Friday, May 19, 2006

P. Hitchens on Human Rights and Other Things

From across the pond, Peter Hitchens derides the simultaneously ineffective and authoritarian politics behind that lofty concept, "Human Rights":

Which brings me to 'Human Rights'. If there were any human rights, surely one of them would be that you would not have to be ruled by people who actively despised their own country and its people. No such luck. 'Human Rights' don't actually exist. They are worthless paper money, invented by idealistic lawyers 56 years ago at a conference in Rome. The only 'rights' you have are the ones the liberal lawyers and judges are prepared to let you have.

[...]

Britain and the USA were not free because they had 'rights'. They were free because they had limited government. Their peoples have - or in our case used to have - freedoms to live in peace, secure from having your door smashed down, free to say and think what you like, because of good, hard restrictions on state power.

[...]

Thanks to these limits on the state, we have become free. By contrast, Europe's wishy-washy 'rights' to privacy, to marry, to life, are all conditional. The 'right to life' has come to mean the right of convicted murderers not to be executed. It has not saved the life of a single innocent baby in an abortion clinic, nor will it save the old and inconvenient from the fatal injections which the liberals long to 'permit' them.


Hitchens also has the story about the Catholic Archbishop of Westminster's recent firing of his press secretary. The secretary somehow believed that introducing his previously unknown partner in unnatural vice to his boss was a good idea. He also 'wanted to fight to change the Church's attitude to homosexuality from the inside'. One almost wonders about his and his fellow subversives' opinions are on the age of consent. But of course, there is no such thing as the Lavender Mafia, and evil reactionary traditionalists have an iron grip on the church's various bureaucracies.

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