Your love, my right
When human rights compete, then they can’t by definition be universal
Kevin Steel - December 10, 2007
It's International Human Rights Day, the 59th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights by the United Nations. I suppose I should spend the day in sorrowful contemplation of all of the wickedness in the world, but instead I find myself singing:
Oh baby, your love is my human right,
My bark is just as loud as my bite,
It'll be anything but a silent night!
These are the words sung by a love struck young geek in a TV commercial for Future Shop. Our swain asks a salesman to help him decide whether to buy an iPod for his beloved or make a present to her of his execrable ditty. Our would-be Jackson Browne, accompanying himself on a keytar, finishes his rendition on a screeching high note: "Niiiiight!" Suitably appalled, the salesman concludes, "We'll go with the iPod then."
Funny stuff. Even before our poet, who appears to have recently survived a near fatal encounter with static electricity, breaks into song we’re laughing because we think, “This guy has a girlfriend?” But then when we hear his words, we wonder whether this ad just might be—like the famous Geico caveman ads—deliberately satirical. “Your love is my human right”? That’s funny because it’s untrue. Where did this fellow get the idea that the love of any woman could be his human right? Everyone knows that she has the right to refuse him, to say no, and no means no as the feminists remind us.
And yet Geek Boy’s claim is not quite as absurd as it first appears. For are not Canadians instructed that practically every potential personal or professional disappointment is a violation of their human rights to be redressed by human rights tribunals? And given what we have seen and heard of Geek Boy, he has been disappointed in love many times before and is likely to be so again.
The genius of this ad is that it exposes the fatal flaw of the human rights industry. If two rights compete, i.e. the right of Geek Boy to the woman of his dreams versus her right to tell him to drop dead, then one of these rights is by definition not universal, common to all, “human.”
Or to a take real-life example, let’s consider the disparity between Section 2 and Section 15 of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. According to Section 2:
Everyone has the following fundamental freedoms: a) freedom of conscience and religion; b) freedom of thought, belief, opinion and expression, including freedom of the press and other media of communication; c) freedom of peaceful assembly; and d) freedom of association.
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