But we are not discussing "human rights" but "legal rights" Two completely different things!

Quote Originally Posted by leo9 View Post
And now we come down to one of the fundamental lines that divide people's basic philosophies of life.

If you answer "yes" - yes, all people deserve the same basic rights regardless of who they are or what they may have done - you are on one side of the line. (Hi!) If you answer "no" - no, some people don't deserve the basic rights I consider an absolute right for me and mine, because they're the wrong sort of people - you're on the other. It doesn't matter whether you define their wrongness as being black, gay, Muslim, terrorist-suspect, illegal-immigrant or whatever. It's the belief that human rights only apply to the right sort of humans that determines where you are going to stand on every important issue.

Believing that human rights are absolute doesn't make you a liberal pushover, though you will of course be accused of it. You can be as aggressive as anyone in defending your own rights: you just recognise the challenges in doing so without violating others'.

Classing your enemies as unpeople makes everything simpler, which is one reason it's so popular. But we all know where it leads in the end.