Mark Steyn: The All-U-Can-Eat Toxic “Human Rights” Salad

by SHEIKYERMAMI on FEBRUARY 26, 2012

Scaramouche:

The All-U-Can-Eat “Human Rights” Salad Bar Is One Mighty Toxic Melange

Mark Steyn, who filed this one from Down Under, says that “human rights”–the fake ones granted by increasingly statist governments–will be the death of us:

The transformation of “human rights” from restraints upon state power into a pretext for state power is nicely encapsulated in the language of Article 14 of the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union, which states that everyone has the right “to receive free compulsory education.” Got that? You have the human right to be forced to do something by the government.
Commissar [Kathleen] Sebelius isn’t the only one interested in “striking the appropriate balance” between individual liberty and state compulsion. Everyone talks like that these days. For Canada’s Chief Censor, Jennifer Lynch, freedom of expression is just one menu item in the great all-you-can-eat salad bar of rights, so don’t be surprised if we’re occasionally out of stock. Instead, why not try one of our tasty nutritious rights du jour? Like the human right to a transsexual labiaplasty, or the human right of McDonald’s employees not to have to wash their hands after visiting the bathroom.

Commissar Lynch puts it this way:

“The modern conception of rights is that of a matrix with different rights and freedoms mutually reinforcing each other to build a strong and durable human rights system.”

That would be a matrix as in some sort of intricate biological sequencing very few people can understand? Or a Matrix as in the illusory world created to maintain a supine citizenry by all-controlling government officials? The point is, with so many pseudo-”rights” bouncing around, you need a bigger and bigger state: Individual rights are less important than a “rights system” – i.e., a government bureaucracy.