Over the years, the American political left has excelled at using the vocabulary of rights—human and civil—to bolster and advance its policy objectives. Conservatives would do well to copy them.
Building on the successes of the civil rights movement of the 1960s, progressives and Democrats have successfully cloaked their policy platform in rights-based language. In this way the battle over voter ID laws was transformed into a crusade against the resurgence of Jim Crow-era racialism. Attempts to defend traditional marriage became not a negotiable policy problem but an attempt to keep gay men and women from enjoying their constitutionally guaranteed pursuit of happiness. Marginal limits on abortion morphed into an assault on the hard-won rights of women to control their reproductive lives.
And it worked. The Democratic base loved it, and 51 percent of American voters responded to it. At least they did last Tuesday.
The brilliance of this strategy is its appeal to the average American’s sense of justice. Policies are negotiable. Rights are not. If you characterize your rival’s policies as violations of other people’s rights, you can write your own political future.
The entire intramural debate currently raging among conservatives and Republicans about abandoning social issues, appealing to Hispanics, and compromising on taxes will be moot if progressives and Democrats continue to hold the moral high ground in the minds of the majority of Americans. If conservatives want to get back on top, they must define the high ground and take it.
And that means understanding their own policy goals the way liberals view theirs: as a defense of human rights. Construct a rights-based argument, provide evidence to support it, and make it, repeatedly.
Conservatives don’t do a very good job of making the moral case for a market system, at least in terms that resonate widely with the American people. They do, however, do a pretty good job of making the moral case for social conservatism when they make the effort. When they cede that ground to the left, they leave themselves open to caricature.
The last election cycle was a disaster for social conservatives precisely because the politicians who represent those views weren’t prepared to defend them using explicitly rights-based language. Pro-life candidates must never accept the notion that abortion is merely a question of women’s reproductive freedom, or heaven forbid, sexual violence and its consequences. Similarly, supporters of traditional marriage must never allow to go unchallenged the premise that their views are inherently discriminatory.
Some on the right may object to such a strategy, insisting that the pro-life and pro-traditional-marriage positions can be defended using the language of natural law, tradition, and social order. This may be true, but such arguments are self-defeating. A mere fifty years ago, similar claims were made in defense of a system of racial segregation that was laughably described as “separate but equal.” The American public hasn’t forgotten and sees the cultural right as the heir to that tradition. We don’t want to go there.
Rather than arguing from tradition, then, social conservatives must be prepared to speak about abortion and marriage using the vocabulary of human rights. It’s not difficult. Every human being has dignity, and because of this every human being has an absolute right to be born. It is the first and most fundamental human right. Biologically, every child has a mother and a father, and children do best when raised by both parents together. The civil institution of marriage derives from these incontrovertible facts, not from public attitudes toward alternate lifestyles or the popularity of Glee.
State this. Defend it. Don’t back down. Don’t equivocate. Don’t allow yourself to be blown off course. Always steer the conversation back to the rights of a child to be born and to have both a mommy and a daddy.
In short, be like a progressive.
Take the fight to them. The media will never challenge liberal Democrats for their support of abortion on demand, whether embryonic, late-term, partial-birth, or sex-specific. It is up to the voices of the conservative right to aggressively hold progressive public officials to account for their commitments to radical organizations such as Planned Parenthood, NARAL, and Emily’s List.
It’s a winning issue. Fewer and fewer Americans buy into the left’s argument on abortion. In a 1996 Gallup poll, 56 percent of Americans said they considered themselves pro-choice. Earlier this year, that number stood at only 41 percent, with 50 percent of Americans calling themselves pro-life.
That means that social conservatives are making slow, steady progress. Giving up on social issues, as many in the GOP and in the media seem to be advocating, would not only be morally wrong but would look like failure, capitulation to the left’s insistence that conservatives are only interested in sexually repressing women.
Admittedly, in the current political environment, the traditional marriage position is a harder sell than the pro-life one. But if legalized gay marriage is inevitable, then social conservatives must turn to a positive defense of the constitutional rights of religious communities. The free exercise of religion is a protected right. It says so in the First Amendment.
A renewed emphasis on the pro-life, pro-traditional-marriage platform using language that frames the questions in terms of rights, not preferences, is the best option available to counter the ascendancy of what Ramesh Ponnuru so succinctly called the Party of Death. It’s not necessary to jettison social issues from the Republican platform. On the contrary: They can form the basis of a conservative resurgence, if they are presented in a way that has proven appeal to the American people.
Matthew Hennessey is a writer and editor who lives in New Canaan, Connecticut. You can follow him on Twitter @MattHennessey.
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Comments:
Why? A man's most sacred property is his labour. It is anterior even to the right of property, for it is the possession of those who own nothing else. Therefore he must be free to make the best use of it he can. The interference of one man with another, of society with its members, of the state with the subject, must be brought down to the lowest dimension. Power intervenes only to restrict intervention, to guard the individual from oppression, that is from regulation in an interest not his own. Free labour and its derivative free trade are the first conditions of legitimate government.
As for abortion, the questionis not whether survey respondents label themselves pro-life; it is whether the citizens want abortion banned, and how that ban will be enforced. The effects of a ban on abortion can be examined in the case of Savita Halappanavar.
Since day one we have clamored for the "right to life" in the abortion debate. I know there are more people now who want abortion limited in some way or other, but wonder if that is the effect of medical advances (sonograms, treatments that push back viability, etc.) rather than our rights talk. For too many on the other side, abortion is seen as a woman's right (not particularly to life, but to convenience even) that trumps her baby's right to live. The Democrats' recent campaign seemed to me to view women as sex objects, beings who live for sex and should be well supplied with free contraceptives so they remain infertile and available. We are our "lady parts", as they said in their sophomoric ad, and we must have them uppermost in our minds, ladies, as we vote. This is progress? Member of the Elite Sandra Fluke is their quintessential "rights victim". It should be common sense that a "right" to free birth control pills and condoms is not on the same plane as an innocent's right to life, but that is apparently their position. We will certainly have to ramp up the "right to life" talk a great deal to make a dent in the souls of people who see women and innocent children in such a limited and unloving way.
The contemporary violations of human dignity will come to and end eventually. The Aztec civilization and its human sacrifice was wiped off the face of the Earth. The culture built upon the backs of slaves in the Old South was destroyed. The Third Reich was only allowed twelve years before it was annihilated. The brutal violation of human dignity inherent in child-killing cannot endure. It will come to an end not so much because of what was said about it as the combination of what was done about it and the very weight of its inevitable, tragic consequences.
I am not sure if the Christians of the Early Church, who rescued and raised infants who were left to die of exposure because the infant had some imperfection, were very eloquent speakers. That they did this in spite of the fact that they were hated for it spoke very eloquently about the dignity and worth of *every* human being.
In fact, I suspect that most of the martyrs of the Early Church were not all that articulate in their verbal defense of the faith. They didn't have to be. Their lives and their willingness to give up their lives rather than deny the Truth spoke mightily to the worldly.
Contemporary Christianity needs to get into the mode of bearing witness to the Truth by what we do more than by what we say, always remembering that Christ promised us hatred and persecution. So we shouldn't be surprised at all if living out our faith brings those things upon us.
The other thing we must remember is that “we must obey God rather than men.” (Acts 5:29). It looks like the current regime is going to put us in a position where we will have to tell them that. This will be no more than the Abolitionists did in continuing with their “illegal” underground railroad. It will be no more than those who hid Jews from the Nazis did. Christians must indeed obey God rather than men when Caesar forces us to make that choice. We render unto Caesar only what is Caesar's, never that which belongs to God alone. It was Caesar's image imprinted upon the coin. God's image is imprinted upon the innocent child in the womb.
This is a specious argument. Under the definition of marriage, a homosexual man may marry a woman just like any other man, and a heterosexual man may not marry a man, just like any other man. Therefore, there is equal protection under the law. When homosexual partners were given rights related to inheritance, hospital visitation and medical decision-making rights, the goal line was moved, and only a redefinition of that institution that has served as the bedrock of human civilization would do.
In those European countries where same-sex marriage has been implemented, the overall marriage rates have fallen dramatically, even to the point where the Dutch press headlined the Death of Marriage in the Netherlands. The out of wedlock birth rates have risen from single digits in countries such as Norway, to upwards of 40%. Given the problems we have in this country on this score already, do we really need to pour gasoline on that fire?
That less than 2% of the country was able to propogandize their way to an increasing "acceptance" of gay marriage which, by the way, only around 10% of the eligible gay population has taken advantage of, speaks volumes about our declining culture.
Yes. Virtue, not rights, is the way to think about this.
One could just as easily say that children have a right to a childhood, and a right to a household with a mother and a father. They have a right to be born, a right to be dressed in a way that does not expose their bodies to a corrupt and exploitative culture, and a right to be shielded from mass media trash "entertainment" that would have been considered pornography to full-grown adults barely two generations ago.
Good article, thank you for it.
Most Americans--quite justifiably at this point--can't even spell "Rousseau," nor do they care what his views on the social compact are.
Sure, rights for one means limiting another's right. You know that and I know that but guess who doesn't know it? The same people out there who think that "free health care" can be legislated into existence by forcing young Americans to buy expensive policies from insurance companies.
Those people have been fed a lifetime's worth of propaganda that has accomplished the goal of vitiating meaningful language about natural law, and they consider a "right" to mean pretty much anything a politician promises them.
Framing decent living for children in the language of "rights" is therefore a worthy strategy, in my opinion.
I would have been happy to hear the last three Republican presidential candidates discourse on Rousseau, and it might have done some good for the overall party ten years ago. But nobody wants to hear that now that we're all broke and jobless, or even worse, broke and employed. However, single mothers on welfare and young working men wanting to have families of their own might be amenable to such ideas when they finally realize that the Democrats have not magically created "free everything in America" out of thin air and have instead absconded with a pile of tax money to a pineapple plantation in Hawaii.
