Comments on: Fun With Pedantry

By: David T

David T — Tue, 20 Nov 2007 19:22:19 +0000

I would take issue with you that “civil liberties” was traditionally used only with reference to *governmental* imposition. Was the ACLU going beyond its jurisdction in supporting anti-lynching legislation decades ago, long before its 1960′s turn to the Left? (Lynching, to be sure, was sometimes actively supported by the state, but often the state took a passive role, either unwilling or unable to stop it. Now of course you may say that stopping lynching is a *legitimate* use of state authority, but that is another matter.)

By: Julian Sanchez

Julian Sanchez — Fri, 09 Nov 2007 15:34:37 +0000

Oh, I don’t actually imagine there’s any nefarious intent; the last sentence was somewhat tongue in cheek.

By: dan

dan — Fri, 09 Nov 2007 14:10:32 +0000

It’s not that I disagree with the distinction, or even that I don’t recognize it’s sometimes useful. Go forth and educate the world. It’s your implication of nefarious intent I find objectionable, and more to the point, implausible.

By: Julian Elson

Julian Elson — Fri, 09 Nov 2007 06:06:43 +0000

Accepting your view of civil liberties, do you really think that it’s impossible for exemptions to laws which themselves impinge on civil liberties to be worse for civil liberties than consistent enforcement of the aforementioned impinging laws without such exemptions?

Obviously, you wouldn’t approve of a law that said “campaign advertisements are prohibited one week before the election,” but taking such a law as a given, would you really approve of loosening that law’s civil liberties-impinging grip by creating a very specific exception like “campaign advertisements are prohibited one week before the election, except those sponsored through religious organizations?”

Now, admittedly, the civil liberties groups in question — assuming that the article is referring to the groups it refers to later, the Human Rights Campaign and the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force — were not (as far as I know) saying anything like the hypothesized argument of “this act impinges on civil liberties generally, but these specific, narrrow exemptions make it worse, not better.” Still, opposing specific exemptions to laws which impinge on civil liberties doesn’t automatically disqualify them from being civil liberties advocates if they viewed the exemptions as making the laws worse, even if supporting the law more broadly does disqualify them from being civil liberties advocates as such.

Or do you think I’m still confusing civil liberties and civil rights?

By: Julian Sanchez

Julian Sanchez — Fri, 09 Nov 2007 04:41:26 +0000

The word “libertarian” appears nowhere in my post. I’m pointing up the distinction between a “civil right” and a “civil liberty” traditionally recognized by literate people… admittedly perhaps also a fringe group. This has nothing to do with “hard-core libertarians” and “their language,” except insofar as “their language” is “English.”

http://www.commonplacebook.com/current_events/politics/difference_betw.shtm

By: dan

dan — Fri, 09 Nov 2007 01:28:20 +0000

umm…sure. or one could note that “civil libertarians,” in your strict sense of the phrase, are such a vanishingly small and irrelevant force in contemporary politics that they played no role in this debate over what would presumably have been one of the bigger items on their legislative agenda, if they had one. From this, one might be tempted to conclude that, rather than trying to “brand itself as a defender of something they oppose,” they were more likely to have been unaware of any academic distinction between the two phrases; hard-core libertarians are too fringy a fringe group for anybody to bother trying to steal their language. Sorry to break it to you, but…