OUR LONG DECLINE " INTO BARBARISM

BY ADAM A. J. DEVILLE

One of the most frequently asserted, but never demonstrated, claims in the debate about same sex marriage is that homosexuals have a "right" to the institution of marriage. It is, we are told, simply a question of protecting minority "rights" to something the majority enjoys. It is, moreover, unthinkable that gays and lesbians should have to settle for something like civil unions, thereby implying, we are told, that their rights are second-class.

Thus do we find in Bill C-38 the concept of a "right" to various things three times in four brief clauses. We are told that "the right of couples of the same sex to equality without discrimination" is the purpose of the legislation and that "civil union, as an institution other than marriage, would not offer them that equal access and would violate their human 'dignity."

These claims are made, and treated, as self-evident truths. We know, however, that there are no self-evident truths, and any claim to the contrary is always a sign that an argument has gone badly wrong or is advanced by a protagonist too lazy to prove his point in more reputable and demonstrable terms.

In fact, all such claims to rights are stark nonsense, and the claim that civil unions are second-class "rights" is nonsense on stilts.

Let me state plainly: There are no human rights to marriage or any other such arrangement. As the eminent moral philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre has put it, belief in such rights "is one with belief in witches and unicorns." The reason that no such rights exist, MacIntyre teaches us, is that "every attempt to give good reasons for believing that there are such rights has failed." Once the discussion of rights has been opened, it consists simply of the compilation of a never-ending list of demands, the refusal of any one of which is an arbitrary act and raw exercise of power and preference.

Even such a vigorous defender of the concept of human rights as the American philosopher Ronald Dworkin has conceded that the whole business rests not on evidence and demonstration but on faith in the assertions of the high priests of the cult of rights, most of whom are employed in our ostensibly secular universities, but who have many officious votaries in government bureaucracies.

As nonsensical as they are, these claims are not, however, surprising insofar as the invention and promotion of various rights to this and that is a full time industry that admits of no end.

Although Prime Minister Paul Martin may have scoffed at the idea that we will soon find ourselves confronted with demands for the protection of a right to polygamy, he ought to have paused to think momentarily before opening his mouth for so fatuously hasty a dismissal.

Had he thought about it, he would have realized that, once opened, the discussion of rights consists simply of the compilation of a never-ending list of demands, the refusal of anyone of which can appear as – and indeed is – an arbitrary act and raw exercise of power and preference.

Anyone who attends to the history of human-rights claims in the 20th century, and now the 21st, will see this to be true. From a relatively modest list in the United Nations' Universal Declaration of Human Rights of 1948, human-rights claims have become a bloated, bottom-less well of demands in which one can find a right to just about anything.

In the 1970s, the "right" to kill upborn children in the womb was invented out of whole cloth, and on this basis we have proceeded to destroy tens of millions of human beings in the past 30 years. Now, we are told that homosexuals have a "right" to marriage, and people have a right to help in killing themselves.

Anyone who thinks that this is the end of the list – that we will not soon see claims to a right to polygamy, incest, bestiality or claims to a right to "euthanasia" for an ever-expanding category of maladies – is so completely deluded as to require anti psychotic medication. The problem with these claims – in addition to the fact they are but the beginning of a long, endless decline into barbarism – is that a society like ours has no rationally settled means for definitively adjudicating claims to rights because there are no shared precepts about the meaning and purpose of human life – what MacIntyre, following the Aristotelian tradition, has called the telos of human life. Until and unless we agree on such fundamental issues as the purpose and meaning of human life and the source of its dignity, the battle now joined over Bill C-38 will be but the beginning of an endless series of ever more shrill, pitched, and hostile debates, producing ever more heat and ever less light and wisdom. As Chesterton so famously said, when a society stops believing in God, the problem is not that it believes in nothing: the problem is that it will believe anything.

Or, as Ivan Karamazov so famously put it in Dostoevsky's famous novel, "If God does not exist, everything is permitted.'" . .

ADAM A. J. DEVlLLE is a PhD candidate at the Metropolitan Andrei Sheptytsky Institute for Eastern Christian Studies at Saint Paul University