- Feb 5, 2002
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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.
Continued below.
denvercatholic.org
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.
Continued below.
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
denvercatholic.org
