We Can't Increase Rights

[Seldon2639]

I just wanted to clear something up from the Political Science & Public Policy perspective:

There's no such thing as increasing rights. The only thing you can ever do is decide where the balance of interests (rights) are between two competing parties. You can decide whether the right of homosexuals to live openly as homosexuals outweighs the right of the Christians to avoid any interaction with sinful behavior, but in order to increase the rights of one group, you must undermine the rights of the other.

My right to run naked, screaming, through the streets is balanced against your right in not having to see me do that (and probably descend into madness from the sheer beauty, but I digress). In order to protect my right to do it, we have to accept removing your right to avoid it (assuming we both have a fundamental right to use the street).

Sure, there are innocuous issues, like saying everyone of a sufficient age and qualifications has a right to use the street to drive. But most of the time we're talking about conflicting interests. Your interest in adhering to your religion and not giving your child immunizations has to be balanced against society's interest in avoiding epidemics.

So, can we stop talking about one side wanting to "suppress" rights while the other wants to "protect" them? Both sides want to suppress some peoples' rights in order to protect the rights of others.

 

[Nmil-ek]

I think George Carlin said it best you have no rights we made them up its all bullshit.

 

[Tech Team FTW!]

I have to ask:
What is your point?

 

[Joeshie]

I just wanted to clear something up from the Political Science & Public Policy perspective:

There's no such thing as increasing rights. The only thing you can ever do is decide where the balance of interests (rights) are between two competing parties. You can decide whether the right of homosexuals to live openly as homosexuals outweighs the right of the Christians to avoid any interaction with sinful behavior, but in order to increase the rights of one group, you must undermine the rights of the other.

My right to run naked, screaming, through the streets is balanced against your right in not having to see me do that (and probably descend into madness from the sheer beauty, but I digress). In order to protect my right to do it, we have to accept removing your right to avoid it (assuming we both have a fundamental right to use the street).

Sure, there are innocuous issues, like saying everyone of a sufficient age and qualifications has a right to use the street to drive. But most of the time we're talking about conflicting interests. Your interest in adhering to your religion and not giving your child immunizations has to be balanced against society's interest in avoiding epidemics.

So, can we stop talking about one side wanting to "suppress" rights while the other wants to "protect" them? Both sides want to suppress some peoples' rights in order to protect the rights of others.

The problem with your argument is that you are essentially saying that there is no right and wrong. By making any possible action a "right" you are essentially saying that there is no right or wrong.

Not that I'm saying that you are aren't right in some ways philosophically, but ultimately your point of view tends to not work out in the real world, as many philosophical ideas tend to do.

 

[Therumancer]

Well increasing your rights is a contextual thing within the scope of society. The extent of your rights comes into play with things like Search and Seizures, and other various police actions. Just as the goverment can take away or limit rights in certain circumstances it can also give you more by guaranteeing your abillity to do something (or whatever) within specific circumstances where you couldn't do whatever it was before.

Otherwise, yes. When it comes to things like free expression you rapidly run into a problem where the rights of one group to express themselves run contrary to the rights of another group to not be "harassed" or whatever. It can, and always has been, a very touchy subject, and going too far in either direction can start a slippery slope effect of things rapidly going in directions nobody intended. Largely because once you make a law/ruling something called "precedent" comes into play, people will take any law and twist it in every conceivable way they can for an advantage, and if they ever succeed it for all intents and purposes becomes part of the law itself. It can get pretty complicated.

That said, one of the big issues with our country is the nature of Democracy. While we are a Representitive Republic, our central belief system is supposed to be one where everyone gets a vote, and whatever has the most votes is what everyone does. The majority rules. When it comes to minority groups however we run into a problem, as some modern interpetations of "what was intended" (ignoring what our founding fathers actually did and how they interpeted things) go, the majority has no right to regulate minority groups. This of course leads to problems that can range from outright anarchy, to a wierd kind of tyranny where a minority group has more control over what actually happens than the majority of people do.

Not perfectly expressed, but sociology goes back and forth about it.

One other issue connected to this in our society is the whole issue of when a desician should become set in stone. While many people would call it a "Good" thing in some civil liberties cases, consider that a minority group can campaign again and again for anything they want, spread propaganda, and then keep trying until they get the kind of rights and recognition that they want. Ruling against Blacks, or Gays, or whomever today doesn't mean that they can't try again tomorrow, and we have seen eventual victory. The problem is that anyone can do this including groups of organized child molestors (like NAMBLA) and all it takes is one good day and society can be made to change. The fact that our society doesn't have a mechanism under which an issue can be put to rest forever more is a problem. So far we have seen a lot of good come from it, but it is going to bite us in the rear, and already has to some extent. A lot of really bad ideas have gotten into law over a period of time simply due to persistance among lobbyists.


Speaking about gays in general, I am very much against gay men. My opinion has waffled back and forth over the years but I keep coming back solidly in the "against" column.

Right now it's a propaganda tool that people only object to homosexuality based on morality and/or religion. That is not true. While a Christian, I am not a deeply spiritual one. I fancy myself a Christian Agnostic who believes in the central ideas (Christ as the savior, etc...) but not with the specific words of the bible or the teachings of any specific church. Religion doesn't enter into it for me.

Generally speaking I was attacked by a gay man when I was like six. I have no direct memory of the incident probably because it was so traumatic (I was in Residential at the time). Just knowing it happened has made me rather angry.

That aside, I have personally seen a tendency among gay men to be heavily attracted to pre-sexual humans. We're not talking teens here, but like really little kids. The news is full of incidents of such attacks, and I've had my mailbox spammed with porn basically selling the "youngest tightest little boys you can find". Then there are groups like NAMBLA who are just waiting for acceptance to become accepted so they can start the lobbyist spamming. NAMBLA might not strike people as a serious threat but they are so popular, and so well funded that the casino where I used to work warned us (security officers) away from pursueing gay child molesters too vigorously because other casinos had run into trouble with NAMBLA hiring high powered lawyers to defend such pervs, and do it successfully.

Oh sure, well Bob is just like you except he likes other men. Honestly I wouldn't care about that if I really felt it stopped there. Some control themselves a bit better, but I think there are differances between gay and straight child molestation.

Not to mention things like exposes on the international sex trade and such, how much young boys go for, what "sex tourists" go after, and of course then there is the literature about it all which usually comes down to (yep) pre-sexual young boys. I might not find it as disturbing if it was just a controlled interest in teenagers and such for the most part.

As far as the statistics and such that a lot of liberals and lobbyists pull out, I feel they are scewed. In part because they try and treat gays and lesbians as the same thing, when honestly they are no more alike than men and women are (Men are from Mars, Women are From Venus... etc...). I won't say there haven't been lesbian sex offenders, but how bloody often have you heard stuff about some mother losing control and raping her six year old daughter? Not nearly as often as you hear about psycho-daddies doing it. Same thing for kidnappings for sexual abuse and such. Sure there are heterosexual men who do it (usually going after young teens, though there are rare exceptions), but also plenty of gay men who do it and it has seemed to me to be in greater numbers and with generally younger targets.

See, I'll be the first guy to tell you that all gay men aren't like the lisping queens you see on TV. Heck, if that's all there was to gay men I wouldn't care.

The bottom line is that I've long felt that gays and lesbians need to be legally seperated into two differant groups and policed/treated very differantly by society. In general there are reasons why people talk about being violated up the butt with fear (or in jest because it's so messed up). Notice you don't see women talking about being forcibly muff dived or whatever the same way.

Honestly, I can only think of a few times I've really heard about a lesbian sexually assaulting/raping someone outside of stories about women's prisons which is still pretty rare comparitively speaking (my father is a CO) or in porn (usually Japanese Anime) typically directed at men to begin with.

All the "Gay rights" stuff is fine for Lesbians, however we should be redefining the term "police state" for gay men.


These are MY opinions and observations only, and they have been years in the coming (and I have waffled in my attitudes a number of times for various reasons). I expect a lot of people to disagree.

Apologies about the sheer length and the tangent(s)

>>>----Therumancer--->

 

[Mullahgrrl]

The only people affected by gay rights are homosexuals.

christians don't have any special right to be bigoted pricks and you dont have the right to run naked in the street.

We CAN Increase rights and there are no sane reasons not to do so.

 

[munkyforce]

I just wanted to clear something up from the Political Science & Public Policy perspective:

There's no such thing as increasing rights. The only thing you can ever do is decide where the balance of interests (rights) are between two competing parties. You can decide whether the right of homosexuals to live openly as homosexuals outweighs the right of the Christians to avoid any interaction with sinful behavior, but in order to increase the rights of one group, you must undermine the rights of the other.

My right to run naked, screaming, through the streets is balanced against your right in not having to see me do that (and probably descend into madness from the sheer beauty, but I digress). In order to protect my right to do it, we have to accept removing your right to avoid it (assuming we both have a fundamental right to use the street).

Sure, there are innocuous issues, like saying everyone of a sufficient age and qualifications has a right to use the street to drive. But most of the time we're talking about conflicting interests. Your interest in adhering to your religion and not giving your child immunizations has to be balanced against society's interest in avoiding epidemics.

So, can we stop talking about one side wanting to "suppress" rights while the other wants to "protect" them? Both sides want to suppress some peoples' rights in order to protect the rights of others.

I think the problem with this argument is that you assume that people have the "right" to not be offended. From a classical liberal (read libertarian for Americans) viewpoint individuals have a right to life, liberty, and property. The state's role is to protect these rights. The right to liberty means that you are free to do anything you wish provided that you do not impinge on the life, liberty and property of others.

Yes there are some difficult questions, like the immunization issue you raised, but in the case of social outrage provided no individuals life, liberty or property is threatened then noone has had their rights diminished. I just don't believe that rights are a zero sum game.

 

[Seldon2639]

The only people affected by gay rights are homosexuals.

christians don't have any special right to be bigoted pricks and you dont have the right to run naked in the street.

We CAN Increase rights and there are no sane reasons not to do so.

That's a normative judgement. You don't accept the validity of the "right" to avoid a society in which gay marriage is accepted, nor the validity of my right to run naked in the streets, so you slide the scale far in one direction. That's fine, but that doesn't eliminate the scale, it simply says that one group has no right on a particular subject.

Do I have the right to freedom of speech? Sure. Do you have the right to not have to hear racial and sexual epithets? Maybe. You can't increase your right to avoid those things without decreasing my right to say them. So, even if you say I have no right to say them, that's just decreasing my right to zero.

I didn't mean to step on the landmine of people thinking I was saying all rights are equally valid, they aren't. I only meant to point out that in order to give the right of homosexuals to practice homosexuality openly, you have to deny the right of Christians to live without open homosexuality in their societies and schools. That's fine (and I approve), but it's still making one right sacrosanct by removing another one.

Your right to be protected from my hate speech is only possible insofar as you deny me the right to speak freely. Now, I'd draw a parallel between you having to hear my hate speech when you could plug your ears (or not leave the house) to the Christian argument about having homosexuality thrust upon them (and the analogy works), but you'd accuse me of being a homophobe.

The problem with your argument is that you are essentially saying that there is no right and wrong. By making any possible action a "right" you are essentially saying that there is no right or wrong.

Not that I'm saying that you are aren't right in some ways philosophically, but ultimately your point of view tends to not work out in the real world, as many philosophical ideas tend to do.

Wow, I had meant to be purely existential here. You're right, I don't make a moral judgement here, because it's largely irrelevant. I would agree that there's no right to murder, and complete right to not be murdered. That doesn't mean I'm not suppressing one right to guarantee the opposite.

There are times when the balance is completely tipped in one direction or the other. Your right to drive drunk is completely outweighed by my right not to die due to your drunk driving. But that's still a balance. I didn't mean to hit some kind of moral relativism that all rights are equivalent. Most of the time, there's a clear decision to be made about whose right is more important, but the times we're talking about aren't those times.

And in those times when there's a balance to be made, you can't actually increase the total amount of liberty. You can increase someone's liberty at the expense of someone else's. You may be completely right to do that, but you're still doing it.

 

[Seldon2639]

I think the problem with this argument is that you assume that people have the "right" to not be offended. From a classical liberal (read libertarian for Americans) viewpoint individuals have a right to life, liberty, and property. The state's role is to protect these rights. The right to liberty means that you are free to do anything you wish provided that you do not impinge on the life, liberty and property of others.

Yes there are some difficult questions, like the immunization issue you raised, but in the case of social outrage provided no individuals life, liberty or property is threatened then noone has had their rights diminished. I just don't believe that rights are a zero sum game.

This is where the language gets tricky. The word "right" in how we use it is best described as an "interest". People have an interest in not being offended, but in order to decide whether they have a right to that, we have to balance their interests. So, to rephrase the point:

Interests are a zero-sum game. When we increase the validity of one interest, we diminish the importance of its countervailing interest. You come at it from a minimalist (Locke) perspective. That's fine, but then you're missing the forest for the trees. If you believe that the liberty interest outweighs all other interests, you've answered the question beforehand by not granting even the possibility of rights in the opposite direction.

The question isn't how we decide which rights exist, or are even enshrined, but whether we can increase the credence given to one interest without diminishing the credence given to the opposite interest. If you say, for instance "there's no right to be protected from hate speech", that's a fine conclusion, but you're glossing over the question at the core of it:

Does the imporance of the interest of individual "A" to say whatever he wants outweigh the importance of the interest of individual "B" to not hear hate speech? You can't say person "B" has no interest in not hearing speech he doesn't like, so all you can say is that his interest isn't important. But, even then, you're still simply balancing.

 

[munkyforce]

I think the problem with this argument is that you assume that people have the "right" to not be offended. From a classical liberal (read libertarian for Americans) viewpoint individuals have a right to life, liberty, and property. The state's role is to protect these rights. The right to liberty means that you are free to do anything you wish provided that you do not impinge on the life, liberty and property of others.

Yes there are some difficult questions, like the immunization issue you raised, but in the case of social outrage provided no individuals life, liberty or property is threatened then noone has had their rights diminished. I just don't believe that rights are a zero sum game.

This is where the language gets tricky. The word "right" in how we use it is best described as an "interest". People have an interest in not being offended, but in order to decide whether they have a right to that, we have to balance their interests. So, to rephrase the point:

Interests are a zero-sum game. When we increase the validity of one interest, we diminish the importance of its countervailing interest. You come at it from a minimalist (Locke) perspective. That's fine, but then you're missing the forest for the trees. If you believe that the liberty interest outweighs all other interests, you've answered the question beforehand by not granting even the possibility of rights in the opposite direction.

The question isn't how we decide which rights exist, or are even enshrined, but whether we can increase the credence given to one interest without diminishing the credence given to the opposite interest. If you say, for instance "there's no right to be protected from hate speech", that's a fine conclusion, but you're glossing over the question at the core of it:

Does the imporance of the interest of individual "A" to say whatever he wants outweigh the importance of the interest of individual "B" to not hear hate speech? You can't say person "B" has no interest in not hearing speech he doesn't like, so all you can say is that his interest isn't important. But, even then, you're still simply balancing.

Ok I see what you're saying. In which case yes I agree that political interests are a zero sum game. But if we are talking about how the state behaves in relation to these interests then yes, I think the liberty right always should win out. I think that social change and social activism are betters ways for these conflicting interests to be resolved than through the state.