[SuziQ]

Sounds reasonable to me. He's saying that people who choose to be homosexual should have the same basic human rights we all have. He doesn't think they should have any special rights that do not pertain to any others, as many in the homosexual activist community would prefer.

As for same-sex marriage, since marriage isn't a basic human right, it's not something that homosexuals can claim for themselves. There is no RIGHT to marriage; there are all kinds of rules attached to it, based on concepts adopted by civilizations throughout history.

[Reddy]

I agree. Homosexuality by its very definition is a behavior. We need to control the debate by controlling the language.

Homosexual marriage is NOT a civil right, and by legalizing homosexual marriage the state would be legislating that children be intentionally either a mother or a father.

[Mrs. Don-o]

SuziQ, what you're saying would be true if there were a context which defined what a "human right" is -- first and foremost, the right to simply go on living. But instead, West provided a context which trivialized sexual decency and derangement to a choice of different ice cream flavors.

So I must disagree with you. I think West has played right into the hands of the perv-activists who portray homosexual behavior as a "human rights issue" (for instance, the gay-advocacy group that calls itself, with suave simplicity, HRC: the "Human Rights Campaign") --- sans definition.

It's not just the gay issue. With any issue you name, we find ourselves in a rhetorical funland in which anything you can assert as a "wanna" turns automatically into a "right."

• A right to have objective vice presented attractively to other people's children.
• A right to receive perks, benefits, subsidies and entitlements to support your disordered choices.
• A right to compel others to provide you with goods and services, even if morally offensive to the provider.
• The right to change the definitions of key words in psychology, religion, epidemiology, ethics, public health, literature, history, and law.

You name it: anything you want is a right, based on the First and Greatest Commandment, the Law of Wanna.

In this rhetorical context--- here and now--- "human rights" don't center on a right to live secure from murder, assault, fines, imprisonment, confiscation of property or loss of livelihood as retaliation for some harmless private jiggery-pokery. "Human rights" is a phrase twisted to mean "My power to demand that society affirm and subsidize anything I wanna do."

And if West doesn't understand that, he ought to maintain a wise silence until he masters the vector analysis of how "Rights Talk" spins in public.