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Originally Posted by filtherton
The right to not be discriminated against based on race/gender/ethnicity/ancestry/sexual orientation when one is trying to find an apartment.
The right to go to a restaurant without being exposed to cigarette smoke.
What, you've never heard of these rights? Well geez, they are just as valid as rights as the right of private businesspeople to decide what goes on in their private businesses.
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No, they really aren't. You don't have a right to that which you didn't earn or weren't gifted. There's nothing rational about a 'right' to a space that someone else bought/inherited, someone else maintained, a space for which someone else bears responsibility. That's not 'just as valid', that's confiscation of someone's hard work. Maybe not even the work of the mean bigot down the street, but then from the hard work of the mean bigot's mean bigot father. This even goes for those heathen smokers as well.
And there's a word for taking stuff from people who are mean to you, solely because they're mean to you - and it's far from my first usage, but it continues to be fitting - it's childish.
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Perhaps it is better to just consider them individual rights. In fact, pretend I never mentioned collective rights at all, they aren't really all that important to what I'm trying to say.
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Good idea. If not "all imagined rights are equal", perhaps "let's talk about something else".