Rights and Privileges

Posted on April 13, 2005 in Folly Watch Liberty

I always find it amusing when someone says “We should go back to the values of (choose one):

• the Founding Fathers
• the Middle Ages
• the Druids
• the Bible (especially the Old Testament)
• Calvin Coolidge and Herbert Hoover
• Pope Pius XII
• preChristian religion
• our grandparents and their grandparents

What these all share in common is a fantasy about how good things were, how all were happy, and all was truly just. What they represent is an individual desire to control the present by invoking dubious and fictionalized pasts. Take the last item. It is assumed that the world of our great great grandparents was filled with women in long skirts carrying parasols and men striding about wearing straw boaters, white pants, and striped shirts. In truth, the Nineteenth Century was rife with corruption. Small town girls were kidnapped and sold into prostitution: their survival rate into adulthood was not good in those days of unchecked venereal disease.

Those who revere Pius XII want us to overlook his early support of the Nazi Party and his paralysis in the face of Nazi atrocity –being ever so willing to condemn Allied Bombing but never the concentration camps and segregation of Jews. Those who love pre-Christian religions forget that they could be every bit as tyrannical as Fundamentalist Christianity and sometimes more so: witness the child sacrifice practised by the Phoenicians and Carthaginians for one example or the political oppression of the Romans. (Now there’s a parallel to Fundamentalism if I ever saw one!) The emphasis on the Bible as the pure word of God (despite the denials within that very anthology) obstructs understanding of our bodies and our place in nature. And going back to the values of the Founding Fathers? Slavery anyone?

These fantasy worlds spring up in the face of change, technological, moral, and spiritual. Often what people react to is a loss of privilege and they attempt to recast that privilege as a right. The holding of large amounts of money, for example, is a privilege. Free speech is a right. The government may take the one away but never the other.

The interesting thing that happens when you confuse the two is that those who defend privileges often do so at the expense of rights. Many Christians, for example, insist they are persecuted because they have been losing the privilege of promoting their religion over all others in the public schools and forums. This is just a smokescreen, just as the cries of “class warfare” are obfuscations when we talk of fair taxes and the abolition of inheritance. What the Constitution wisely protects is the freedom to practice your religion without the Government commenting on whether or not it is a good thing, without the Government stating an opinion on the matter. It denies to every believer — equally — the privilege of having the Government propagandize on behalf of their faith (or lack thereof). On the issue of the existence of God, the Government has no opinion. On the issue of whether you choose to worship or not, the Government is entirely behind your choice.

The lessons of the last 230 years should wake us up. It was not the Government that made the rights: it was the human spirit. The reason why we abolished slavery, for example, was because many felt in their souls that it was simply wrong to own another human being, that the natural condition of the human being was freedom. Even slaveholders and proponents of Jim Crow knew this: witness the lengths to which they went to deny the humanity of African Americans. By not being human, they could not have the same rights. This, of course, has been shown to be bogus.

The lesson of slavery is that we have the right to survival as long as that survival does not impinge unduly on the independence of others. Whether it is by theocracy, slavery, or indebtedness, no person has the right to control others. Those are privileges, bestowed by Government. We must not allowed them to be restored and we must bravely rethink our economic relationships with one another so that no one may make himself or herself a de facto king or queen in a democratic republic.

In a nation where the Government is the property of the People, everyone is of consequence.