Human Rights v. Civil Rights before the Supreme Court, Again
The experience of love constitutes the sole significance of human life. The recognition of human rights is the acknowledgment of that significance — that all human beings share an intrinsic need to experience and express forms of self-transcendent love that impart to their lives eternal and unchanging dignity and worth.
Human rights derive from the universal need, conscious or unconscious, to respond to divine love. These rights abide equally and infinitely within each individual independent of history, culture, or politics. Human rights therefore transcend and ultimately trivialize all the hierarchies, categories, and classes people assign to themselves. Because of this universality, the exercise of human rights does not bring happiness to some people and misery to others; rather, its practice uplifts all to truth, love, purity, and beauty. Conversely, the suppression of human rights degrades the one who oppresses but cannot diminish the rights of one who is oppressed.
Because human rights are an expression of divine love, they are in no way amenable to coercion; however, they can be temporarily suppressed by man's law. Human rights pertain to the freedoms to love God and each other in family, community, and nation. They are the rights people are most willing to die for.
Civil rights are based upon extrinsic and changing aims in the enterprises of the world. They are granted by men to each other in law to make the substantial transactions of life just and fair according to temporal viewpoints. Civil rights are dependent upon and conditioned by history, culture, and politics. Civil rights may be conceived in noble intentions, but they invariably devolve to promote the rights of culturally favored groups and restrain the rights of disfavored groups. Therefore, the exercise of civil rights can bring satisfaction to some but suffering to others.
Today, the most culturally favored group in America is the LGBT amalgamation. Despite adding at least five letters over time, this group remains a single-digit-sized minority. LGBT cultural supremacy controls the ideologies promoted by the American educational, government, and media establishments. The tenet that LGBT civil rights trump the human rights of everyone else has been accepted across these institutions. That doctrine is so dominant that the Supreme Court — afraid to clearly uphold the First Amendment right of Christians to freely and publicly exercise their religion — accepts only those cases that touch that sacred black-letter constitutional protection with a ten-foot pole.
Left-wing ignorance and atheism enable the terms "human rights" and "civil rights" to be used interchangeably in the pursuit of special rights for favored groups. In America, one hundred years after the establishment of universal suffrage, civil rights are the enemy of human rights. The two great human rights catastrophes of American history have been the civil right to own slaves and the civil right to commit abortion. In the former, if the civil right to own slaves (afforded to both white and black people) had simply been removed without the introduction of "reparative" civil rights such as affirmative action, our nation would be better off today.
The human right of family members to express love for each other, and for parents to protect and guide their children, is such a primal and universal "given" it was not specifically mentioned in the Constitution. As enacted in slavery, the denial of this human right was particularly cruel. This cruelty is being repeated in the service of LGBT civil rights, when parents are not allowed to prevent the artificial resexuation of their minor children.
In 2018, an Ohio judge named Sylvia Hendon destroyed the human rights of parents when she terminated their legal relationship with their minor son so he could begin artificial resexuation while still in high school. Having practiced psychology for over forty years, I have witnessed what it takes to involuntarily terminate parental rights following accusations of child abuse. It's a heavy legal lift. In the service of the LGBT civil rights, all it took was Judge Hendon's opinion that resexuation should be undertaken before college. How realistic were the plans you made when you were sixteen? How did that career as an international rock star work out? It was a firm plan when you were playing bass with your crew at the VFW hall. But so great are Judge Hendon's prophetic powers that she is certain that twenty years from now, when the late-30s "trans" is unable to make love, have babies, or even walk or talk in a natural manner, it will be for the best.
Any legal dispute between human rights and civil rights, such as cases testing the religious freedom of Christians against the civil rights of LGBTers, should be conceptualized from the vantage point of the more fundamental right. But that does not happen. For example, the Supreme Court case Masterpiece Cakeshop v. Colorado Civil Rights Commission, which tested Christian human rights against LGBT civil rights, was described in the mainstream media as a "gay rights" case. This despite the fact that the "gay" men could use the Yellow Pages to find another baker, while the baker could not use that directory to find another Christ.
The current human rights case before the Supreme Court, Harris Funeral Homes Inc. v. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission," tests whether a Christian funeral director can be forced by the government into employment practices that violate his Christianity. The funeral home had a male employee who began artificial resexuation during the course of employment and demanded to be allowed to cross-dress on the job according to his subjective feelings of being a woman. Both parties are driven by subjective personal experience. One believes that his eternal life is dependent upon obeying Christ; the other wants to come to work dressed as a woman and keep his job.
The Supreme Court declines to boldly uphold human rights above civil rights by accepting the case solely to review the limited question of whether the term "sex" in the Civil Rights Act of 1964 covers discrimination based on "gender identity." Of course it does not. That no-brainer is unworthy to be put before the dignity of the Court. The various minority sexualities and "gender identity" refer to purely psychological conditions distinct from and independent of biological sex. "Gender identity" theory was a witch's brew cooked up in the 1990s to poison the American mind against the natural facts of binary sex.
May the Supreme Court someday find the courage to do its sworn duty to the Constitution and re-establish the human right of religious freedom above any narrow civil right in America, once and for all.