fbpx
Breaking Campus News. Launching Media Careers.
OPINION: ‘Dignity’ is the Radical Left’s New Favorite Word

For years, academic liberals have had a favorite “D” word–diversity. They’ve used it to justify a wide range of political projects on campus, from racial quotas to porn-fueled sex education.

But there’s a new favorite buzzword on campus–dignity. Peter Wood writes for Minding the Campus, about the academic left’s new weapon of verbal warfare:

The latest entry in the topsy-turvy world of inverse semantics is the benign-sounding word, “dignity.”  Attorney General Eric Holder took the new buzzword out for a spin in a speech to the Swedish Parliament on February 4, in which he touted the United States’ commitment to the “dignity” of “every human being.”

The speech was in fact an enunciation of the Obama administration’s evolving position on the rights of “lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender–LGBT–citizens.”  “Dignity” has been a key word in the gay rights movement, as in Dignity USA, a gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender Catholic organization.  But I’d like to follow a different thread in the Attorney General’s emphatic use of the term. Holder told the Swedes, “We share a belief in the dignity and equality of every human being.”  He said that the “values that define our nations–values that give rise to dignity, equal opportunity, and justice for every segment of our people–are anything but a novel concept.”

There are, to be sure, theological and philosophical arguments for the dignity of mankind.  The topic comes up in some debates about the foundations of morality.  If we are created in the image of God, human beings have inherent dignity.  Our capacity for rational thought also sets us apart as having dignity.  And among the philosophers, Kant made special use of the idea of dignity, arguing that it is our ability to choose between right and wrong that raises us above the animals.

But the word “dignity” is essentially foreign to the American legal and Constitution system.  And not just the word, but the underlying idea. The Declaration of Independence enunciates our values as “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”  Neither the Constitution nor the Bill of Rights mentions “dignity,” and it remained virtually unmentioned in U.S. Constitutional law down to 1944, when it appeared as part of a concurring opinion by Justice Frankfurter, and thereafter in a handful of other opinions, such as Justice Murphy’s 1946 dissenting opinion in which he opposed the execution of a Japanese war criminal.  An interesting summary of this history can be found in a Montana Law Review article in 2004 by a Georgetown professor of law, Vicki Jackson.

The main point that Professor Jackson argued ten years ago was that, precisely because the claims of “human dignity” were so small a part of our legal heritage that  U.S. courts would have to look abroad for precedents.  “Human dignity” is not our way of talking about fundamental rights, but it is very much “part of the transnational vocabulary of constitutionalism.”  The UN Charter upholds it and various European nations make much of it in their post-World War II constitutions.  In the U.S. “the concept of ‘human dignity’ in the Court’s jurisprudence is episodic and underdeveloped,” but that need not hold us back.  Jackson called on Americans to look to “international, transnational and national sources” for the idea, as well as “subnational entities that function with sufficient independence to develop their own lines of authority and reasoning.”

“Subnational entities”?  A footnote makes clear that Jackson meant state courts, which she imagined could import foreign legal principles even if our higher courts declined to go shopping in more enlightened places.

Those arguing the case for LGBT rights, including gay marriage, have picked up this theme of “dignity” as a fundamental right and run with it.  I don’t know that this tactic was necessary to their campaign but it has produced some unsettling results.  Among other things, we are seeing the Attorney General of the United States declare before the parliament of another country that we have elevated the transnational norm of “dignity” over our own Constitution.

Read Wood’s full essay at Minding the Campus.

(Image: WehoCity.Flickr)

Like The College Fix on Facebook / Follow us on Twitter

Please join the conversation about our stories on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Reddit, MeWe, Rumble, Gab, Minds and Gettr.