Choking on Rights Talk

In her prescient book Rights Talk: The Impoverishment of Political Discourse, Mary Ann Glendon of the Harvard Law School warned her fellow Americans in 1993 that our public life was being degraded by the promiscuous use of the language of “rights” as a rhetorical intensifier in campaigns to promote this, that, or the other thing: things that the founders and framers would never have imagined to be “rights.” “Rights talk,” Professor Glendon cautioned, sets the individual against the community, as it privileges personal autonomy—“I did it my way”—over the common good. And that, she concluded, was going to be very bad for the American experiment in ordered liberty over the long haul.

The long haul has now arrived. And the results are every bit as bad as Professor Glendon predicted.

Nowhere has this descent into verbal incontinence created as malodorous a public stench as in the profligate use of the self-contradictory phrase “reproductive rights.” What can that term possibly mean if we’re not in Alice’s Wonderland? “Reproductive rights” is a euphemism for abortion. Elective abortion is the willful destruction of a human being at an early stage of his or her development. How can the destruction of that human being—whose biological humanity is affirmed in high school textbooks—be a matter of exercising a reproductive right when the process in question is intended to end reproduction by expulsion from the womb or fetal dismemberment? 

Yet this blatantly deceptive—in fact, absurd—term, “reproductive rights,” was recently embraced by the Republican Party’s presidential candidate shortly after the Democratic National Convention celebrated abortion as if it were a civic sacrament—indeed, the civic sacrament, before which all must bow in worship. There is something quite sick about all this. And mutterings about the “lesser of evils” are of little consolation when what is being embraced as a “right” by the putatively lesser miscreant is, in truth, the deliberate destruction of an innocent human life—which is, this side of blasphemy, about as evil as evil gets. 

Politics is typically downstream from culture, and if our politics have become warped to the point where the abortion license is being sacramentalized, then there is something gravely wrong with our public moral culture. How, then, do we rebuild a public space where truth-telling prevails over euphemism, so that serious debate replaces volleys of epithets in which each cannonading side accuses the other of violating its “rights”?

One possible path forward lies in a recovery of the classic Catholic notion that “rights” are always tied to responsibilities. In that still-relevant work of Catholic political theory We Hold These Truths: Catholic Reflections on the American Proposition, John Courtney Murray, S.J., explained the linkage in these terms, while exploring the deeper meaning of the rights of free speech and freedom of the press:

[T]hese institutions do not rest on the thin theory proper to eighteenth-century individualistic rationalism, that a man has a right to say what he thinks merely because he thinks it. . . . The proper premise of these freedoms lay in the fact that they were social necessities . . . essential to the conduct of free, representative, and responsible government. People who are called upon to obey have the right first to be heard. People who are to bear burdens and make sacrifices have the right first to pronounce on the purposes which their sacrifices serve. People who are summoned to contribute to the common good have the right first to pass their own judgment on the question, whether the good proposed be truly a good, the people’s good, the common good.

When “rights” are severed from responsibilities, the public square becomes a gladiatorial pit in which everyone’s rights-claims are in a constant, often brutal, battle for survival against everyone else’s. That is not democratic deliberation. It is intellectual and moral chaos. And chaos can lead to freedom’s self-destruction. Thus, Murray put the danger to an America choking on contending rights-claims in these elegantly dramatic terms: Perhaps, one day, “the noble, many-storeyed mansion of democracy [could] be dismantled, leveled to the dimensions of a flat majoritarianism, which is no mansion but a barn, perhaps even a tool shed in which the weapons of tyranny may be forged.” 

Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger said much the same thing when he raised the alarm about an encroaching “dictatorship of relativism” on the day before his election as Pope Benedict XVI. We are not quite there yet. But the persistent, profligate abuse of language and reason displayed in terms like “reproductive rights” is hastening the day of reckoning.

George Weigel’s column “The Catholic Difference” is syndicated by the Denver Catholic, the official publication of the Archdiocese of Denver.

George Weigel is Distinguished Senior Fellow of Washington, D.C.’s Ethics and Public Policy Center, where he holds the William E. Simon Chair in Catholic Studies.

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Photo by Matt Hrcak, provided by Flickr, licensed via Creative Commons. Image cropped.