In her prescient book, Rights Talk: The Impoverishment of Political Discourse, Mary Ann Glendon of the Harvard Law School warned her fellow Americans in 1993 that our public life was being degraded by the promiscuous use of the language of “rights” as a rhetorical intensifier in campaigns to promote this, that, or the other thing: things that the Founders and Framers would never have imagined to be “rights.”
“Rights talk,” Professor Glendon cautioned, sets the individual against the community, as it privileges personal autonomy—“I did it my way”—over the common good. And that, she concluded, was going to be very bad for the American experiment in ordered liberty over the long haul.
The long haul has now arrived. And the results are every bit as bad as Professor Glendon predicted.
Nowhere has this descent into verbal incontinence created as malodorous a public stench as in the profligate use of the self-contradictory phrase “reproductive rights.” What can that term possibly mean if we’re not in Alice’s Wonderland? “Reproductive rights” is a euphemism for abortion. Elective abortion is the willful destruction of a human being at an early stage of his or her development. How can the destruction of that human being—whose biological humanity is affirmed in high school textbooks—be a matter of exercising a reproductive right when the process in question is intended to end reproduction by expulsion from the womb or fetal dismemberment?
Yet this blatantly deceptive—in fact, absurd—term, “reproductive rights,” was recently embraced by the Republican Party’s presidential candidate shortly after the Democratic National Convention celebrated abortion as if it were a civic sacrament—indeed, the civic sacrament, before which all must bow in worship. There is something quite sick about all this. And mutterings about the “lesser of evils” are of little consolation when what is being embraced as a “right” by the putatively lesser miscreant is, in truth, the deliberate destruction of an innocent human life—which is, this side of blasphemy, about as evil as evil gets.
Politics is typically downstream from culture, and if our politics have become warped to the point where the abortion license is being sacramentalized, then there is something gravely wrong with our public moral culture. How, then, do we rebuild a public space where truth-telling prevails over euphemism, so that serious debate replaces volleys of epithets in which each cannonading side accuses the other of violating its “rights”?
One possible path forward lies in a recovery of the classic Catholic notion that “rights” are always tied to responsibilities. In that still-relevant work of Catholic political theory, We Hold These Truths: Catholic Reflections on the American Proposition, John Courtney Murray, SJ, explained the linkage in these terms, while exploring the deeper meaning of the rights of free speech and freedom of the press:
…these institutions do not rest on the thin theory proper to eighteenth-century individualistic rationalism, that a man has a right to say what he thinks merely because he thinks it…. The proper premise of these freedoms lay in the fact that they were social necessities…essential to the conduct of free, representative, and responsible government. People who are called to obey have the right first to be heard. People who are to bear burdens and make sacrifices have the right first to pronounce on the purposes which their sacrifices serve. People who are summoned to contribute to the common good have the right to pass their own judgment on the question, whether the good proposed be truly good, the people’s good, the common good.
When “rights” are severed from responsibilities, the public square becomes a gladiatorial pit in which everyone’s rights-claims are in a constant, often brutal, battle for survival against everyone else’s. That is not democratic deliberation. It is intellectual and moral chaos. And chaos can lead to freedom’s self-destruction. Thus, Murray put the danger to an America choking on contending rights-claims in these elegantly dramatic terms: perhaps, one day, “the noble, many-storyed mansion of democracy [could] be dismantled, levelled to the dimensions of a flat majoritarianism, which is no mansion but a barn, perhaps even a tool shed, in which the weapons of tyranny may be forged.”
Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger said much the same thing when he raised the alarm about an encroaching “dictatorship of relativism” on the day before his election as Pope Benedict XVI. We are not quite there yet. But the persistent, profligate abuse of language and reason displayed in terms like “reproductive rights” is hastening the day of reckoning.
(George Weigel’s column ‘The Catholic Difference’ is syndicated by the Denver Catholic, the official publication of the Archdiocese of Denver.)
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If everyone has a right regarding their rights, then no one can be wrong. Except for those whose rights differ. What then if not chaos? Justice regarding whose rights are right will be determined by who is in power. But that’s no way to run a democratic republic founded on perennial principles of justice most of which relate to God inspired tradition and common law.
It comes down to the point articulated by Weigel and the dictatorship of relativism. Unfortunately, that leaves us with one alternative. Let’s rumble!
Gilbert & Sullivant, too, were prescient:
“For you are right, and I am right, and we are right, and all is right…” (The Mikado).
An ode to moral relativism.
Indeed.
I miss Gilbert & Sullivan. We don’t hear much of them these days.
Clearly it’s only a spelling error. Instead civil rights it’s civil “rites” of passage into the brave new world of modern barbarism. Wasn’t it John Courtney Murray who wrote of “learned ignorance?” And, John Henry Cardinal Newman, with Weigel, reminded us that “conscience has rights BECAUSE we have duties” (Letter to the Duke of Norfolk).
Posted here before, but again useful as a reminder of things past and then of our more recent euphemisms:
A comparison table, the “Third Reich and Contemporary Society” (William Brennan, The Abortion Holocaust: Today’s Final Solution, St. Louis: Landmark Press, 1983, Chart 6, and 100-102), connects that Fascist era to our own drift—similar and different—into another kind of culture of death. Here are some side-by-side snapshots with the first years, at least, of the abortion revolution:
“I know of not a single case where anyone came out of the chambers alive” (Auschwitz commandant Rudolf Hoess on the destructive capacity of Zyklon B gas, 1947) and “It never ever results in live births” (an experienced abortionist on the merits of dissection and extraction, 1981);
“the subjects were forced to undergo death-dealing experiments ‘without receiving anesthetics’” (Dachau freezing experiments, 1942) and “the fetuses are fully alive when we cut their heads off, but anesthetics are definitely unnecessary” (Fetal researcher Dr. Martti Kekomaki, 1980);
“no criticism was raised” (conference of German physicians to the Ravenbrueck death camp sulfanilamide experiments, Berlin, May 1943) and “no one ever raised an eyebrow” (meeting of American pediatricians to an experiment involving beheading of aborted babies, San Francisco, 1973); and
“what should we do with this garbage” (Treblinka, 1942) and “an aborted baby is just garbage” (fetal researcher Dr. Martti Kekomaki, 1980).
In Mein Kampf (1925) Adolf Hitler referred to Jews as “a parasite in the body of other peoples”; fifty years later, the year of Roe v. Wade, a radical feminist group branded the unborn as “a parasite within the mother’s body” (an early edition of Our Bodies, Ourselves: A Book By and For Women).
I was reading comments from an abortionist recently who denied that children today survive attempted feticides. He stated that was only a thing in the past. He shared that he first “compassionately” dispatches the child in the womb to prevent a live delivery from occurring & causing distress to the mother.
Didn’t Flannery O’Connor say something about tenderness leading to the gas chambers?
The death cult that is the American left cares nothing for reason or argument or anything at all to do with determining truth.
They pretty much conceive of the world in a few cartoon-styled visuals that usually either rhyme or posit false dichotomies.
And these bumper-sticker substitutes for thought are what leftists disseminate through their ubiquitous talking points (note that no one ever mistakes them for ‘thinking points’), bumper stickers and protest signs.
Well, here’s one back at ‘em:
DISMEMBERING BABIES ALIVE IS NOT A HUMAN RIGHT.
IT’S AN INHUMAN WRONG.
Well said, Father, and excellent post, Mr.Weigel! “With Love, comes responsibility.”
The question is simply “From whom are our human rights derived?”.
On one side of the cultural divide, our human rights are derived from the “City of Man” the Caesars, the prevailing secular authorities in office at the moment.
On the other side of the cultural divide, in agreement with the Fathers of the Church and the Founding Fathers of American our inalienable human rights are derived from our Creator, in the view of “Truly, truly I say to you that heaven and earth may pass away but my Word shall never pass away”.
One indisputable right everyone has is to not be subject to a level of George Weigel animus that generates George Weigel bald faced falsehoods. Of all the people on the planet available to associate with “reproductive rights,” including many of Francis’ favorite people, Weigel demonizes the man who did more to destroy the effects of such mythology than any man in history even as Weigel covered his own complicity is sabotaging those efforts by telling Catholic America not to vote for Trump in 2016. Weigel would later lie about the matter by claiming he only opposed him in the primaries. No, it was in the general election, and it’s on film. Currently, Trump has been Machiavellian in distancing himself from abortion despite not changing his actual beliefs according to those who know him. However much pro-lifers like to lie to ourselves, being overtly pro-life is a death dealing political position in a dying civilization. Rather than cut any slack to the man who scored the greatest pro-life victory in history, Weigel invokes praise for his long-time idol, John Courtney Murray SJ, who first introduced Catholic America to being Catholic and supporting abortion during the Kennedy years.
To say the horse has left the barn when it comes to questioning the notion of human rights is an understatement. In fact, Catholic can thank Jacques Maritain, who was very influential in the advocating for the notion of human rights while Tom Fleming, former editor of Chronicles, highlighted the danger in the pro-life movement’s adoption of “the right to life” argument over thirty years ago. Unfortunately, what Weigel and many “conservatives” don’t understand is there are no good or bad rights, just like the ring in LOTR can not be used for good or evil but must be destroyed. Mankind is made in the image of God and has no need to based their dignity on a nebulous notion of rights as determined by an anti-Christian mob.
St. JH Newman: “We have rights because we have duties.”
Pro-life is progressive. Abortion kills the progress of every unborn child. No one has the right to kill children, annd we all have a duty to protect them.