Tag: civil rights

Despite Headlines, There Is No Reduction in Voting Rights

Liberals and Democrats are claiming that the Supreme Court is poised to make a ruling that will restrict voting rights because race will no longer be considered in districting.

This is false.

Under the U.S. Constitution, all adults aged 18 and over have the right to vote, and they will continue to have that right. No ruling or policy under consideration eliminates or limits that constitutional guarantee.

What critics are truly upset about is that race will no longer be used to determine electoral districting. The Trump administration argued that race had been overemphasized in the process, violating the Constitution’s Equal Protection Clause. The move aims to ensure that district boundaries are drawn based on population and geography, not racial calculations.

This debate, and the exaggerated claims that someone is losing their rights, reveal a deeper divide between the two parties. Republicans argue that equality means the same rules for everyone, regardless of race. Democrats, on the other hand, insist that equality requires different rules for different groups based on race

The Supreme Court appeared inclined to further restrict the use of race in redistricting. During recent arguments, conservative justices, including Brett Kavanaugh and Chief Justice John Roberts, questioned whether race-based remedies should continue indefinitely, suggesting that the Court may soon impose new limits on when race can factor into drawing congressional maps.

The Court’s three liberal justices, however, warned that weakening Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act would effectively dismantle the law and reduce minority representation in Congress.

Democrats argue that Section 2 is essential for protecting minority voting rights and warn that a conservative victory in the current Louisiana case could trigger widespread redistricting. They claim this would reduce the number of minority-held seats, particularly across the South.

However, the United States does not have a quota system, and no congressional seats are specifically designated as “minority seats.” Fair, race-neutral voting would simply result in all seats being awarded to the candidates who receive the most votes, regardless of race.

The Court’s decision, expected by mid-2026, could mark another major rollback of federal race-based policies, following the 2013 elimination of Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act and the 2023 decision ending affirmative action in college admissions.

Democrats claim that minority “voting power” or “electoral influence,” will be diluted. The Act prohibits voting practices that “deny or abridge the right to vote on account of race.” Over time, courts have interpreted “abridge” to include not only preventing people from voting but also drawing district lines that intentionally dilute minority voting strength. Democrats argue that the Act ensures the right for every vote to carry equal weight and influence.

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Is Health Care a Human Right?

Is there a right to health care? Most libertarians and classical liberals would say “no,” and most progressives are shocked by that answer. For progressives, nothing could be more obvious than that everyone deserves access to health care regardless of their ability to pay. Distributing medical care based on wealth is for dystopian science fiction stories, where the underclass gets back-alley doctors and the ruling class gets sleek, modern hospitals. It doesn’t belong in a civilized society. (For more on this topic, see “Government Makes Healthcare Worse and More Expensive.”)

Thus progressives ask, how can libertarians be so heartless as to not believe in a right to health care?

In this essay, I will try to answer that question. While I might not convince you that there isn’t a right to health care, I hope to at least convey that, whatever a “right” to health care is, it is something fundamentally different from the sort of thing we usually call a “right”—so different, in fact, that we probably shouldn’t be using the same word.

I’ll be narrowly focused on that question. This essay is not about how the free market can solve health care, it’s not arguing that health care isn’t crucial to a flourishing life, and it doesn’t claim that America’s health care system is better than systems where people do have a “right” to health care. It’s only about whether it makes sense to call health care a “right.”

What We Mean When We Say, “Rights”

In October 2017, the National Health Service, Great Britain’s single-payer, socialized healthcare provider, announced that smokers and the obese would be banned from non-urgent surgery indefinitely. According to the Telegraph:

[T]he new rules, drawn up by clinical commissioning groups (CCGs) in Hertfordshire, say that obese patients “will not get non-urgent surgery until they reduce their weight”…unless the circumstances are exceptional.

The criteria also mean smokers will only be referred for operations if they have stopped smoking for at least eight weeks, with such patients breathalysed before referral.

The policy change understandably received significant criticism and brings to the fore the true meaning of “right” to health care. 

What is a right? Even though “rights talk” permeates our political conversations, most people have never tried to define a right. Sometimes the term is used as a synonym for “important”—thus we hear about a right to clean water, shelter, education, and healthcare, all of which are undoubtedly important.

Yet having a “right” to something means more than that. Saying something is a “right” describes a relationship between individuals. It makes us think about our obligations to each other and the government’s obligations to its citizens. Rather than focusing on what we have rights to, I’d like to focus on the relationships that a “right” creates and the distinction between positive and negative rights.

Rights describe a relationship between at least two people: a rightholder and a duty-holder. If someone has a right, others have a corollary duty. They’re inextricably linked; two sides of the same coin.

Think of a desert island with only Robinson Crusoe, before Friday arrives. Crusoe could tell the trees and the animals that he has a “right” to life, but would it mean anything? A tiger chasing him through the grass is immune to Crusoe’s right-claim. Tigers can’t be duty-holders, so the term “right” does not describe a relationship between Crusoe and the tiger. When Friday arrives, however, Crusoe’s claim that he has a right to life implies something about the relationship between him and Friday. If Crusoe has a right to life, then Friday has a duty not to murder him, and vice versa.

The nature of the corollary duty is what distinguishes positive rights from negative ones. For negative rights, the corollary duty is an omission—that is, duty-holders are required to refrain from doing something, e.g. don’t steal, don’t punch people, don’t kill. For a positive right, the corollary duty is a duty of action—that is, duty-holders are required to affirmatively act, e.g. provide food, provide health care, or provide resources for such things. Understanding this technical, but crucial, difference between positive and negative rights can help us identify four qualities that make them categorically different.

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Inalienable Rights in an Age of Tyranny: The U.S. Government Is “Playing God”

We are now struggling to emerge from the wreckage of a constitutional republic, transformed into a kleptocracy (government by thieves), collapsing into kakistocracy (government by the worst), and enforced by a police state algogracy (rule by algorithm).

This week alone, the Trump administration is reportedly erecting protest barricades around the White House, Congress is advancing legislation that favors the wealthy, and President Trump is grandstanding at the opening of a detention center dubbed “Alligator Alcatraz.”

Against such a backdrop of government-sponsored cruelty, corruption and shameless profiteering at taxpayer expense, what, to the average American, is freedom in an age when the government plays god—determining who is worthy of rights, who qualifies as a citizen, and who can be discarded without consequence?

What are inalienable rights worth if they can be redefined, delayed, or revoked by executive order?

Frederick Douglass posed a similar challenge more than 170 years ago when he asked, “What, to the American slave, is your Fourth of July?”

His question was a searing indictment not just of slavery but of a government that proclaimed liberty while denying it to millions—a hypocrisy that persists in a system still governed by institutions more committed to power than principle.

Every branch of government—executive, legislative, and judicial—has, in one way or another, abandoned its duty to uphold the Constitution. And both parties have prioritized profit and political theater over justice and the rights of the governed.

The founders of this nation believed our rights come from God, not government. That we are born free, not made free by bureaucrats or judges. That among these rights—life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness—none can be taken away without destroying the very idea of government by consent.

And yet that is precisely what’s happening.

We now live under a government that has become judge, jury, and executioner—writing its own laws, policing its own limits, and punishing those who object.

This is not what it means to be free.

When presidents rule by fiat, when agencies strip citizenship from naturalized Americans, when police act as both enforcers and executioners, and when courts rubber-stamp the erosion of basic protections, the distinction between a citizen and a subject begins to collapse.

What do inalienable rights mean in a country where:

  • Your citizenship can be revoked based solely on the government’s say-so?
  • Your freedom can be extinguished by surveillance, asset seizure, or indefinite detention?
  • Your property can be taken, your speech censored, and your life extinguished without due process?
  • Your life can be ended without a trial, a warning, or a second thought, because the government views you as expendable?

The answer is stark: they mean nothing—unless we defend them.

When the government—whether president, Congress, court, or local bureaucrat—claims the right to determine who does and doesn’t deserve rights, then no one is safe. Individuals become faceless numbers. Human beings become statistics. Lives become expendable. Dignity becomes disposable.

It is a slippery slope—justified in the name of national security, public safety, and the so-called greater good—that leads inevitably to totalitarianism.

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Women’s College Hit With Civil Rights Complaint For Admitting Men Claiming To Be Women

One of the largest all-women’s colleges in the U.S., Smith College, has been hit with a federal civil rights complaint because it admits men claiming to be women and allows them in the private women’s spaces like restrooms.

The Title IX complaint, filed by Defending Education with the U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights, brought the complaint against the 150-year-old Massachusetts women’s college “for discrimination on the basis of sex in programs or activities that receive federal financial assistance in violation of” federal law.

The college’s Equal Education Opportunity Policy “indicates that it will follow Title IX and prohibit discrimination on the basis of sex in its federally funded programs,” the complaint, written by Defending Education Vice President Sarah Parshall Perry, states. However, she continues, “The very same policy … indicates that Smith interprets Title IX to prohibit ‘gender identity’ discrimination, despite federal case law and this [Education] Department’s guidance to the contrary.”

“Discrimination based on gender identity is not the same as discrimination based on sex under Title IX, as this Department well knows, and the Supreme Court has never held it is,” the complaint reads. “In other words, to the extent Smith’s accommodations for so-called gender identity encroach upon sex-specific programs and spaces, it is in violation of Title IX. The college’s admission policy appears to violate Title IX for the same reason.”

The complaint further cites executive orders signed by President Donald Trump and guidance from the Education Department that Title IX protections shall be based on sex rather than “gender identity.” The college confirms it allows males who claim to be female to take admissions spots from actual women, the complaint says. Smith’s website explicitly states that “people who identify as women—cis, trans and nonbinary women—are eligible to apply to Smith.” It also says that male applicants can simply claim to be women to be considered for admission because “Smith’s policy is one of self-identification. The applicant’s affirmation of identity is sufficient.”

“Ironically, in what appears to be yet another exercise in sex discrimination, Smith admits natal men who identify as women but does not admit natal women who identify as men,” the complaint states, citing a 2023 CNN article.

The complaint goes on to cite “Smith’s policies on ‘Gender Identity and Expression,’” which “indicate that ‘[e]very single-occupancy restroom on campus is designated all-gender” and show how the college “advertises ‘[a]n all-gender locker room in the athletic facilities,’” the complaint reads. Smith College’s website also says that “more and more” multi-stall bathrooms on campus will be designated “all-gender,” allowing men to access them, and that the health & wellness center “provides trans-affirming primary care, including hormone therapy.”

The school made the change to allow men in 2015, when it told itself, faculty, staff, parents, and alumnae that allowing men in the school actually “affirms Smith’s unwavering mission and identity as a women’s college, our commitment to representing the diversity of women’s lived experiences, and the college’s exceptional role in the advancement of women worldwide.”

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How Tyranny Parades as Law

“Law is often but the tyrant’s will and always so when it violates the rights of an individual.”

Thomas Jefferson warned us.

The biggest crimes against liberty do not happen in the shadows. They happen right in front of us. Paraded as law, justice, and the public good. When law itself becomes a weapon, no one is safe.

THE MASK OF LEGALITY

If you want to understand how tyranny operates, you have to see through the disguise. No one openly admits they are out to crush your liberty. Every usurpation, every unconstitutional power grab, every violation of your rights is always dressed up with a stamp of law.

John Dickinson nailed it during the height of the American Revolution.

“All artful rulers who strive to extend their power beyond its just limits endeavor to give their attempts as much semblance of legality as possible.”

This is the tyrant’s playbook. They always hide behind “legality.” They never admit what is really going on.

The Anti-Federalist Federal Farmer sounded the same alarm.

“Men who govern will in doubtful cases construe laws and constitutions most favorably for increasing their own powers.”

Give them any ambiguity, and they will twist it to justify more power for themselves.

THE COMFORT OF APPEARANCES

Here’s the unfortunate truth: most people don’t want reality. They prefer comfort. The word “legal” gives it to them. Machiavelli called out this self-delusion five hundred years ago.

“The great majority of mankind are satisfied with appearances as though they were realities and are often even more influenced by the things that seem than by those that are.”

That is exactly how tyranny survives and thrives. It hides under layers of illusion and make-believe, each one more convincing than the last. Two centuries later, John Trenchard made the same case in Cato’s Letters No. 9.

“The most successful deluders and oppressors of mankind have always acted in masquerade. And when the blackest villains are meant, the most opposite spirit is pretended. Vice acts with security and often with reputation under the veil of virtue.”

Delusion, masquerade, virtue signaling. It is all cover for the worst crimes.

MANIPULATING THE MASSES

He doubled down just a few weeks later, spelling out exactly how the scam works.

“Yet even in countries where the highest liberty is allowed and the greatest light shines, you generally find certain men and bodies of men set apart to mislead the multitude.”

That’s how they set the stage. The real con is in how they brand what’s evil as good – and good as evil.

“Whoever who are ever abused with words, ever fond of the worst things recommended by good names, and ever abhore the best things and the most virtuous actions, disfigured by ill names.”

Then he drilled down to the core tactic: control the words, control the people.

“One of the great arts, therefore, of cheating men is to study the application and misapplication of sounds. A few loud words rule the majority. I had almost said the whole world.”

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Trump Administration Launches Civil Rights Probe of Harvard’s Hiring Practices

The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission is investigating whether Harvard University unlawfully hires faculty based on race and sex, arguing that the school’s own data provides evidence of discrimination. The probe is the latest federal action against the beleaguered university, which last month sued the Trump administration over its decision to freeze more than $2 billion in aid to the Ivy League school.

In a document initiating the investigation, the EEOC cited materials on Harvard’s website—many of them now deleted—in which the school bragged about increasing the number of “women, non-binary, and/or people of color” on the faculty. The largest increase was in the share of non-white tenure-track faculty, which rose by 37 percent between 2013 and 2023.

The majority of those new hires, Harvard noted in a 2023 report, had been made in the past year.

White men, meanwhile, decreased dramatically as a share of tenure-track faculty, dropping from 46 percent in 2013 to 32 percent in 2023. Every other demographic for which Harvard collects data, including white women, rose over the same period.

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Ukraine guilty of human rights violations in trade union massacre, top European court finds

The European Court of Human Rights has found the Ukrainian government guilty of committing human rights violations during the May 2, 2014 Odessa massacre, in which dozens of Russian-speaking demonstrators were forced into the city’s Trade Unions House and burned alive by ultranationalist thugs.

Citing the “relevant authorities’ failure to do everything that could reasonably be expected of them to prevent the violence in Odessa,” the court ruled unanimously that Ukraine violated Article 2 of the European Convention on Human Rights, which guarantees the right to life. The judges also condemned the Ukrainian government’s failure “to stop that violence after its outbreak, to ensure timely rescue measures for people trapped in the fire, and to institute and conduct an effective investigation into the events.” 

42 people were killed as a result of the fire, a bloody bookend to the so-called “Maidan revolution” that saw Ukraine’s democratically-elected president deposed in a Western-backed coup in 2014. Ukrainian officials and legacy media outlets have consistently framed the deaths as a tragic accident, with some figures even blaming anti-Maidan protesters themselves for starting the blaze. That notion is thoroughly discredited by the verdict, which was delivered by a team of seven judges including a Ukrainian justice.

As dozens of anti-Maidan activists burned to death, the ECHR found deployment of fire engines to the site was “deliberately delayed for 40 minutes,” even though the local fire station was just one kilometer away.  

In the end, the judicial body determined there was nothing which indicated Ukrainian authorities “had done everything that could reasonably be expected of them to avert” the violence. Officials in Kiev, they said, made “no efforts whatsoever” to prevent skirmishes between pro- and anti-Maidan activists that led to the deadly inferno, despite knowing in advance such clashes were likely to break out. Their “negligence… went beyond an error of judgment or carelessness.”

The case was brought by 25 people who lost family members in the Neo-Nazi arson attack and clashes that preceded it, and three who survived the fire with various injuries. Though the ECHR found Ukraine violated their human rights, the court demanded Ukraine pay them just 15,000 euros each in damages.

The ruling also stopped short of acknowledging the full reality of the Odessa slaughter, as it largely overlooked the role played by Western-supported neo-Nazi elements and their intimate ties to the sniper massacre in February 2014 in Maidan Square which has been conclusively determined to have been a false flag. In the judges’ decision, they downplayed or justified violence by the violent Ukrainian football fans and skinheads, charitably describing them as “pro-unity activists.”

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Taking Rights Seriously

“If all mankind minus one were of one opinion,
and only one person were of the contrary opinion,
Mankind would be no more justified
In silencing that one person,
Than he, if he had the power,
Would be justified in silencing mankind.”

— John Stuart Mill (1806-1873)

The world is filled with self-evident truths — truisms — that philosophers, lawyers and judges know need not be proven. The sun rises in the east and sets in the west. Two plus two equals four. A cup of boiling hot coffee sitting on a table in a room, the temperature of which is 70 degrees Fahrenheit, will eventually cool down.

These examples, of which there are legion, are not true because we believe they are true. They are true essentially and substantially. They are true whether we accept their truthfulness or not. Of course, recognizing a universal truth acknowledges the existence of an order of things higher than human laws, certainly higher than government.

The generation of Americans that fought the war of secession against England — according to Professor Murray Rothbard, the last moral war Americans waged — understood the existence of truisms and recognized their origin in nature.

The most famous of these recognitions was Thomas Jefferson’s iconic line in the Declaration of Independence that self-evident truths come not from persons but from “the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God.” Thus, “All Men are created equal and are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness” is a truism.

Jefferson’s neighbor and colleague, James Madison, understood this as well when he wrote the Bill of Rights so as to reflect that human rights do not come from the government. They come from our individual humanity.

Natural Rights

Thus, your right to be alive, to think as you wish, to say what you think, to publish what you say, to worship or not, to associate or not, to shake your fist in the tyrant’s face by petitioning the government, your right to defend yourself and repel tyrants using and carrying the same weapons as the government does, your right to be left alone, to own property, to travel or to stay put — these natural aspects of human existence are natural rights that come from our humanity and for the exercise of which all rational persons yearn.

This is the natural rights understanding of Jefferson’s Declaration and Madison’s Bill of Rights, to the latter of which all in government have sworn allegiance and deference.

A right is not a privilege. A right is an indefeasible personal claim against the whole world. It does not require a government permission slip. It does not require preconditions except the ability to reason. It does not require the approval of family or neighbors.

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Why Trump’s Anti-DEI Order Is Both Radical and Rooted in Civil Rights Law

Marc Morial, president of the National Urban League, convened a panel of civil rights leaders last month to assail President Donald Trump’s executive order on “ending illegal discrimination and restoring merit-based opportunity.” The so-called anti-DEI order, Morial claimed, was an effort to “reverse the gains of the last seventy years.”

“Diversity, equity and inclusion are aligned with American values,” declared Morial. To any critics claiming that DEI represents “some sort of preference program” that “divides Americans,” Morial scoffed. “We say, absolutely not.” Morial then argued that the organizations gathered there would crusade to protect DEI and “the notion that everyone has an equal opportunity.”

This response of the civil rights establishment was more than simply a vow of resistance to the Trump order; it reflected opposition to a long-cresting sea change in racial politics in America.

In 1963, the Urban League was one of the groups that participated in Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s March on Washington, where King envisioned a nation for his children not “judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.” During this period, non-white Americans faced legal and cultural barriers to full participation in civic life, from school segregation to rampant discrimination in employment and housing opportunities.

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