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Are “human rights” just a list of politically popular demands?
by Scott Gilbreath ~ November 10th, 2008
So argues Katherine Sinnott, MEP (Member of the European Parliament), Ireland South, speaking in Rome last week.
[A]s an MEP, I also work in an environment where we have two languages, and I don’t mean English and French. I mean the language of the culture of life and the language of the culture of death and what is very confusing is that they use the same terminology – the exact same terminology. They often attribute different and usually opposing meanings to the same terms. So, human rights, to me, means the rights that accrue from the dignity and destiny of the human person which in turn are a gift of God.
And in the other lexicon, human rights are increasingly just a list of demands that have gained political strength.
One morning on the radio in Ireland, I heard an activist saying that every child had a human right – a fundamental human right to high quality free child care. To me, this would have meant that the human baby has the natural need, so therefore the right to mothering and therefore, the right to receive that mothering from his or her mother. And that we, as a society, have a duty to support the family and through that – to support the mother so that she could give this child what the child needed – or to give that support to a committed mother substitute where that wasn’t possible. But, to this campaigner, this human right meant that women had a fundamental human right to be absent from their babies and to have a professionally accredited child care facility free of charge.
Thus do unelected “experts” manipulate and subvert the language of human rights.
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November 13th, 2008 at 07:13 PM
[...] ARE “HUMAN RIGHTS” just a list of politically popular demands? …. [...]