how dangerous an assertion or even a definition of rights can be unless it has an intention of rigorous pursuit of morality and good will behind it. Secularism rejects that safety measure

WHY ARE YOU transcribing what Stanley Hauerwas is saying if you disagree with him so much, is the question.  Well, I don't disagree with him on the basic theme of his talk that there are some very deep and serious problems with the way we talk and so think about rights* and how we express moral problems and issues that go far deeper than "rights language" can go and which secular political discourse can and those are problems that quickly impinge on all of us and, so, become entwined in our politics.  As I pointed out the other day, when Neo-Nazis, neo-fascists, Republican-fascists, Trumpzis, etc. and their allies in the mendacious Murdochian media are the foremost pushers of "rights" which they explicitly invoke to gain power to destroy rights, with the collusion of the Republican-fascists in Congress and on the Supreme Court, all of this rights business has been transformed and distorted nightmarishly in the most horrific hall of mirrors in modern history.

I think the diversion he made his speech go into on abortion was, itself, an example of the problem of dealing with a particularly fraught issue in which problems of how we talk about abortion and so how we misconstrue it and what to do about it are central to that.  The challenges I made to the problem of those who want to prevent abortions as to why they have not, in the past fifty years, championed extensive and pervasive programs to educate the public on how to effectively use contraception to prevent unwanted or impossible pregnancies - the only real way to prevent most abortions - and why the anti-choice side with few exceptions oppose any real and enduring support of pregnant Women, the children born to them and the fathers whose "rights" over a fetus seems to be the only thing they belief is worth considering but not when the child is born and in need of care and parenting, all of that is a product of how we talk about rights and other such issues lead us away from clarity and into self-defeating circles.  

I notice you haven't argued with those points or the others I've made over the past two days, I wonder why that might be.

I certainly don't agree with some of what Hauerwas says, in transcribing what he said I don't want anyone to think I consider him to be in the same class of thinker or writer as a Robinson, a Brueggemann, a Hans Kung or a James Cone.  On the other hand, he's not a light or inconsiderable thinker. I do think many of the things he says are important and, because of the consequences of the promiscuous use of the idea of "rights," in which the language casually developed by the left in the 1960s and beyond was so easily adopted by not only conservatives but overt oligarchs and fascists, our indigenous form of that in white supremacy, and now even Neo-Nazis with ACLU lawyers representing them.  The ACLU lawyers may deplore the point, but they must do this knowing their clients fully intend to do what they say when, through their exercise of speech and press, they come to power.  If the ACLU in 2022 doesn't believe that is possible they are too stupid to hold law licenses.  Or maybe just stupid enough to hold them considering the Supreme Court's rulings.

I do mean it when I say that secularism is impotent to deal with these things in an effective way because it lacks and rejects the central concept that makes rights not only comprehensible but intellectually and emotively durable, God.  There is a reason that that brilliant young man of the 18th century scientistic enlightenment, Jefferson, when he was assigned to write the Second Continental Congress's declaration breaking with the King of Britain, probably against every inclination he had, HAD TO RESORT TO GOD AS THE SOURCE OF THE RIGHTS HE WAS CITING because no one then and no one now has located any other intellectually plausible source of rights as real things.*  

Supreme Court's sometimes foolish most other times sleazy practice of inventing "rights" for artificial objects such as endowing money with that status is intimately tied up with the intellectual dishonesty that you can practice when you figure God is either absent through deistic indifference, as adopted by some of the Founders, or if you don't really believe in God as I really, truly believe a majority on the present Court does not.  They certainly don't believe in the God of Abraham, Issac and Jacob, they most certainly don't believe in the same God Jesus talked about.  They serve Mammon, they don't serve God.

Their creation of "rights" and their and the framers of the Constitution illogically assigning rights to humanly created entities such as the press and religion and political units and stupidly and vaguely seeming to do so to guns is certainly a logical contradiction of Jefferson's assertion in the Declaration of Independence and as Hauerwas has pointed out once you separate rights from the People whose lives are where rights play out in any phenomenological manner, you can do that kind of thing whenever you figure it works for you.  I do think his tying of "inherency" to that is wrong, I think it is when you remove the source of that inherency that you get that happening.  I don't think it is unrelated to the Supreme Court bestowing "person-hood" on corporations in one of the most cynical and dishonest things that frequently cynical and dishonest Court has done.

I will probably take a break and decide if I want to go on with Hauerwas's talk, though I would very much encourage anyone to listen to it and think about what he says with enough respect to not just agree with it.  If there is a better source for introducing a discussion of the problems I've laid out with our "rights language" I would willingly consider using it to discuss that.

* This issue makes considering how we talk about things containing the limits of how we think about them a lot clearer.  The beginning of the talk in which Hauerwas makes a joke about how it is unthinkable to question any aspect of the assertion of rights due to our habits of language and how notions of propriety make any questioning of some rights assertions socially unacceptable is worth considering.  I would point out that that prohibition is certainly not anything like uniform, the rights of all manner of People in various underclasses are certainly breezily down-talked, denied to exist and are easily disposed of.  Look at how easily the Roberts Court dispatched the right to vote of Black People and others in what is now probably a majority of the states of the old Confederacy, now joined by Union states such as Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan and Wisconsin.  I don't see the level of objection to that by the free press that the danger of it warrants, the freest press in our history which could certainly do to that reversion to Jim Crow American Apartheid what they did to Hillary Clinton or what they are doing to President Biden, risking cementing Republican-fascism into place for a very long time.  I will never take back what I said about the Warren Court stupidly creating a right to lie for the media in the Sullivan decision because it has had one of the most devastating effects on our politics during my lifetime as any Court decision, especially with the way later Courts maliciously built on it.  The political, social, economic and other effects of that decision are certainly more pervasive and durable than the Brown v. Board decision.  American schools are hardly desegregated any more than they were equal under the lie of  Plessy. v. Ferguson. 

Jefferson's faith in the, on balance, beneficial nature of the press was grotesquely misplaced.  Especially now with electronic media which gives so much power to it, sucking up the thinking and attention of most Americans in ways that an 18th century newspaper never could.  The conception of the right of the press granted to a humanly invented entity, conceived of in the minds of those who knew little about electricity that was unknown to Benjamin Franklin and could not possibly imagine radio, TV or the internet and a world in which media is ubiquitous to the point where it is hardly escapable, has become a cancer that is destroying democracy and equality and the planet.  Without effective restraints on lying in the media, it is deadly.  And the cowardly refusal to face that truth is self-defeating because with the corporate media lying like it does for political purposes, those who will truly put restrictions on it so it only lies for them and never tells the truth is guaranteed just as it happens in all anti-egalitarian, anti-democratic governments.  The Republican-fascists will do that as the whiny, idiot civil-libertarians are left without any coherent countering to that because their secularism leaves them with nothing.

You see, you have to really think outside the box of "rights" that we are all in to think about them as they really are, now.  "Rights language" doesn't allow that. You have to leave it to even admit how bad the problem has gotten.

* I think rights are real things, that isn't anything like saying our conception of them is full or spot-on or even very clear.  I think one of the clearest things we know about rights is that our conception of them is extremely liable to error.  Our legal, intellectual and philosophical conceptions of them are make-shift at best, often distorted by self-interest and ideology, typically.  If there is one thing that the witness to seeing Nazis and fascists and white supremacists and corporate lawyers and scumbag Supreme Court "justices" invoking rights must lead you to, it is an appreciation of how dangerous an assertion or even a definition of rights can be unless it has an intention of rigorous pursuit of morality and good will behind it.  Secularism rejects that safety measure.  It is as reckless as an establishment of state religion.