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rights

  • SOURCE: New York Review of Books
    4/7/2022

    How Rights Went Right

    by David Cole

    Is an all-or-nothing view of constitutional rights at the root of growing cultural clashes pitting civil rights against the free exercise of religion? A new book suggests alternatives. 

  • SOURCE: The New Yorker
    5/24/2021

    From Guns to Gay Marriage, How Did Rights Take Over Politics?

    Writer Kelefa Sanneh examines recent books that diagnose America's polarization as a product of a "rights revolution" under which Americans have been trained to identify their social and political preferences with absolute rights. Does the language of rights discourage Americans from working out pragmatic solutions to disagreements?

  • SOURCE: Salon
    5-23-13

    Michael Lind: Voting is Not a Right

    Michael Lind is the author of Land of Promise: An Economic History of the United States and co-founder of the New America Foundation. Is it time, at long last, for the citizens of the United States to enjoy the constitutional right to vote for the people who govern them?Phrased in that way, the question may come as a shock. The U.S. has waged wars in Iraq and Afghanistan justified, at least in rhetoric, by the claim that people deserve the right to vote for their leaders. Most of us assume that the right to vote has long been enshrined in the U.S. Constitution.Not according to the Supreme Court. In Bush v. Gore (2000), the Court ruled that “[t]he individual citizen has no federal constitutional right to vote for electors for the President of the United States.” That’s right. Under federal law, according to the Supreme Court, if you are a citizen of the United States, you have a right to own a firearm that might conceivably be used in overthrowing the government. But you have no right to wield a vote that might be used to change the government by peaceful means....

  • Social Security: A Right or a Privilege?

    by Eric Laursen

    Image via Shutterstock.How did it come about that people have a “right” to certain benefits from the state -- or “entitlement,” in the loaded language of our day? A fascinating new paper by legal scholar Karen N. Tani argues that the idea of “welfare rights” first became commonplace not amongst activists in the 1960s, but with a group of mid-level Roosevelt administration officials who in the late 1930s were trying to get an ambitious new state-federal assortment of anti-poverty programs off the ground.