The Tyranny of 'Rights'

As our country has lost sight of the idea of the 'common good' and descended into a collection of conflicting interest groups, the focus has increasingly become 'my rights'. Everyone is concerned about maximizing their personal 'rights' regardless of what that might mean to the common good. Many claim only to want to defend their rights when no else is harmed but that strikes me as patently untrue since their view of 'harm' seems limited to physical attack and pays no mind to even physical harm in the case of abortion, which kills a baby.  In fact, the rights talk of today seems to me to have more in common with the arguments used in the mid-1800's to defend slavery than seems to be recognized.

For example, the pro-abortion interests like to say that 'it's my body, my right'. Regarding slaves, the owners felt that 'it is my property, my right' to treat slaves as they wished. The pro-abortion lobby essentially treats unborn babies in the same manner as a slave was treated by owners, as a piece of property to be treated as they chose. The intent seems to be to make it look as if the issue is not about people; rather, it is about property or a 'blob of tissue' which is clearly mine.

Some who favor abortion like to say that the aborted baby is 'better off', assuming that they would be unwanted and therefore abused or at least neglected if allowed to be born. Supporters of slavery often argued that slaves were 'better off', being looked after by a master since most had no education and few if any marketable skills.

Many supporters of slavery liked to circumvent the slavery issue by claiming that the real issue was 'states rights', not slavery. They were just fighting for the rights of states to make their own decisions, they were not defending slavery, even though the main decision that the states wanted to defend was the decision to keep slavery legal. This is much like the 'my body' argument but at the state level instead of the personal level; 'it is our state, and we get to decide'.  Similarly, abortionists try to avoid the issue of life by talking about 'freedom of choice' instead of 'right to abortion' since the idea of choice is so much more palatable than killing babies.  Both in the case of slavery and in abortion, the idea is that 'freedom of choice' supersedes all other rights, including the right to life itself.

The homosexual lobby takes a similar approach. The approach is to focus on personal autonomy and choice with our own 'property' (body) and neglect the issues about morality and the common good. The idea that marriage is purely private rather than a public institution takes this approach, claiming that homosexual 'marriage' is somehow a right, but this seeks to ignore the public nature of families and child rearing and the common good to society of marriages that both produce children and raise them with both male and female role models, which nearly all studies on the subject have repeatedly demonstrated as vitally important. It is in fact the disintegration of the family that is responsible for much of the social dysfunction in our society, and homosexual 'marriage' adds to that destructive legacy even further.

 So it seems to me that the pursuit of 'rights' has become more like tyranny than like freedom, especially since the approach has been to try to force them upon the nation via court action rather than by legislative approval. The pursuit of rights has become a matter of tyranny rather than of freedom.