Another comment I want to memorialize in the main text

[morsefan]

The thing about discussions about "human rights" (let us now bow down and worship at the altar!) is there actually is something called the law of human rights that has content. There are procedures for unpacking questions like "What is or should be recognized as a human right?" "Who has authority to enforce a human right and when?" "How do we know

Comments

[morsefan]

Why don't we do the "let the little jurisdictions pick what rights they will protect?" thing. Easy: human rights discourse for all too many people is not about actually protecting human rights (recall, we've got folks over there arguing the Holocaust didn't happen and you're awfully quick to assume unborn children don't deserve any protection even if it's possible they are fully human and when this post didn't really raise that -- sorry, but it does sound like you needed that for your argument, as in, that some people aren't really people, and it's OK to define them that way, which can lead to all sorts of stuff as I think you know). If it had anything to do with protecting human rights, those great thump-their-chest guys out there would have had the European armies in Darfur in a minute. Nope, human rights discourse is about being subtle (and sometimes not too subtle) in an attempt to control human beings. It's about tyranny. It's about saying "in the name of this thing I can't even define and has no basis called human rights, you ought to do X and Y or worse, I'll make you do it."

Donald Kagan had a good article in Policy Review someone linked somewhere to my journal, and he makes TONS of great points on this (Europeans are trying to appeal to American conscience, etc., etc. to get us to do things the way they want them so they go on and on ad infinitum about human rights, but the one that fascinated me most was the notion that as Americans, we are still in "history" fighting for "the good," while Europeans are post-history, basking in a sort of second-rate peace. I don't know if I buy it, because I tend to have a little trouble separating "pre"/"during"/"post" history when that set of arguments comes out, but taken with the other point, it explains a lot.

But here's where I get off the train. Tyranny is antithetical to anything in my undestanding of human rights. My understanding of human rights comes from a source that rejects tyranny utterly. If your source doesn't reject it, see potential buggaboos above.

Let's get back for a second to abortion -- your lead-off point, really. Because from a believer's perspective, because we are creatures our relationship with each other and our world is different and we have different responsibilities. But if you don't believe you are a creature -- if you believe in the opposite which ultimately collapses to hedonism -- a lot of scary stuff is possible to justify. Like saying an unborn child isn't really human. Or, as a few who got a little out of hand on europeanunion said: Jews aren't really human either.

Only power can stop human rights violations, and lots will go on. But in defining them, it helps to have a proper sense of your place in the pecking order. Next best option: guns. And I want lots of them, and I'll vote for them along with the money to pay for them. People can say all they want about us, but it's a hell of a lot better to be here on the human rights front than anywhere else in the world.