Rights Without Responsibility Are Not Rights

HAVING IN MY YOUTH HEARD THE REAL THING I NEVER HAVING ADMIRED anything much about Eric Clapton, it didn't surprise me when he, years ago, went into a racist, English chauvinistic rant sounding like Enoch Powell at his most demented, it didn't surprise me when he joined in the geezer-rocker whine against public health measures designed to stop the spread of the Covid-19 pandemic which he whined was costing him money and it doesn't surprise me to read today that he's gonna refuse to play venues that require proof of vaccination - something which this past month has convinced me is eventually going to be pretty much a universal requirement because this pandemic isn't going away and the refuse-nuts are volunteering to be the medium in which newer, worse variants are arising. 

Maybe they can call one of those deadly new variants the Eric-clap to honor his lifetime work like they might name an asteroid that's headed for the Earth.  Having already had enough, I don't exactly welcome a new reason to disdain him but, welcomed or not, he gave it to me.

His reason, as given in The Guardian is what this is really about.  

Eric Clapton has said he will not perform at any venues that require attendees to show proof of vaccination.

In response to the government announcement that vaccination passports will be required to access nightclubs and venues by the end of September, the musician has issued a statement saying he would not play “any stage where there is a discriminated audience present.

“Unless there is provision made for all people to attend, I reserve the right to cancel the show.”

Clapton shared the statement via the Telegram account of Italian architect and Covid sceptic Robin Monotti. It was accompanied by a link to Clapton’s anti-lockdown collaboration with Van Morrison, Stand and Deliver, in which they sing: “Do you wanna be a free man / Or do you wanna be a slave?”

On top of Marjorie Taylor Greene's refusal to disclose that she (like Clapton) has been vaccinated by claiming that a reporter asking her to say if she had violated her "HIPAA rights,"  people claiming a huge swaths of "Constitutional rights" that not only appear nowhere in the Constitution or in the law or case law, people claiming rights to break laws and violate the Constitution (Donald Trump does that regularly) it's clear there's a world of trouble surrounding those "rights" which we have been trained like Pavlov's dog to have a positive reaction to whenever we hear it.  Clearly it's got the American fascists drooling ever more than before these days and there's held to be a right to not only overturn elections and the Constitution as a "Constitutional right" there is held to be a right to get innocent people killed so a bunch of fucking rich white rockers can make even more money as they kill their audience.  What's the difference between that and the depraved scene in the John Waters movie where the Divine Character, in a theatrical display of depravity and crime as art turns a gun on her audience and kills a number of them.  I can tell you the difference, in that case it was only in a really bad shock-trash movie, in the case of these asshole rockers and members of Congress, they won't be prosecuted for doing what they're doing as they are shielded from that reality of what they are doing by an imaginary wall of "rights."  

There is no right to get someone killed.

There is no right to go where you may infect other people by a refusal to be vaccinated and, or to wear a mask. 

There is no right to lie.

There is no right to hold that someone has a right to do either of those.  I would favor making the punishment for that being socked over the head with a rubber chicken and evermore being held up to ridicule.  It might eliminate entire "news" networks who do all of those.  I wish getting those a-hole rockers in the linked to story to disappear were as easy but rock has never been about honesty and responsibility and growing the fuck up.