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March 24, 2010 05:31 AM UTC
29 Comments
As the brother of a lesbian and the nephew of a lesbian, I thank you for this note, Congressman Polis.
This is the civil rights issue of our generation.
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A better argument can be made that it is a matter of social rights.
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Another candidate for “the civil rights issue of our generation” might be active US support provided to radical extremist (? terrorist ?) elements in the government of Israel to keep Palestinians stateless, and thus without any civil or political rights.
Through the actions of our government, by indirectly funding and tacitly approving the awful treatment imposed, these people do not even have the right to have rights.
The
Islamofascist?Judeofascist ? perpetrators(no, the perpetrators don’t actually believe in God, in my experience, except to say that God gave the land to the descendants of Abraham)
are now even going after liberal and progressive and justice-loving Jews like the folks at B’tselem.
Yet another candidate: the continuation of torture at Gitmo under President Obama.
No more threats to rape a detainee’s mother; no more mutilation of a detainee’s genitals.
Thankfully Rahm has permitted Obama to stop those outrages.
But we still hold captive about 60 men that we have declared, after 8 years of interrogations, as completely innocent. In my book, that wanton disregard of natural law would be torture, if I was the one being held. I would be reminded daily that my captors regarded me as less than human, because the values espoused by my captors say explicitly that human beings cannot be treated that way. Under those conditions, I might have confessed to the Lindberg kidnapping.
Some people have constructed a hierarchy of rights, and say that civil and political rights are more important than economic, social and cultural rights. I tend to agree.
Is discrimination against GLBT’s bad ? Of course it is. But likening it to the discrimination against African-Americans 100 years ago, that just doesn’t hold up to careful examination.
But then, you weren’t being serious with that assertion, were you ? I am overreacting to a rhetorical foil.
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It doesn’t just involve prom dates. You can replace “gay” with “black” and find that the two issues are formally indistinguishable, except in the minds of people who harbor one bigotry and not the other.
There are three basic reasons why your distinction is inaccurate:
1) Gays aren’t just deprived the right to attend prom with their date, but also substantial and basic legal rights like marriage.
2) the Civil Rights Movement did not just extend equal protection under the law, but also legal protections against private sector discrimination.
3) School districts are government entities, so even if 2 above were not the case, this is an act of government discrimination against gays, not private discrimination.
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Civil rights pertain to one’s participation in the state as citizens.
Pre-Civil Rights movement of the 1950’s – 1960’s, African-Americans were denied the ability to participate as citizens: voting, redress, equal protection, etc.
Look around. Are homosexuals denied any civil rights ? If you think so, please list them.
In my ignorance, I can’t think of any. I can only think of marriage and the right to serve in the military, neither of which is clearly a “civil” right.
The right to marry is not about citizenship, I don’t think, or participation in the state as a citizen.
A better argument can perhaps be made that the right to serve in the military is a civil right, but to my recollection DADT opponents consistently treat it as a social right.
“… the two issues are formally indistinguishable …”
Now you embrace form over substance ? Even Steve Harvey will accede that they are substantially distinguishable, n’est pas ?
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form is substance, in the sense that we are talking about the form of distribution of rights, rather than the substance of how that distribution varies according to how it applies to various groups being descriminated against.
You included “equal protection” as a civil right, and, in fact, “equal rights” was precisely what the high school students were denied in the narrative above. The school, a governmental agency, denied the would-be prom goers equal access to a government sponsored activity whose function was as a gathering for young people coming as romantically-involved couples.
Furthermore, the civil rights movement became defined to include protection against discrimination in all forms. It is now understood as a civil right that no restauranteer can refuse to serve you just because of the color of your skin. There is no difference in form between that discrimination and a school refusing to allow a gay couple to attend a prom. And since there is no difference in form, there is no difference in substance relevant to this discussion.
Your hair-splitting and artificial distinction between “social rights” and “civil rights” is meaningful only to those trying to deny to some what are generally understood to be civil rights by redefining what they are being denied as something other than civil rights. Semantic games don’t interest me; treating people with dignity and decency does.
It is a civil rights issue to be denied equal access on equal terms to a school dance; it is a civil rights issue to be denied equal access on equal terms to a legal status with various symbolic and material implications attached to it; it is a civil rights issue to be systematically discriminated against. I’ll leave the sophistry of trying to define that simple and clear reality out of existence to you.
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the subtle distinctions between social rights such as you are upset about
and
civil rights, where institutions of government deny the humanity of people, executing and torturing them, and worse.
But you then have to quit calling yourself a “Progressive.”
Agreed ?
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when governments torture and execute people?
So, thanks to your mastery of “subtle distinctions,” a civil right isn’t violated merely when a government agency discriminates against some class of citizens (as in the case of denying a gay couple access to a school-sponsored prom), but only when that government agency commits physical violence in the process? My, that is a “subtle distinction,” one so subtle that it has never been discerned before as part of the definition of a civil right or its violation.
And we, as a society, have not denied gays and transexuals their humanity, or committed brutalities against them? Few who have experienced discrimination would agree with the former, nor would the families of those who have been beaten, tortured and killed agree with the latter.
You’re absolutely right: The moment I start rationalizing away one more incarnation of “man’s inhumanity to man”, as you so blithely and absurdly do, is the moment I would have to quit calling myself a “progressive.”
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Am I projecting, or are you equating the actions of individuals with the actions of the state ?
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“Civil rights” are those rights accorded any “civilian”. Traditionally, they were defined as those rights vis-a-vis the state, but came to be extended to those rights that the state has guaranteed to protect against private infringement. We all understand that for a private establishment that serves the public to refuse to serve someone on the basis of their race is a civil rights violation, and, in fact, can be investigated and prosecuted as a civil rights violation (according to the Civil Rights Act of 1964).
Furthermore, in the case described above, this broader definition is not required, because the school is a government agency. Denial of that couple of the right to attend the prom as a couple was an action of the state. So even according to your narrower definition, this was a civil rights violation.
I don’t know how often and in how many ways I can repeat this. 1) The young couple’s civil rights were denied because the state discriminated against them; 2) we have come to understand, and to legislate the understanding, that private discrimination can also constitute civil rights abuses; 3) the definition of civil rights abuses does not include some threshold of violence necessary for any state or private action to rise to the level of a civil rights abuse; and 4) if the existence of endemic violence is necessary for you to consider some category of social prejudice to rise to the level of denying some group of people their humanity, then evidence of such violence is not lacking in this issue.
Take each one of those separately or together, as you please, but do not continue to pretend that the inclusion of one somehow nullifies any other. The first is sufficient to debunk your exclusion of state discrimination against a gay couple from the definition of a violation of their civil rights. The rest are included merely to paint a more complete and illuminating picture.
since it will take you a long time to find the definition you are looking for.
From Cornell Law School: “A civil right is an enforceable right or privilege, which if interfered with by another gives rise to an action for injury.”
Not limited to interference by the state; not limited to violence and torture; not limited to rights pertaining to political participation. Get used to it.
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I read your definition, Steve, and try as I may, I cannot figure out how any tort claim is not also a “civil right,” in the scheme you proffer.
So if I trespass on your property, I have violated your civil rights.
Your definition also obviously includes any complaint under contract law.
When I’m late with my rent check, bingo, again I’ve violated your civil rights.
Its a brave, new world for trial lawyers.
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that is what “civil right” literally means. You don’t need Cornell University Law School to tell you that: You just need to look at the word and think about its semantic meaning. It was through extending civil rights protections to those categories of people who had been denied them that the term came to be used to refer to some narrower set of rights.
If you recall, Barron, it was you who insisted that the word had a very narrow meaning, technically and absolutely it would seem from your arguments, in order to diminish the violation of the rights of people on the basis of their sexual orientation. But the relevant point always has been, are the rights of some category of people being denied because of their categorical membership, not what “kinds” of rights are being denied. Any denial of rights on the basis of categorical membership is a civil rights violation, because civil rights are any rights.
Because of the historical and legal association of the term with systematic denial of rights, we don’t generally use it when discussing individual infringements of rights under contract and tort law. Since we have had “civil rights legislation” for much of our history as a nation, “civil rights violations” have been defined by reference to either the letter or spirit of that legislation.
You insisted on relying on a false semantic argument to defend an odious moral distinction, and didn’t succeed in doing so. The arbitrariness of your disinction was made clear by the first line of the first page of the first law school article devoted to the subject that I opened up, upon Googling “civil rights” at your indirect suggestion. Are you sure you still want to be smug about it?
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That’s what the Academy does.
And the folks who do this deep thinking have constructed several categorical frameworks for analyzing and discussing rights:
positive rights vs. negative rights
natural rights vs. legal rights
civil & political rights vs. social, economic & cultural rights.
Only on a blindly “progressive” blog would the mashup you assert go unchallenged.
Or the silliness that “gay rights are the civil rights issue of our generation.”
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In another vein, I must say that your writing of late is much improved, far more accessible. My compliments.
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It’s important not to confuse semantics and typologies with reality. We reduce reality to packets which we can manage in a variety of ways, and this is a necessary and functional process. But it yields diminishing returns to the extent that we debate the packets rather than the realities they purport to represent.
The typology of rights you identify (civil, economic, social) is one typology for one set of cognitive purposes. I have never heard it presented as a hierarchy, which, if done, is strictly a value judgment and not analytically defensible. How these categories are used varies according to who is using them and why. Some uses are more intellectually defensible than others.
I’ll be honest with you: I have always considered typologies to be overused in academe, and dynamical systems modeling to be underutilized. We live in a dynamical world that for most purposes can best be understood, systemically, not as sets of discrete categories, but rather as numerous punctuated continua defining an n-dimensional theoretic space (punctuated because variation along the continua is often clumpy rather than smooth).
Even some things which seem to be quintessentially, in nature, divided into discrete categories, on closer examination, aren’t quite so much so. Species, for instance: When you consider subspecies and populations subdividing those categories, and closely related genuses clumping them together, they start to appear a bit less discrete. But species also provide an example of when the use of categories really is the best way to match our cognitions to reality.
Rights most certainly are not such a phenomenon. Rights are a massive sprawling concept that we divide up only in order to deal, cognitively, with particular swaths of it at a time. We can talk about economic rights in order to focus on the concept of what material needs should be considered a right. We talk about political rights in order to consider what kinds of participation in governance should be considered a right. We talk about social rights only to consider what kinds of social relational choices should be considered a right. They are not perfectly discrete (is freedom of assembly and association a social or political right? Is labor unionization an economic, social, or political right?), nor are they necessarily all-inclusive. Other than enabling us to think about rights in related clumps rather than as an undifferentiated mass, there is little or no social theoretical justification for these typologies.
Debates concerning civil rights in the United States have long revolved around the issue of categorical denials of any and all identified rights (however they are defined) rather than identification of what rights are to be defined as “civil”. To present as a major issue in this discussion whether the gay couple in the story were denied civil rights or social rights is to be intentionally focused on misdirection, rather than clarification.
In fact, there is nothing whatsoever silly about the assertion that gay rights is the civil rights issue of our generation. The parallels between the civil rights movements for African Americans and for gays are extraordinary, and the essential issues are identical. No, you are right, political participation and the denial of it is not one of the dimensions that are shared. But the denial of one of the most basic human rights to a minority population is no less odious, and no less worthy of moral condemnation.
I get that you don’t get that. That doesn’t make your semantic and typological focus any more relevant or convincing.
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I understood that entire post. Thanks for dumbing it down. You used to be more obtuse, and folks read all kinds of motives into that.
I completely agree that the hierarchy I invoked is an artificial construct, but believe it is useful for the present analysis.
I recognize the assertion in question as silly because there are plainly more urgent civil rights issues to be redressed.
The two more urgent issues I cited are of particular interest to me, having invested in them personally, though there are surely others, some of which may be even more urgent than these.
##### In the case of a Palestinian living in the occupied West Bank (Samaria and Judea, if you prefer,) they do not have citizenship in a state. Citizenship is the ticket a person needs to be able to have any rights protected, because that’s what states do, fundamentally: protect rights.
They do not have the right to have rights, in a manner of speaking.
##### In the case of the Guantanamo Detainees who have been thoroughly investigated and cleared for release: these men are all citizens of some state (unless, again, they are Palestinian.)
However, their government is powerless to protect their rights against violation by the US. The only rights they have are those afforded through the operation of US law, which has been utterly discretionary.
If a “right” is at the discretion of the state, is it really a right ?
I see a qualitative difference between having no rights whatsoever, on the one hand, and in having one particular asserted right, one not recognized by the state, denied, on the other.
You see an elegant equivalence between zero rights and 25% or 75% rights, and for that I must yield, for I do not share your vision. To me, the very humanity of the two groups I think are in recognizably worse positions is being denied. I don’t see that happening to homosexuals who cannot get the state to sanction their unions, while protecting so many of their other rights.
post script: I believe that certain rights are inalienable and are “endowed by my Creator,” by which I mean they are intrinsic in the human condition. States can grant some rights. Clubs can grant some rights. But the right to life, for example, does not come from any earthly authority, so it cannot be rescinded by one, either.
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of horribly denied rights.
I disagree that either of them in any way reduce the salience of the issue of gay rights, which refers to discrimination against a class of people that live in all cultures at all times, and have been denegrated and marginalized in many, for centuries.
As for “natural rights,” which I personally consider a useful fiction, I don’t see their relevance to this discussion, other than to invoke them to argue that the right to partner for life romantically with the person of your choosing could easily be considered one. (Rights are a human invention: They don’t exist in nature. The concept of “natural rights” is really the articulation of a moral perspective which has, thankfully, become recognized to well-serve human beings collectively, and so has been reified into something given from above in order to strengthen the case for respecting them).
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but I think you’ve won me over to your position.
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I owe you a beer, and a bow of respect.
What gives you the right, as a straight white Christian male, to rank minorities and play favorites? Fuck off with your condescending bullshit.
Wholeheartedly agree.
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by your subtle, nuanced argument.
But then I realized that this is about your religious beliefs.
I do not mean to attack your religious beliefs. You are entitled to them; they are just as valid for you as mine are for me.
I was trying to illuminate some differences between the struggle for civil rights by African-Americans and the struggle for social rights by homosexuals. Congressman Polis conflated the two; botw elevated a struggle for social rights to the level of a struggle for civil rights.
The intellectually rigorous can argue the differences; the religiously offended cannot. My insult was unintended. I apologize for questioning that which cannot be questioned.
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Then should a society be able to make that the law so as not to offend those people?
Here’s the thing Barron, no one is asking you to take a male date to the prom. They are just asking that each person can take their sweetie to the prom.
First you were talking about Israel, then you were talking about Guantanamo Bay, and somehow those two things led you to say black people are more worthy than gay people of civil rights. Your argument made no sense. It led nowhere.
The only reasonable thing to conclude is that your ranking of minorities is based on bigotry, since you provided no evidence otherwise.
Next time you try to illuminate some differences between the struggle for civil rights by African-Americans and the struggle for social rights by homosexuals, you might want to find some differences. Then illuminate them.
Until then, you’re a bigot. Hope that fact doesn’t offend your delicate straight white male Christian sensibility. I know we all have to be careful how we talk around you people.
He has “intellectual rigormortis” (thanks for sharing that, BX), which probably explains why he keeps getting intellectually buried, or cremated, or otherwise disposed of.
I read somewhere once that there’s some kind of post-mortem “scream” that sometimes occurs when air escapes the body sometime after death. Maybe that’s what “Barron X” really is, given that he’s suffering “intellectual rigormortis.”
Let’s Glennbeck it, and find out:
“X” can be short for “ex post,” which means “from after.” And Barron clearly is an alternative spelling of “Barren,” which means “infertile,” which is the opposite of “life bearing” and therefore means that which is devoid of life; in other words, Death. So “Barron X” really means “from after death”!!! He is the post-mortem scream, after all!
Glad we solved that one.
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good job
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Very poignant.
Those who resist that bend toward justice in the arc of history, aside from imposing a little local suffering in the name of their bigotries, serve mostly to reinforce the growing commitment in others to be less petty and repugnant.
Among the pictures of the Little Rock Nine being escorted into school amidst the angry faces of misguided racists lining the way, there is one with a young white woman whose face is contorted with rage. I saw that young woman interviewed decades later, saying with the utmost sincerity and humility that she had been wrong, shamefully wrong.
The Itawamba County School District apparently prefers to repeat history, rather than learn from it.
Jared, thank you for helping GLBT students. We have so much to do to educate so many who are not students anymore. This young lady has a great start now that she has learned the importance of being true to oneself.
And, thank you and our Colorado Democratic members for getting a beginning form of health care for a modern U.S. through to Obama.