All This “rights talk” Is Dangerous to Human Freedom

I so agree. The Catholic Thing has a great piece here at "Rights" and Liberties . This sums up the problem so well and the danger.



Here are some excerpts





What Mary Ann Glendon called “rights talk” is increasingly prevalent and dangerous to human liberties. Everywhere “rights” are being codified, enforced, and redefined to mean whatever governing bodies want them to mean. They have no other source but positive law.


Briefly, we are losing our liberties because of our “rights.” The totalitarians among us now zealously speak “rights talk” with the best of them. “Defending” modern human “rights” means suppressing what rights meant in the older sense of that term.


In Rome recently, Janne Haaland Matlary, the Norwegian scholar, politician, and member of the Pontifical Academy of the Social Sciences, remarked: “Human rights are becoming increasingly vulnerable to political exploitation.” We Americans, and not only we, might assume that “rights” have a solid, unchangeable meaning. We think this grounded meaning is in the Declaration. That older meaning, however, has been all but obliterated. ........



David Walsh has noted that the word “rights” still retains a vague relation to some stable grounding in being. Today, however, “rights” mean what Hobbes, its original formulator, claimed: namely, the word rights means whatever the de facto political authority says it means. A “right” is what the government defines and enforces as a right, nothing more, nothing less. The current president’s whole anti-life agenda, the most extreme ever designed in any responsible or irresponsible polity, is presented to us under the guise of “human rights.” It is breathtaking......



The whole thing is a good read. Here are my thoughts. It is no secret that many Catholic Justices and in fact many Catholic blogs I link are not big on Jurist acting on some natural law jurisprudence. I understand the difficulties.



However here is the rub. For most of our nations history they have really had too. It is quite amazing even in the most rural of areas that an advanced education meant a huge study in the liberal arts. Many ideas based on the natural law were a part of that. I think in a sense Legislators had often relied on this background. So in many cases , not all, the legislator was enacting many laws and had a view of "rights" that was based on this prior experience.



The situation is changed. In effect even the best Colleges have become well "trade schools". This foundation that many of past legislators have had is gone!! In fact to make matters worse it is gone from most of the public.



That I think is why we have gotten to this nonsense of everyone spouting "I have a right to x" on everything under the son.