Leftists Confused About Rights. Again.
I was browsing around the feminist blogosphere the other day, and I noticed an interesting item over at Feministing objecting to the recent federal court case that overturned Washington state's law requiring pharmacists to provide emergency contraception.
This is [expletive]. The state had a very compelling reason for the requirement: As we all know, EC gets less effective over time and in rural areas there may not be another pharmacy for miles. And pharmacists who don’t believe in birth control or erroneously think that EC is an abortifacient were free to pass the prescription off to coworker who would fill it. As the Seattle Times wrote in an editorial calling on the state to appeal the ruling, this decision “sends a message that pharmacists’ personal views can take priority over patients’ rights...”
...It’s an upside-down world where pharmacists’ refusal rights supersede patients’ rights to timely care and the conscience of religious institutions trumps the rights of the individuals–religious or not–to access the health care coverage they need.
I personally don't think that such a right, assuming that one exists, necessarily ought to impose obligations on other private entities. The weird thing is that this doesn't seem to bother a lot of people. I have all this time been under the mistaken impression that rights came in the form of government restraint, but now they come in the form of government creating such legally enforceable obligations between citizens. Eventually, everyone will be entitled to everything, and we all be held accountable by the nanny state. For once, thank god for the federal court system.
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Re: Leftists Confused About Rights. Again.
You hit on the critical difference between positive "rights" and negative liberty. A positive "right" to a good or service that others produce and provide necessarily infringes on the providers' liberty to contract, freedom of commerce, and liberty of conscience.
How does the thought that there exists some transcendental "right" to specific medicines accord with the fact that those medicines have only recently come into existence? Was every pre-1960 pharma scientist who didn't invent hormonal birth control violating women's "rights" by not inventing the Pill sooner? For that matter, was every pre-1960 individual who didn't go into pharmaceutical science violating that right through omission?
The logic is completely untenable, of course. There are big problems when people want to usurp the rhetoric of "rights" when they actually just mean "things that I feel people ought to have if they want it." Huge difference.
Re: Leftists Confused About Rights. Again.
What timing - I just happened to post this video on my Facebook page on Friday.
I've had this video in the virtual vault for a while now, and I try to post it whenever it seems pertinent to whatever the main subject of debate is.
Feb '12
Re: Leftists Confused About Rights. Again.
So if I have the "updated" rights language lingo down correctly, it means that someone owes me some firearms right?
Re: Leftists Confused About Rights. Again.
That Williams bit is good. I think I'll start posting it too.
Jul '10
Re: Leftists Confused About Rights. Again.
I thought the entire purpose of the first amendment, and years of delusional thinking by people who believe the words "separation of church and state" can be found in the constitution, was to provide that the "conscience of religious institutions trumps the rights of the individuals" who wish to use their influence with a tyrannical regime to force the religious institution to submit its conscience to the demands of the more popular party. In other words, just because it’s a Catholic hospital, Holy Cross Hospital cannot be forced to provide abortions to the abortionphile majority on demand.
You might think “abortionphile” is a bit strong, but there are those who think that abortion is the most important women’s health issue, more important than any and all cancers, heart disease, osteoporosis, Alzheimer’s or any other disease.
Apr '11
Re: Leftists Confused About Rights. Again.
The left has so manipulated the political vocabulary that arguments for limited government are incomprehensible to the average citizen.
Which was probably the point all along.
Re: Leftists Confused About Rights. Again.
Stay out of that section of town, son. Nothing but bad girls there.
Re: Leftists Confused About Rights. Again.
Thank you, Andrew. What a brilliant post. I shall make it my "right" to use it whenever I encounter the wrong-headed.
May '10
Re: Leftists Confused About Rights. Again.
What world does the writer live in? Are there really places in Washington that are so remote you aren't five or ten minutes away from another pharmacy? Do we live in a country where you can take the time to have unprotected sex but you can't be bothered to drive to the next town to get your abortificant of choice? Are we really so lazy or stupid that we need to trample the right for a pharmacist to conscientiously object to emergency contraceptives?
I, for one, am tired of having to respond to asinine counterfactuals to defend fundamental liberties.
Re: Leftists Confused About Rights. Again.
Superb post, and timely. Thank you!
May '10
Re: Leftists Confused About Rights. Again.
Steyn wrote just the other day about the corruption of rights.
Oct '10
Re: Leftists Confused About Rights. Again.
You can actually stand reading feminists blogs? Some of them are as close to true evil as I've encountered.
Oct '11
Re: Leftists Confused About Rights. Again.
This post and its comments all make the case very well, but that case is obvious to all of us. Do any of you even try to understand this from the point of view of the left? Unless we do that, we're talking in an echo chamber.
To the left, rights do not flow from God, reason, the nature of Man, or the Magna Carta. These things have no place in their conceptual realm other than as tools of argument. Their unspoken motivation, their paradigm, is that rights flow from power. A right is what they can compel others to give them. They are children, literally. If they want it and can compel you to provide it, it is a right.
We cannot counter the left if we imagine they share our motives and mental sets.
Apr '11
Re: Leftists Confused About Rights. Again.
Eric Ames:
...“sends a message that pharmacists’ personal views can take priority over patients’ rights...”
...It’s an upside-down world where pharmacists’ refusal rights supersede patients’ rights to timely care and the conscience of religious institutions trumps the rights of the individuals–religious or not–to access the health care coverage they need.
My understanding is that many pharmacies don't carry schedule-2 drugs, not out of religious conviction but because they got tired of dispensing them at gun-point. Why should abortifacients be protected but pain medication not be? The law defers to pharmacists' judgments for other drugs but not these. Why do panicky women have the 'right' to morning-after pills but cancer patients don't have a 'right' to get pain medications?
Feb '12
Re: Leftists Confused About Rights. Again.
I seem to remember Thomas Sowell spending a lot of time in The Vision of the Anointed differentiating between positive rights (rights-to) and negative rights (rights from). A positive right requires someone else to be forced into your service. If I have a right to food, someone else has an obligation to farm, whether or not he wants to or feels he is compensated worth his while.
Feb '12
Re: Leftists Confused About Rights. Again.
jt
Eric Ames:
...“sends a message that pharmacists’ personal views can take priority over patients’ rights...”
...It’s an upside-down world where pharmacists’ refusal rights supersede patients’ rights to timely care and the conscience of religious institutions trumps the rights of the individuals–religious or not–to access the health care coverage they need.
My understanding is that many pharmacies don't carry schedule-2 drugs, not out of religious conviction but because they got tired of dispensing them at gun-point. Why should abortifacients be protected but pain medication not be? The law defers to pharmacists' judgments for other drugs but not these. Why do panicky women have the 'right' to morning-after pills but cancer patients don't have a 'right' to get pain medications? · 7 minutes ago
I have wondered about this before. Here in BC, Canada, getting an oxycontin script filled (my mother has damage from osteoperosis at the site of a 20 year old spinal fusion) is about as easy as getting a weapons permit. I would think that pain sufferers would be more sympathetic than people getting the pill.
Oct '10
Re: Leftists Confused About Rights. Again.
Exactly. Similarly, Sen. Gullibrand was arguing that if we don't require employers to have health insurance that paid for contraception, that we would be taking away womens right to take contraception. Absolutely ridiculous.That's like saying because my employer does not provide me with a company car, that he is taking away my right to own a car.
Aug '11
Re: Leftists Confused About Rights. Again.
An excellent post. Another way of quickly distinguishing the so-called "negative rights" from the left's so-called "positive rights" is to look at the Bill of Rights. Not one of the rights enumerated in the Bill of Rights directly requires anyone -- even the government -- to spend money.
Barfly suggests "We cannot counter the left if we imagine they share our motives and mental sets." So here is one way of thinking about rights as the left does. If we go back to older legal systems, a "right" is also the legally recognized long standing power or entitlement to do something. In that sense the Church had the right to try criminals who had committed crimes on Church land. What the left is trying to do is to establish these recognized long standing powers with a barrage of new rights/entitlements. Once established they will be almost impregnable. Look at Greece.
Apr '11
Re: Leftists Confused About Rights. Again.
I have come to view rights in much the manner Mr. Williams states in the video above. I view the role of government in a just society to acknowledge the natural rights of Man and defend them from infringement by other men. I view this as absolutely necessary as natural rights are inseparable from the very idea of humanity. Our rights require no external assistance in their manifestation, much like breathing. They are those things that exists for all humans regardless of location, economy, or time. One's own rights are instinctive and can not be repressed by one's own self much like breathing (suicide can of course end all rights and is self inflicted). Thus our rights can not be given by external sources only suppressed by them. History shows us this is true when we look at tyrants and dictatorships past and present. The supression of another's rights is the denial of their basic humanity, and therefore criminal.
To claim health care is a right is to say that health care is an intrinsic part of human nature, and its absence a denial of humanity. A human denied health care is made less than human...continued
Apr '11
Re: Leftists Confused About Rights. Again.
resumed...
But, consider a man alone on an island. If health care were a basic human right. Than if he became injured and could not properly treat himself he is made less than human by a quirk of chance. Chance and nature can not deny your humanity or oppress it. Freedom of expression though cannot be denied to this lone man except by that which denies us all things death. In fact death, is ultimately the only way to truly deny a human any of his rights, anything else is only a restriction and never a complete repression.