This is for you progressives in the audience. The conservatives and libertarians already know this, so you may skip down to the next post.
A right is something that is endowed to you by your creator, whatever you believe that is, and can not (legitimately) be taken away by any person or government. Life. Liberty. The pursuit of happiness. Speech, religion, press, assembly, keeping and bearing arms, no illegitimate searches and seizures (ooops), and so on. It’s a short list, but a pretty comprehensive one.
Rights have one thing in common; they don’t infringe other peoples’ rights. When I exercise my right to speak, it doesn’t take away your right to speak. For that matter, when you talk about taking away my rights – like the Second Amendment – it doesn’t infringe my rights; I need to meet you with more, better speech, and convince more Americans that you’re a ninny. And I do.
But I digress.
There is no right not to be offended – because if we tried to say you had a right not to be offended, then it’d take away someone else’s freedom of speech. If person A makes a statue of the Virgin Mary out of cow dung, Catholic Person B isn’t getting any rights violated; they are fully entitled to show the world why Person A is a terrible artist, or make a statue of Person A out of goat dung, or whatever.
So since it’s been in the news for the past 24 hours, let’s talk about the “women’s right” to birth control.
You women (and men, ahem) have a right to your private life (NSA notwithstanding), and to live your life more or less as you want (yep, there are restrictions on snake-handling and marijuana and raw milk and machine guns and a bunch of other stuff, but work with me here). So go ahead and buy and use birth control!
But you have no right to force other people to buy birth control for you if it violates their beliefs, which are a right and don’t interfere with your rights (as opposed to wants).
Frankly, you should have no more “right” for you to force anyone else to buy you contraception than I should to force you to buy me ammunition, not because of my religious beliefs (which say nothing about contraception) but because it takes my money. But that brings up an argument about taxation and government that goes way beyond this, and that we should actually have in our society (government should pay for nothing but the court system, defense, and arresting and prosecuting people who materially harm other people), but is a huge tangent from the discussion we’re actually having.
You have a right to use contraception. You have, currently, the legal means to force most people who work for most companies, and all publicly-held companies, to pay for them. You don’t have the right to violate the rights of privately-owned companies’ freedom of religion.
It’s pretty simple, which is of course why you all get it wrong.
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