News

Your love, my right

By Kevin Steel ⋅ December 10, 2007 ⋅  Email this post ⋅  Print this post ⋅ Post a comment

When human rights compete, then they can’t by definition be universal

It’s International Human Rights Day, the 59th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights by the United Nations. I suppose I should spend the day in sorrowful contemplation of all of the wickedness in the world, but instead I find myself singing:

Oh baby, your love is my human right,
My bark is just as loud as my bite,
It’ll be anything but a silent night!

These are the words sung by a love struck young geek in a TV commercial for Future Shop. Our swain asks a salesman to help him decide whether to buy an iPod for his beloved or make a present to her of his execrable ditty. Our would-be Jackson Browne, accompanying himself on a keytar, finishes his rendition on a screeching high note: “Niiiiight!” Suitably appalled, the salesman concludes, “We’ll go with the iPod then.”

Funny stuff. Even before our poet, who appears to have recently survived a near fatal encounter with static electricity, breaks into song we’re laughing because we think, “This guy has a girlfriend?” But then when we hear his words, we wonder whether this ad just might be—like the famous Geico caveman ads—deliberately satirical. “Your love is my human right”? That’s funny because it’s untrue. Where did this fellow get the idea that the love of any woman could be his human right? Everyone knows that she has the right to refuse him, to say no, and no means no as the feminists remind us.

And yet Geek Boy’s claim is not quite as absurd as it first appears. For are not Canadians instructed that practically every potential personal or professional disappointment is a violation of their human rights to be redressed by human rights tribunals? And given what we have seen and heard of Geek Boy, he has been disappointed in love many times before and is likely to be so again.

The genius of this ad is that it exposes the fatal flaw of the human rights industry. If two rights compete, i.e. the right of Geek Boy to the woman of his dreams versus her right to tell him to drop dead, then one of these rights is by definition not universal, common to all, “human.”

Or to a take real-life example, let’s consider the disparity between Section 2 and Section 15 of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. According to Section 2:

Everyone has the following fundamental freedoms: a) freedom of conscience and religion; b) freedom of thought, belief, opinion and expression, including freedom of the press and other media of communication; c) freedom of peaceful assembly; and d) freedom of association.

But then Section 15 (1) tells us that:

Every individual is equal before and under the law and has the right to the equal protection and equal benefit of the law without discrimination and, in particular, without discrimination based on race, national or ethnic origin, colour, religion, sex, age or mental or physical disability.

So we see that in Canada some human rights are more important than others. Furthermore, according to Section 15.(2):

Subsection (1) does not preclude any law, program or activity that has as its object the amelioration of conditions of disadvantaged individuals or groups including those that are disadvantaged because of race, national or ethnic origin, colour, religion, sex, age or mental or physical disability.

In other words, the Charter of Rights specifically protects positive discrimination. So on the one hand, Section 2 lists a host of freedoms which are supposedly “fundamental.” And according to the Canadian Oxford Dictionary, fundamental means “essential, primary, original.” This suggests that freedom of conscience, religion, expression, etc. are inalienable, as in the American Bill of Rights. Section 15 however suggests something very different.

So in any conflict between the human rights enumerated in Section 2 and those enumerated in Section 15, we’re going to have a winner and a loser. One human right is going to trump another. Therefore, the loser cannot have been a human right at all.

This is not mere debate team philosophizing. Section 2 and Section 15 have on numerous occasions duked it out in the Canadian courts. For instance, Scott Brockie, a Toronto printer, was accused of a human rights violation by a homosexual organization in 2000 because he had refused to print business materials for them, claiming this would have violated his religious conscience. The complainant shouldn’t have been able to land a glove on him. After all, Section 2 supposedly guarantees as “fundamental” the right of “conscience and religion” but also “freedom of association.” As invariably happens in Canadian courts, however, Section 15 KO-ed Section 2, and Brockie was fined $5,000 by the Ontario Human Rights Tribunal.

No one claimed that Brockie’s refusal to print the materials would have meant that they would have gone unprinted. There were many other printers in Toronto willing to do the job and the homosexual organization admitted that they had settled on Brockie as a test case. His “human right” to act on his religious belief and his “human right” of free association were trumped by the superior “human right” of a class protected and preferred by the state.

Maybe Geek Boy’s problem is that he is just a little bit ahead of his time. Canada has been universally acknowledged as a leader in the expansion of human rights ever since 1948 when John Peters Humphrey drafted the U.N. Declaration. And we’re not about to stop now. Homosexual rights were not included in the Charter when it was drafted in 1981, but were “read in” later by our ever progressive Supreme Court. Canadians know—or they are frequently told—that human rights are not fixed, but are instead endlessly mutable. Homosexual rights today, transgendered rights tomorrow. And what of the day after that?

As Geek Boy reflects on his consistent failure with women he notices that this failure is a defining characteristic of his Geek brethren. In fact, he argues, do not Geeks represent an “identifiable class”? And have not Geeks suffered, and do not they continue to suffer, “systemic discrimination”? Are they not systematically mocked, bullied, and even beaten from birth? Are they not condemned to suffer Prom Night without the balm of female companionship? And finally, does not Article 2 of the UN declaration state, “Everyone is entitled to all the rights and freedoms set forth in this Declaration, without distinction of any kind,” including “birth or other status.”

Perhaps in 2017, say, it will be anything but a silent night for Canadian women when they learn that freedom of association no longer applies to matters of the human heart. Geek power!