human rights
Oct. 3rd, 2006 12:39 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
chelidonI believe in gay rights, because I believe in human rights. I believe in queer rights, and straight rights, and kink rights, and family rights, and children's rights, and woman's rights and men's rights, and the rights of all people, whatever race, sex, gender, age, religion, language, ethnicity, heritage, sexual preference, fashion sense (or lack of same), physical form or political views, to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.
Those rights end when they infringe on the rights of others to be who they will. The word of sin is restriction. And those who cannot effectively protect their own rights may need allies to help them do so, at least for a time, and we may not agree on exactly what constitutes the situational meaning of such knotty terms as "harm" "restriction" "infringe" and "rights," so we may need to resort to some sort of supposedly impartial mediation and intervention. And those will be human systems, and therefore imperfect and flawed, so it's necessary to make sure that the cure doesn't introduce worse injustice than the disease.
And it's possible to get frozen into inaction by the complexity of it all, so it's important to remember that we each have choices, every single moment of every single day, and the world will be changed not by what we write on a journal, or what we say, or what we believe, but by what we choose to do, one decision, one act at a time.
" I am convinced, I know now, that God will ask, asks us now, not what we label ourselves, but what we are i.e. what we do. With Him deed is everything, belief without deed is nothing. With Him doing is believing"
--Mahatma Gandhi, Poona 1924
Those rights end when they infringe on the rights of others to be who they will. The word of sin is restriction. And those who cannot effectively protect their own rights may need allies to help them do so, at least for a time, and we may not agree on exactly what constitutes the situational meaning of such knotty terms as "harm" "restriction" "infringe" and "rights," so we may need to resort to some sort of supposedly impartial mediation and intervention. And those will be human systems, and therefore imperfect and flawed, so it's necessary to make sure that the cure doesn't introduce worse injustice than the disease.
And it's possible to get frozen into inaction by the complexity of it all, so it's important to remember that we each have choices, every single moment of every single day, and the world will be changed not by what we write on a journal, or what we say, or what we believe, but by what we choose to do, one decision, one act at a time.
" I am convinced, I know now, that God will ask, asks us now, not what we label ourselves, but what we are i.e. what we do. With Him deed is everything, belief without deed is nothing. With Him doing is believing"
--Mahatma Gandhi, Poona 1924
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no subject
Date: 2006-10-03 05:03 pm (UTC)What's your definition of "rights"?
(The right to a lack of fashion sense ends right around the young man in my lecture today who was wearing a diamond-patterned waistcoat with a checked shirt...with a couple of inches of hairy chest and hairy gut showing either end. Bad Form.)
no subject
Date: 2006-10-03 08:43 pm (UTC)Of course it does not. No one is forcing said person to participate in gay acts or do anything else. Promoting gay rights may annoy lots of people. Last time I checked, "annoy" does not mean "harm."
no subject
Date: 2006-10-03 11:00 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-10-04 12:06 am (UTC)