Against Human Rights

America had a specific way of going about this, laid out in its Declaration of Independence: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” Equality is not controversial as long as the Creator retains His place in the daily life of society, the sense being that people are equal in the sight of God. But when other ways of looking at society arose, and when people began to be judged by, say, their earning power or their good looks, then equality became what Edmund Burke would call “that monstrous fiction, which, by inspiring false ideas and vain expectations into men destined to travel in the obscure walk of laborious life, serves only to aggravate and imbitter that real inequality, which it never can remove.” Human rights is the assertion that, no, our equality perdures even if the Creator is not in the picture.