One of the key rights that makes civil society possible is the right to free association: the right to deal with people who want to deal with and the right to dis-associate yourselves from those who (for whatever reason) you disapprove of without threat of force being used against you.
As a result it should be no surprise that in the ongoing struggle to replace the interactions of civil society with entirely political mediated interactions, that the right to free association is under attack yet again. The right to decide who you must to do business with is being fought for by Catholic and Muslim institutions who do not want to be forced by law to deal with people who are homosexuals (i.e. people acting sinfully according to their beliefs).
Yet no one is even discussing the fact that individuals, such as shop owners or landlords for example, might also want the right to free association Why is this right being discussed only in terms of ‘group rights’? The right of Catholic or Muslim institutions not to have people forced on them by law? What about the rights on everyone else to make their own minds up who they will or will not associate with and do business with?
Excellent point.
In the new political order, feelings are admissible in court – but only if those “feelings” have been institutionalized. It’s rather like racism. If you are a member of a minority with a race-baiting organization to represent you, then what you “feel” is racism becomes so by law. If, however, you are a member of a majority group with no such representation, then it is not legally possible for anyone to discriminate against you because you don’t have any legally recognized feelings on the matter. This game has been going on with race for 40 years now. I guess it’s about time they extended it to religion. Of course, they will never extend it to private individuals, but that is because individuals are not incorporated.
If it were a matter of purely private establishments, then clearly people should be able to refuse their services based on whatever bizarre criteria they wish.
The problem arises from the unhappy alliance of state and private spheres in areas like faith schools. I’d be worried if state institutions started denying services to certain groups of people that the state didn’t like.
Indeed. But the only services the state should be providing are security services.
In the end it all disintegrates because a skilled politician just learns to play the minorities off against each other without ever having to get up and say that they’re all stoneage fuckwits with taboos.
I see a lot of people on BBC News ‘Have your Say’ forum saying ‘what about deaf children’ with regard to the ‘veiled teacher’ issue – and thus it begins.
There is a restaurant in Wisconsin called the Silent Woman, and its logo is a cartoon of a woman whose head has been cut off.
I think these insecure smalldicked Muslim men veil their women to shut them up.
I am a little puzzled by the regular use of the word (and concept of) ‘rights’ by Samizdatistas and members of the Commentariat. I would have thought that the preferred language here would be of (civil) liberties rather than of (civil or human) rights. Rights exist where some other person or organisation defines, defends and enforces those rights. Liberty is something that you exercise because you can, not because it is allowed or required by someone else.
Once the paradigm shift has been made to a rights culture as opposed to an appreciation of liberty, the rights granted can be manipulated, modified or even removed by those who control those rights with the acquiescence of those ’empowered’ by those rights. I’ll take liberty over rights any day.
Am I missing something?
There are two fair options:
1. Everyone may refuse service to anyone.
2. No one may refuse service to anyone.
Obviously, no.1 is better, but no.2 is at least even-handed.
The problem is the government’s pandering to the religious lobby while not making reciprocal arrangements, and not just with gay people. The religious dislike of gay people as a group is no more rational than the dislike of blacks/whites/women as a group, but the government doesn’t think it right to allow discrimination in those instances.
J is correct. The right to refuse service to gay people will be allowed in state-funded religious-delivered services, which is what the government wants. God knows why, but it does.
As private institutions, religions can refuse whom they please – women in the clergy, ‘fornicators’ Communion and so on, Mormons discriminating against black people before 1976. But a private tennis club, for instance, would have a hard time discriminating in such a way.
Hopefully, all this stupidity on top of other stupidity will come tumbling down when the Commission for Equality and Human Rights gets the CRE, the DRC and the EOC under one roof. But it will probably just be slanging matches and the same old grievances.
Eleutheria…
Not sure I think the idea of even-handed tyranny is an improvement.
Johnny Surabaya…
Liberty is a right. I would say it is the right.
I think your puzzlement comes from differing semantics over what you & I & others mean by ‘rights’ (which I do not see as ‘man made’ in so far as my theories of a person’s rights are based on notions of objective reality rather than political processes) and ‘liberty’ (by which we both probably mean the same thing).
I might be convinced to abandon the word ‘rights’ on purely utilitarian grounds (though probably not), but it does seem that I do not mean what you mean when I use the term.
Perry, when I said ‘fair’ I was searching for something like ‘equitable.’ Perhaps I should have said ‘uniformly restrictive.’ 😉
So-called group rights are the biggest cause of grievances and illiberal policy-making, but politicians haven’t learnt this yet. They just seem to think the answer is giving rights to *another* group. So it becomes an endless game of playing off one group against another.
“Rights” (as many thinkers have noticed) have, to some extent, moved from limitations upon government power (as in the British or American Bill of Rights) to excuses for government power (as with many of the “rights” in international declarations of rights in the 20th century – although the signs of such a change can be seen even as far back as the supposedly anti statist French Declaration of the Rights of Man at the time of the French Revolution).
Some establisment thinkers have claimed that there has not been a move from “negative” rights (limitations on government power) to “positive” rights (either rights to exercise political power via such things as the vote or material benefits in health, education, welfare or whatever), as “all rights are positive rights” that demand state action.
However, this is not true. For example the right not to be murdered does NOT require a state police force. Murder was recognised as a crime in England long before government police forces became compulsory (the 1850’s).
Nor do limitations on government power require government welfare payments (as establishment thinkers seem to think). For example, the right to keep and bear arms does not require that the government use tax money to provide everyone with firearms.
The old notion of “rights” came from the concept of natural law (or common law – or whatever you choose to call it) that it was a crime to violate the body or goods of people.
It also came from constitutional ideas about how to limit the power of government.
For example, with the right to keep bear arms (to be found, for example, in both the British and American Bill of Rights) this was partly a matter that to try and take a person’s firearm was a crime (just as to, by the threat of violence, take his shirt was a crime), but ALSO that an armed population was a useful safeguard against tyranny (and elected governments can also be tyrannical) – this is perfectly clear from the writings of the leading people of the time.
Nor does “freedom of speech” mean that the government has to give everyone a newspaper or a television station (or a medical operation if they are physically unable to speek due to some defect). All this right means is that people (government people or otherwise) should not try and prevent folk using their own property to spread their opinions (no matter how unpopular these opinions may be) – and that if the government (or some other group of people) tries to smash up a printing press or whatever the owner (and whoever chooses to help the owner) have a right to defend this printing press (or other property) by armed force if need be (one would hope that court action would be enough, but one can never be sure of that – after all, as many of the leading people of the time warned, government appoints the judges).
It was accepted that not all rights can be written down (hence the Ninth Amendment), but this did not mean that any rights were “positive” or welfare rights demanding government money or regulations.
However, if it is true that the idea of “rights” has become so contaminated by the idea of rights as material benefits that it can not be restored to its original meaning, then perhaps it would be better to simply refer to the nonaggression principle of law (hands off).
As for freedom of association (which as Perry knows must include the right not to associate).
Just saying “this is private property” does not keep the government away. For example, the old “Jim Crow laws” demanded that private business enterprises discrimiate against black people (regardless of the wishes of the owners of these enterprises), and the modern “Civil Rights laws” demand that people trade with or employ black people – even if they do not want to.
Of course, such regulations violate the nonaggression principle of law. However, government itself used to be (at least in Britian) a lot less silly than it now is.
For example, I do not accept that government has to run a fire service (there are both commercial and non profit voluntary alternatives), but government fire brigades did not use to cercern themselves with “equality and diversity issues”.
Only yesterday I was shown an advert for a “Equality and Diversity” manager for Northaptonshire Fire Service (a “Conservative” party run county council) on £25,000 a year.
I will not repeat the language of the ad (mostly because the mixture of “management speak” and “P.C. speak” made me feel sick), but rest assured that this person’s duties were not connected with putting out fires.
Both government and private (due to regulations and modern ideas of tort action) operations (in all areas of life) are now ever more dominated by such concepts. And people who reject them either can not get a job or will not hold such a job long.
There’s more to these regulations than goods and services: see http://www.thecctv.org/thecctv/articles/paedophilescharter.htm
Whoa! That CCTV site is moonbat central… and very statist, to boot.
Christians who want to deny gay people services might question why they’re not demanding the same right to deny adulterers and masturbators those services. After all, it’s all mortal sin. No need to be hysterical about one of them and tell lies, e.g., that various scriptural quotations are against homosexuality. They’re not: they’re against homosexual sex. Even the Catholic Church can understand that one, though it has more brains than ‘Bishop’ (where’s his apostolic succession?) Michael Reid’s Peniel cult.
Christians who want to discriminate (and they can be as inconsistent and illogical as they wish in their discrimination) would do well to regret the special privileges and funding they have got from the taxpayer for so long and go it alone.
The dogged insistence of a stupid minority of Christians on clinging to the blasphemy laws has led to the situation where all of us are prevented from saying anything wusses of *any* religion find ‘offensive.’
The dogged insistence of a stupid minority of Christians on special faith schools – proper Christians go to church or Sunday school and get taught there, for goodness’ sake, as I was – this doggedness has led to the situation where the taxpayer is having to fork out to teach Christians one thing and Muslims a completely contradictory and irreconcilable thing.
Satanic Verses burning and death threats? Right to wear the hijab at school but not a baseball cap? Compulsory prayers in schools? The heir to the throne defending all faiths? All down to religious pleading for special rights. If Christians had had the sense twenty or thirty years ago to render unto God the things that are God’s and unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, I’m sure we wouldn’t be in this stupid mess, multicultural or however you describe it. It wouldn’t have been an issue. Religions would now be standing or falling in the marketplace of ideas. But oh no, they want 1970s socialist protection, thank you, and 1950s censorship.
The CCTV site – an apt name for its big-brother intrusiveness – is also screaming against secularism. Secularism is good. The state shouldn’t be paying for the propagation of any faith. It shouldn’t – we shouldn’t – be paying for a lot of other things, either. But people who want special rights make the rest of us work so they can steal our money for their pursuits. Most Christians I’ve had the pleasure of communing with have been quite secular. In not being pompous crybabies, they’ve had a better impression on the people around them.
Bottom line. Jesus didn’t go crying to the state for special privileges, dubious charitable status, faith schools and all the special-rights, special-pleading crap that some Christians seem to want these days. They would do well to learn from his example.
I must, however, applaud the CCTV for denouncing the incitement to religious hatred bill. But it must take those arguments it makes against it to their logical conclusions.
One last thing, at last addressing the CCTV link. The attempt to link gay equality with paedophilia is somewhat clumsy. I can’t judge the books the page mentions because I haven’t read them. I doubt they’re as explicit as they’re cracked up to be, and I’m wondering what straight sex books there are, too.
None of that matters, though. The state shouldn’t be in the business of promoting either homosexuality or heterosexuality. If we are lumbered with state schools, their teaching should be descriptive of society, but not *presecriptive.* Heterosexuality is remarkably attractive to the majority of people, and it always has been. It can stand on its own, ahem, four feet in the free marketplace of ideas. If people’s sexuality has to be propped up by the state, one wonders about the sincerity of it.
And given the pro-family stance of the CCTV and schoolchildren’s tendency to rebel against what they are taught, perhaps it would be best not to teach them that the family is cool. 😉
Children aren’t stupid. They learn from what adults do as much as from what they say. My peers at school learned that divorce was traumatic because they could observe it, either from personal experience or from talking to their mates, not because they were taught it. My school didn’t muck about teaching stuff like that: it was far too busy teaching me stuff I couldn’t learn from observation, like Latin and calculus.
Perry:I might be convinced to abandon the word ‘rights’ on purely utilitarian grounds (though probably not), but it does seem that I do not mean what you mean when I use the term.
Do you think this is another example of the Sociofascist bastardisation of words? A previously plain, valuable word is hijacked into being something divisive and a tool of the fascist left.
A “right”, in my view, is more a right not to be prevented from (indeed, yes, to “be at liberty to”), not a demand to have that handed over to one. A child has a right not to be prevented from having a happy home. Nobody can enforce a “right to a happy home” by somehow having to run around creating one (though many would and do relish it). The right to work is a right not to be prevented from working, not a right to be employed at someone’s expense. It is a right to be at liberty to work.
It’s repulsive.
30 or so years ago, there were people marching against the government, asking them to give them the freedom to consort with others in the way they want to. Damn right too.
Now, the people who want to do these things want to prevent people from having their freedom to consort with others in the way that they want to.
It’s the old “power corrupts” thing, I guess.
Homosexuality is a mental illness- psychosis- brought upon chiefly by a sexual/psychological abuse during childhood. To promote it, is to keep the victim in eternal bondage and misery.
Who is ‘promoting’ it? What we are talking about here is the right to free association and dis-association. Oh and by the way, your attitude is one of the reasons I am so in favour of right to keep and bear arms.