Human Rights Don’t ‘Trickle-Down’
Why must some discussions be silenced in favor of others?
Last week, the U.S. State Department created a new “Commission on Unalienable Rights.” Its stated goal is to change the discourse on what human rights really are. The commission’s name itself is peak Orwellianism, suggesting that some rights are unalienable while shadow-implying that others can, well, be taken away, and indeed that is what the commission’s creators have directly expressed elsewhere. They are unhappy with existing discourse that hinges on identity labels, and they seek to relieve minorities of identity-based rights and the discourse that goes along with them. Referencing the end of World War II as some kind of heyday for humanitarianism, they express the need to take a giant step back from all the work that’s been done over the past 70 years.
An announcement published in the Federal Register at the end of May stated that the purpose of the planned commission was to “provide the Secretary of State advice and recommendations concerning international human rights matters” along with “fresh thinking about human rights discourse where such discourse has departed from our nation’s founding principles of natural law and natural rights.” Here, “natural law” is a reference to Catholicism. Broadly, “natural law” means that how we are supposed to behave —…
