When Policy Preferences Masquerade as Rights
Recently, I took my son swimming at a local rec center. Entering the men’s locker room, we encountered a sign: “Children over 6 must use the appropriate locker room.”
For a moment, I was tempted to speed dial the ACLU and Human Rights Watch to roust some federal judge that Sunday morning who could save me from unconstitutionally ambiguous language. What, after all, was “appropriate?”
In an earlier and saner age, the answer would be self-evident. But that was before sanity was deemed “intolerant.”
So, in today’s brave new world, is “appropriate” whatever the individual entering the locker room thinks? And does no one else have a say in the accuracy of that self-determination even though, in a locker room—to borrow a Biblical phrase—“all will be revealed”? Or do the other users of the locker room have no privacy rights of their own, bound in the name of “tolerance” if not of “rights” to acquiesce in each user’s self-assessment of “appropriate”? Even if it is wrong? Or can it just not be wrong?
In other words, why is a simple sign that ordinary people would understand in one way legally subject to ambiguous, even erroneous interpretation?
Part of the reason, I suggest, derives from a phenomenon I call “‘rights’ freeloading.”
Harvard professor Mary Ann Glendon coined the expression “rights talk” to describe the tendency to expand and overinflate the discussion of policy options by rebranding those choices as “rights.” Paradoxically, such rebranding serves to shut down discussion, because one can debate policy but “rights” demand recognition. People of good will can hold different positions on policy choices, but being against a “right” is like being against motherhood, baseball, or apple pie.
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