Rights.

In the United States recently there have been three cases of groups of people doing controversial things. The most noticeable one at the moment is that of a group wishing to build a Community Center near the Ground Zero site in New York City. The group is predominantly Muslim and as a result people are connecting them with the hijackers of 9/11/2001 and the majority of citizens of the USA are against the building of the center. While this position is moronic, the Cordoba Center and Al-Qaeda being identical is like saying Bishop Tutu and P.W. Botha were part of the same ideology because they were both Christians, people are idiots.

Another group, a 50 member church in Gainesville, Florida, ridiculously named the Dove World Outreach Center is planning a "Burn a Qu'ran Day" on 9/11/2010. It should be noted that Gainseville, Fl is about as redneck, hick, and ignorant a place as you can find in the US of A, possibly more frightening than Alabama, but even their Mayor is opposed to this event. However, it has been publicized to such an extent that the Pope has condemned the action, and Afghans have burned the preacher of the church in effigy.

The third group, the Westboro Baptist Church, believes that the deaths of military personnel abroad is a result of God's condemnation of America for tolerating homosexuality and other "filth." As a result they have taken it upon themselves to picket the funerals of servicemen with signs and yelling about this sort of stuff. If you ever want to be really appalled go to their web site, it is truly astonishing.

This blog post is about rights, and I have brought up these three examples in order to talk about rights. In the USA it is without a doubt that all three of these groups have the legal right, protected under the law, to carry out these activities. The freedom to publicly assemble, speak, and practice your religion are all protected under the Constitution of the United States.

The question that clearly springs to mind at this point is whether these activities should happen or not?

I'll start my reply to this question with an outline of what rights are. A right is an ideal, it is not a real thing. You can't touch it, feel it, weigh it. It is a thought, a concept. When Jefferson wrote in the Declaration of Independence that, "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness." he was talking a bunch of tosh. The very idea of rights are relatively recent. For the vast majority of history, pretty much anywhere in the world, the concept of owning someone else was taken for granted. Owning someone is entirely inconsistent with the concept that everyone has rights. When a husband is beating up his children it seems quite clear that if The Creator has given these children the right to life, liberty and happiness then those rights are useless things without meaning.

Rights are ideals by which a society judges itself, but those rights only matter when they are upheld in practicality through the application of power. The United States was a signatory to the Geneva Convention, has as a founding document the above stated belief in human rights, and through Congress authorized combat in Afghanistan, yet hundreds of men with their inalienable rights have been deprived of liberty and the pursuit of happiness without recourse to trial despite the clear claims of every human rights organization in the world that this is illegal and a violation of rights. When the power in the USA, that of the government and military, decided that certain people did not have rights, then they did not have rights. There are many other examples of such actions. I myself have been illegally stopped and searched in direct contravention of my rights by a sheriff in Michigan, but we both knew that if I kicked up any fuss he was going to beat me up, put me in jail and make up a charge (probably assaulting an officer).

Rights are ideals for a society to live by, but societies don't always live by their ideals. In the above three cases I find one of the proposed activities (the Cordoba Center) to be largely a laudable one, a good thing. The majority of my fellow citizens disagree.
The second activity, that of burning Qu'rans is in itself entirely harmless, it's just burning paper. That a bunch of idiots in Gainseville Fl are cheering themselves up by burning something shouldn't be news. What is upsetting and egregious about the whole thing is that it has been done to upset a billion people around the world. That's what I am against, the sheer rudeness of telling the media about it, and the idiocy of the media to think that the information should be passed on. In the USA I would guess that the split on burning the Qu'ran or not would be close to 50/50, but that's just a guess.
The third activity, that of protesting military funerals is almost universally derided, but has been allowed to stand in a court case.
Should these activities be allowed to happen? In a democratic society should not the majority view be the guide to what should and should not be allowed? Should my opinion actually be the decision for what is right or wrong?

The idea of a right is that it supersedes public opinion. That is that if you have a right to do something, you can do it even if every other person in the country is against it, and even if your government would like to pass a law preventing you from doing it you can still do it.

So, if you believe in the rights under the Constitution then you believe that all of these activities should be allowed to go forward. Now, you are allowed to have an opinion about whether the activities are good activities or bad activities. You are allowed to state your opinion on the matter. But here is the sharp point of the matter. If you believe that your opinion should make any difference at all in whether the activity happens or not, you are against the concept of rights. If you think being offended by the activities should influence whether they happen or not, you are against rights.

This is the hardest thing about tolerance, the hardest thing about having the ideals of freedom. it means that you must support the ability of people to do things you despise to the point that your opinion is irrelevant.

This is very far from an ideal thing, which is the problem with ideals. Any idealism is less complicated than reality. Any right that you can think of will have unpleasant consequences when put into practice, and when faced with these complications. But I think these consequences, the cost of rights, is well worth the fantastic rewards that come from being able to live in a place whereby the mob do not decide what your life will be.