Sunday, September 12, 2004

Anti-Privacy Cards?

I don't know how useful these will be, but they seem reasonably likely to help neg cases on the sept/oct topic (some people might recognize these from Matt Scarola's "rights talk kritik" of CFL Nationals Fame. But I don't know if he used these specific cards, or merely this author).

Mary Ann Glendon, Learned Hand Professor of Law at Harvard University, writes in "RIGHTS TALK: THE IMPOVERISHMENT OF POLITICAL DISCOURSE"
[The Plantiff in Roe v. Wade] won the right that had been understood from its earliest appearance in the American legal system as "the right to be let alone." And let alone she was. No one . . . had been willing to help her either to have the abortion she desired, or to keep and raise the child who was eventually born.
...
Buried deep in our rights dialect is an unexpressed premise that we roam at large in a land of strangers, where we presumptively have no obligations toward others except to avoid the active infliction of harm. This legalistic assumption is one that fits poorly with the American tradition of generosity toward the stranger, as well as with the trend in our history to expand the concept of the community for which we accept common responsibility.

Also this quote set (which is a good block against gay rights aff cases):
Neglect of the social dimension of personhood has made it extremely difficult for us to develop an adequate conceptual apparatus for taking into account the sorts of groups within which human character, competence, and capacity for citizenship are formed. In a society where the seedbeds of civic virtue-families, neighborhoods, religious associations, and other communities-can no longer be taken for granted, this is no trifling matter.
...
Because individuals are partly constituted in and through relationships with others, a liberal politics dedicated to full and free human development cannot afford to ignore the settings that are most conducive to the fulfillment of that ideal.

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