In her prescient book Rights Talk: The Impoverishment of Political Discourse, Mary Ann Glendon of the Harvard Law School warned her fellow Americans in 1993 that our public life was being degraded by the promiscuous use of the language of “rights” as a rhetorical intensifier in campaigns to promote this, that, or the other thing: things that the founders and framers would never have imagined to be “rights.” “Rights talk,” Professor Glendon cautioned, sets the individual against the community, as it privileges personal autonomy—“I did it my way”—over the common good. And that, she concluded, was going to be very bad for the American experiment in ordered liberty over the long haul.
The long haul has now arrived. And the results are every bit as bad as Professor Glendon predicted.
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