territories by force of might. There is no magical superset of "rights" belonging to the collective, to organized groups or to mobs, apart from the rights of the member individuals: rights can't be manufactured or taken away. QED. |
MYTH: When you break a law, you forfeit your rights.
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BUSTED: If you are sentenced to, say, the slammer for bank robbery, and to solitary confinement for being a troublemaker in prison, this doesn't mean that the courts or the prison authorities can revoke your rights. What it DOES means is that the courts and penal system can restrict and restrain you so that you can't bring harm to others. There's no conflict of rights here: if, in the first place, you were interested in the ideas of freedom of action and property ownership as being applicable to everybody, you wouldn't be there.
Think of it this way: your rights are still there, waiting for you, until such time as it is demonstrated to everybody's satisfaction that you are beginning to see other's rights as being equally important to your own. Now, we know that people convicted of a felony most usually can't vote, and can't possess a firearm, and even when "free" may have to report to a parole board for some time or even for life. We even know that in some communities, a roach in an ashtray can get you 25 years and forfeiture of all your property. This article isn't about penal reform. It simply asserts that rights are neither created nor destroyed. A convict may be restrained from the freedom to speak to a person in a neighboring cell, but can't be restrained from the right to an attorney who can try to represent the convict credibly in court.
Under a fully free society, if you do the crime, you still do the time. What we need to remember about rights under penal law is that a stable body of law under free societies is able to make valid and binding distinctions about the rights of suspects versus those convicted of a crime. And, concerning the rights of those lawfully convicted, it is the responsibility of governments to ensure that while privileges may be revoked as punishment, rights are curtailed only as duly and lawfully required to prevent harm to others. |
MYTH: In a democracy, it is up to The People to decide how rights shall be defined and implemented.
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BUSTED: This should be pretty obvious by now. Rights aren't subject to vote, community consensus or "the will of the people". It's a myth. Just as we learned that even kings and queens don't get to grant rights, or take them away, collectives of the citizenry don't acquire kingly or queenly status upon ascension to power, and, even if they abrogate that self-evident truth, those rights themselves are no more subject to the common vote than to the kingly edict or decree. In other words, the form of government violating those rights doesn't matter. The rights still exist, and those violations are still legally and morally wrong. |
MYTH: People do not have rights in a dictatorship.
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BUSTED: We already showed, under "the old USSR", how people had the same rights anyway. Dictatorships and authoritarian regimes are just another example of kings and queens gone wrong; only the composition of ruling class has changed in this example. |
MYTH: In an emergency, rights can be revoked or suspended.
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BUSTED: Here's another dangerous old chromo that refuses to die. Typically, since governments and even elected representatives tend to view themselves as legitimate "grantors" of liberties, in a civil emergency the first thing that's dropped is the distinction between individual perpetrators and classes of people whom some view as suspicious, or "risk groups".
Though only individuals have rights, the favored choice is to suspend recognition of the rights of the entire class, and to abrogate those rights unilaterally. Incarceration of Nisei Japanese-Americans in World War II is a famous example. The ongoing political battle over the proper role of the Guantanamo facility and "secret" offshore detention centers is another. Prisoners of war have certain rights defined by the Geneva Convention, which the United States circumvented by declaring its prisoners to be "enemy combatants" not subject to Geneva rules. As the Abu Ghraib scandal showed, even indiscriminate torture may be considered fair game by those in power, as long as "national security" is deemed to require it.
"Deemed" - by whom? By the ones who want to require it, that's who. How constitutionally circular is that? In the ruling power circles, the question of what basic rights detainees actually DO have, whether accused of specific crimes or not, is an irksome and purely diversionary issue best left to others: outsiders and troublemakers like the ACLU. The general trend of such thinking: rights and civil liberties for others are best treated as personal amenities, suitably remembered just in time for election campaigning - when the government does not really have anything more important to do. |
MYTH: In a democracy, we redefine and curtail rights all the time. People may disagree about whether, or how much, this is OK, but it's infinitely preferable that we do this to ourselves, rather than by having this done to us by dictatorships and corrupt regimes.
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BUSTED: Once again, the legitimacy of the mob does not matter; only the composition of ruling class has changed in this example. To the person being deprived of rights - to the victim - neither the expediency of the cause nor the composition of the depriving authority can change the fact that rights are being violated. It's morally and ethically wrong. |
MYTH: If "they" overthrow the Constitution, "they" are taking away our rights.
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BUSTED: If this wasn't true under the old USSR, it certainly isn't true here either, and never will be. We can and do violate our ability to exercise certain rights all the time, but the rights themselves don't go away. |
SUMMARY: When we violate the rights of others, by nature we're violating universal rights belonging to everybody, which means we violate rights we (in the past) had always claimed for ourselves, as well.
BOTTOM LINE: when we finally surrender the will to guarantee rights to all, we all lose, and in the long run, it will always be somebody else's fault, but we have only ourselves to blame.
Alex Forbes and Summitlake.com, March 17, 2007 |
