Posted on 01/05/2016 5:40:17 AM PST by wagglebee
In her recent essay “The New Dignity: Gnostic, Elitist, Self-Destructive Will-to-Power”, Roberta Green Ahmanson highlighted “a rapid and radical transformation in our culture’s understanding of what it means to be human, and, in particular, what it means to have dignity”. This transformation can also be highlighted by looking in particular at what it means to have rights.
To do this we first need to recognise the difference between natural and legal rights.
Given that the human person is endowed with certain properties and potentials, there are certain things it would be wrong to prevent a person from doing. As a human person, John exists as the kind of thing which has a natural potential to drink water. This means the word “right” is slightly misleading: it is not that it is right to allow John to drink water, but that it is wrong not to allow him to. He needs nobody’s permission to drink, as his body itself gives him that potential.
What he might need, though, is protection from people wishing to prevent him from drinking. This protection can be provided only by the State, meaning human rights are legal protections of natural rights. Natural rights are therefore superior to human rights, and the State’s proper posture towards rights is to protect in law that which exists in our nature.
Now suppose one day John walks down the street and spies a parked Ferrari with doors unlocked and keys in the ignition. He drives off but is soon stopped by the police. When it is suggested to John that the Ferrari belongs to somebody else, he protests “No, no, this is not a car. This is water, and I have a right to access water. I know my rights!”
What should we make of John’s claim?
Leaving aside the small matter of theft, the point is that John has the right to access water only with respect to the nature of that thing which we signify through the word “water”. He cannot under the aegis of that word demand access to things which are not that thing. It can also be noted that we can be aware of human existence without being aware of the existence of rights, whereas we cannot be aware of rights without first being aware of human existence.
Despite being inseparable from his rights, we can say John-as-human is in some way prior to John-as-bearer-of-rights. As such, it is not quite true to say that stealing a Ferrari is the kind of thing John has no right to do. We should instead say that in being human John is the kind of thing which has no right to steal a Ferrari.
Rights and marriage
Likewise, John and Joan have the right to marry and to found a family: in relation to each other they have the natural potential to do those things which we signify through the words “marriage” and “family”. In being two women, Joan and Jane have the kind of relationship which has no right to do those things - their relationship has no natural potential to do them, meaning there is no potential for the State to protect. Were the State to contrive such a potential, the right could exist only in the form of a legal permission (which the State would then protect).
We can tell something has gone wrong by observing that the State cannot redefine legal marriage for some people whilst simultaneously retaining legal protection of the natural definition for others. We either have the natural definition embedded in law for everybody or an artificial definition created for everybody. If human rights are not legal protections of natural rights, John’s human right to marry turns out to be no more than a State-granted permission to access the word marriage and to then project onto that word his chosen meaning.
It follows that John can claim human rights only with respect to the nature of that thing which we signify through the word rights. And, prior to this, John can claim human rights only with respect to the nature of that thing which we signify through the word human. So, what does the State take that word to signify?
New rights for a new man?
There can be no such thing as “women’s human rights”; whilst every woman is a person, not all persons are women. Women have rights by virtue of being human, not by virtue of being women. The same is true of the mantra “gay rights are human rights and human rights are gay rights”. People identifying as gay have the same rights as everybody else, namely those owed by virtue of being human. Human rights cannot be ghettoized. And yet, in April of this year Randy W. Berry took up the (newly-created) post of the US State Department’s Special Envoy for the Human Rights of LGBTI Persons.
The State supposes that some people simply are transgender and are owed rights by virtue of that fact.
But this betrays a misunderstanding of what is meant by transgender, leading to a profound misunderstanding of what is meant by human.
Transgender does not signify something a person can physically be. Rather, it signifies a relationship between two identities - the physical (sex/body/fixed) and the legal (gender/mind/fluid). To say some people are transgender is to say some people are born, as it were, straddling the divide between nature and law, with one foot in each world. It is to say that human identity is half flesh, half law.
Thus the problem is not that human rights have been redefined. The root problem is a prior one: just as we cannot redefine legal marriage for some people only, so too we either have the natural definition of human embedded in law for everybody or an artificial definition created for everybody. Given that the State now regards some people to be transgender, the State does have an artificial definition for some people. Therefore it has an artificial definition for everybody.
The disappearance of natural rights
We cannot under the aegis of the word human validly demand access to identities which are not that thing, yet the State does now permit access to such identities. Man has been de-sexed in law, with our fundamental legal identity now consisting of a self-chosen state of mind, a gender identity, the concomitant effect of which is the redefinition of human rights: if we are “new men”, we are not owed old (natural) rights. The “rights” (permissions) owed to New Man are not limited by the nature of the body and instead exist in the form of innumerable legal permissions, fit for our unlimited imagination.
Indeed the artificial legal version of man must, like a virus, go on to infect the whole of the legal person. Legal recognition of authentic man is eaten away by the acid of gender identity. New Man is owed a new knowledge (where fact is opinion and opinion is fact) and, as Ahmanson shows, a new dignity, the form of which is not sculpted by the hand of God but is instead moulded by the endlessly shifting landscape of the human mind.
New Man also requires a new Language, in which words are deemed detachable from reality, and a new morality. This artificial morality trades under the name tolerance - a legal declaration that it is now wrong to say that something is wrong (legally imposed lawlessness).
Again, we are referring not to people having legal protection of concepts (such as dignity) but to each individual having State-granted permission to access mere words, and to choose for himself or herself personal meanings for them.
Each and every word becomes a kind of skeleton key, able to unlock the meaning of all other words. Equality means X for John but Y for Joan; dignity means this for Joan but that for Jane. With no shared sense of the meaning behind the word human, there can be no shared sense of any aspect existing “inside” that word. The word disintegrates.
But to suppose the State can create a New Man is akin to supposing sunglasses can create a new sun. Sunglasses are limited to being able to darken our view of the authentic sun. So it is when we redefine the legal meaning of human: we legally darken all aspects of authentic man. There can be no new sun. There can be no new man. The State cannot detach from us our authentic dignity, and is instead limited to being able to hide that dignity.
In law, the word dignity becomes a cipher behind which is only a void. Likewise, the State is incapable of bringing into law new human identities such as a John who can become a Joan, or a Joan who can marry a Jane.
But the State can eject from law all recognition of natural identities. It can and it has. In doing so it claims to have dissolved the category of sexual difference, necessitating both a renunciation of the natural family and the full de-regulation of sexual activity.
The State has bet against authentic man, with LGBTI human rights the mechanism through which protection of natural rights is to be erased from the legal system. The choice is not whether to have legal permissions for some or legal protections for all. No, it is whether to have legal protections for all or legal permissions for all.
If the State gets to decide what kind of thing a human is, it also gets to decide what kind of thing it is within our nature to do. Who knows, perhaps it will decide John is the kind of thing which does indeed have the right to steal a Ferrari?
Daniel Moody is a philosopher from Dorset, England. This article was first published on his blog, Gentlemind.
And this is why the left believes it can strip us of our God-given rights.
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Basically redefining the meaning of the word “is”. I go along with his “legalizing lawlessness” as being the forced tolerance of political correctness.
Excellent post.
For thousands of year men and women have done a role towards the advancement to society and yet the liberals, communists, ,.socialists, etc all think that they should redefine what has worked to suit their agenda. Their perversion and mental sickness.
The government has determined that a person’s gender is based on how they feel at any given moment. The government determines how you were born based on how you define yourself. That determination is not static. You can be born different ways depending on your self-realized status at a moment in time. You can be born a woman until you were born a man. You were born straight until you were not.
We call this “science”.
Yes. This person understands Christianity which created the Age of Reason and put Objective Truth into our Constitution and “Justice” (virtue) System so it isn’t arbitrary and unjust.
Our toxic culture has been working on the elimination of Truth (our Constitution) for arbitrary, irrational man-made-up “law” which is unconstitutional.
The so-called “judges” destroy words or make them the opposite of what they are so there can be no debate, no “thinking” by children who hear those now irrational words/concepts-—like two males sodomizing each other is a marriage and “good”. It is bizarro world (Spartan,Satanism, paganism, an irrational world like in Afghanistan where harems consist of pretty little dancing boys).
Only Christianity was capable of ridding the world of evil habits like slavery and pederasty (not that the Christians are reigning in America Law any longer.) Their rational worldview is eliminated for paganism, socialism, irrational elitism and satanism (sodomy). The so-called “Justice System” kicked out our Justice System for a Vice system of Lenin and Stalin.
Control Words and you can control the Minds, esp. of the little children growing up in that evil, toxic culture where Truth can NEVER exist. They become totally irrational (godless animals to be herded and culled by the elite). “Good” becomes whatever you desire and whatever has the force of law (like in Nazi Germany.) Remove God and everything is permissible (Dostoevsky).
It is Ficthe’s (Marxism) wet dream to dehumanize all little children so they will be so irrational, “Up will be Down” and “Freedom is Slavery”. (words are meaningless).
Google Fichte and “Snow is Black quote about bragging about destroying the minds of children “for the State” He literally wanted to destroy Individualism and unique identity in children so they are nothing but godless (unthinking) animals-—where they will remain “happy slaves” of whomever for life.
The state has determined that “up” is “down” and “down” is “up.”
And when our society jumps off an eighty foot cliff, the rocks at the bottom still will not care one whit about what the state has determined.
They abandon God, which means they abandon truth, which means they abandon conscience and reason, which means they abandon the simple concept of right and wrong, which means they abandon the possibility of justice, which means they abandon the rule of law, which means they abandon the basis for republican self-government, which means they abandon the bulwark of ordered liberty, which means that they and their posterity end up, inevitably, as slaves, or dead.
To abandon God is to abandon everything good, and to embrace self-destruction and the destruction of your children.
Thanks for this excellent post.
This debate over LGBT “rights” is currently raging in the United Nations.
LGBTers want the Yogyakarta Principles included in the UN’s Declaration of Human Rights.
But the Yogyakarta Principles have met significant pushback from UN member states; the document’s rejection so far is based on the same cogent argument as in the above post.
Namely, homosexuals already have the same human rights as the rest of us, as defined in the existing Declaration—the right to be free from state murder, extrajudicial arrest, incarceration, rape, torture, etc.
The Yogyakarta Principles actually seek to grant new “legal permissions”—misdefined as “rights” —to a newly protected LGBT class, just as this post so eloquently spells out.
Men choosing to “identify” as women, and having access to children to recruit them into weird sex practices, are not “human rights.”
Granting legal permissions under the guise of human rights inevitably results in the violation of the human rights of others, particularly children.
These statements have been made in the UN.
Yes. It is actually the worldview of Progressives (Marxists) called “scientism” and the purpose of this indoctrination into pagan/satanist worldview is to remove Reason and Logic from our “Justice” System. They need to condition children to believe that “Snow is Black”—any irrational thing the State makes up so they are incapable of a Christian Worldview (using Reason and Logic which created Individual Natural Rights from God.)
Collective, “group think” cultures can NEVER have people who actually can use Logic and Reason, for they will never agree to being slaves of man or a tyrannical system. (that is if they are men of Virtue).
Destroy Virtue, which our public schools are designed to do, and you collapse Western Civilization. They are programming children to be irrational, addicted “bots” who are removed from Reality and Truth (Natural family/nature) and forced into a “group (non) think” system of irrationality.
bump
That alliance ends and Oceania, allied with Eurasia, fights Eastasia, a change which occurred during Hate Week, dedicated to creating patriotic fervour for the Party’s perpetual war. The public are blind to the change; in mid-sentence an orator changes the name of the enemy from “Eurasia” to “Eastasia” without pause. When the public are enraged at noticing that the wrong flags and posters are displayed, they tear them down—thus the origin of the idiom “We’ve always been at war with Eastasia”;
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nineteen_Eighty-Four
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