Free Birth Control and Unfree Photographers

[Chris]

By popular request (paperback), Jacob Sullum at Reason in Free Birth Control and Unfree Photographers (http://reason.com/archives/2014/03/26/free-birth-control-and-unfree-photograph) gets it right imo on where the dividing line is here in the argument:


According to The New York Times, a case the Supreme Court heard on Tuesday, involving a challenge to Obamacare's requirement that businesses pay for their employees' contraceptives, "pits religious liberty against women's rights." Similarly, last month's controversy over an Arizona bill aimed at protecting business owners from being forced to treat homosexual and heterosexual couples alike was widely perceived as a conflict between religious liberty and gay rights.

Both of these debates are more accurately described as clashes between real rights and fake rights. To put it more politely, they pit negative liberty, which requires freedom from external restraint, against positive liberty, which imposes demands on other people's resources. Under the latter vision, giving freedom to one person requires taking it away from another.

...


My first exposure to this was many years ago: Positive & Negative Liberties in Three Dimensions (http://www.friesian.com/quiz.htm).

[Paperback Writer]

The reason I wished this thread is that I have heard many people here talk about "rights" and "civil rights" but it seems to me that these "rights" from the American perspective are actually "things they get".

A "right" from my understanding is an ability one is able to manifest without constraint. An example would be free speech. I have a right to speak my mind about the government.

[Chris]

Right, rights like free speech are rights without constraint, freedom from external restraint, albeit their must be responsible self-constraint, to do not harm, to non-agress. They impose no obligations on others: Your free speech doesn't require other to listen. They are natural rights, derived from natural law.

Civil right are to me positive rights, legal rights, political, that impose obligations, usually on government, and usually, in turn, on others. They are posited, legislated.

Our Bill of Rights are negative rights. FDR's Second Bill of Rights and the UN's Universal Declaration of Human Rights are positive rights.