From the WSJ Opinion Archives
WONDER LAND
Rights Fatigue
Annika Sorenstam is no Martin Luther King.
Remember the Annika Sorenstam storm? No? Come on, it was just last week. Annika Sorenstam, from Sweden, is the world's best woman golfer, by far. She accepted an invitation to play in a men's tournament, the Colonial, and Vijay Singh, an excellent golfer from Fiji, objected, setting off a storm of press support for Annika, who played one round well, collapsed in the second round, missed the cut and said she was going back to the women's tour, "where I belong," but not before about 20,000 inches of sports writing proclaimed her courage, pluck and contribution to . . . to what?
Throughout the Sorenstam storm I kept wondering: Am I missing something here? I can't quite pick up on the evident importance of this event. Forty years ago, black Americans marching for equal rights were blown over with fire hoses in the streets of Birmingham, Ala. Now in our time, virtually as much rhetorical steam is being vented on women gaining access to men's golf tournaments.
Martin Luther King Jr. is the father of the modern civil-rights era. His movement was one of the great periods of moral transformation that at times sweep through American society. That movement is now in the stage of public-policy life known as diminishing returns.
This is not to say it is no longer possible, in a society as vibrant as ours, to find new claims born of new circumstances, such as intellectual property rights. It is to say that the rights movement has become so profligate and profuse in its claims that the original civil-rights idea is collapsing into incomprehensibility. In turn, the public is becoming inured and even hostile to these claims.
Arguably the most reviled person in Moorestown, N.J., is the high school's valedictorian. Blair Hornstine, who soon will attend Harvard, has been tutored at home by teachers paid for by Moorestown, because her family made a successful claim that she is disabled with chronic fatigue syndrome. But the real trouble began when the school system asked Ms. Hornstine to share her valedictorian honors with the boy who finished .055 points behind her, because her GPA did not include a grade for gym. Ms. Hornstine's family sued in U.S. District Court for the exclusive honors, and Judge Freda Wolfson ruled that Ms. Hornstine alone has the right to be the school's valedictorian.
Moorestown is a perfectly nice, forward-looking, suburban New Jersey town. But this event has filled the local paper with extraordinarily angry letters directed at the Hornstines, the legal system and the school system. Moorestown isn't merely having a political disagreement. It is undergoing a loss of faith in its civil institutions.
Title IX is the law that has given college women a right to equality with men in a school's sports teams. At Division I schools, the skill of the female athletes is remarkable to watch, since most have been recruited to athletic scholarships from highly organized high-school programs, summer camps or personal coaches. The law's nominal right of access has been enforced and interpreted with strict numerical precision, terminating many traditional men's teams, and this too has produced widespread bitterness and resentment.
The next example is ludicrous, but I don't think the people who get upset about these things now distinguish between serious and frivolous rights claims. This is of course the case, now filling time on Court TV, of the Muslim woman, a convert, who says it is her right not to have her face photographed for a Florida driver's license. Sultaana Freeman v. Florida is now at trial, with Ms. Freeman's counsel provided by the American Civil Liberties Union. Court TV's chat room is filled with e-mails ridiculing Ms. Freeman's claim as absurd. Of course she may win.
My own interest in these issues has partly to do with what has become of the rights movement itself, but more broadly with its effect on our politics. The Founding Fathers, recognizing that politics is often intense, thought they were designing a system inclined toward compromise. What we have now, however, is invariably bitter and uncompromising. As with the "red" states and the "blue" states, we are becoming the kind of country the Founders struggled to avoid. We should be worried when people start writing letters to the local paper denouncing, in political terms, both an 18-year-old with an A average and "the system."
Animal rights, the patients' bill of rights, affirmative action in all its permutations, medical-privacy rights, environmental justice, reproductive rights, the rights of foreign-born prisoners, golf-club rights and disabled-golfers' rights, the right to insurance coverage, smokers' rights, non-smokers' rights. Some of these rights, standing alone (like an island), make for interesting argument. But does a point arrive when the never-ending claims become too absurd or arcane for most people to support or comprehend? What historic "wrong" was being "remedied" by allowing Annika Sorenstam (71-74) to compete against Justin Leonard, who shot a final round 61?
This is all familiar ground to rights theorists, who have long shuttled between negative rights and positive rights. The impenetrable Mr. Kant notwithstanding, you will see the political import right away on hearing that negative rights are often called "liberty" rights (you may not interfere with my right to speech) and that positive rights are "entitlement" rights (you must provide the resources for me to get an education). We've lived in a long era of positive-rights creation. I think the proponents ought to cash in their chips and give it a rest. Fat chance. On to Augusta.
Martin Luther King's original appeal was ultimately to personal conscience. His success in turn led to public support for passage of historic civil-rights acts. We're a long way from 1964. Not much effort is made anymore at persuasion. The rights game now is about just winning, by manipulating legislatures or finding a whatever-you-want judge, as in Moorestown, and then declaring that the issue is "settled law."
But it isn't settled, not unless the broad public recognizes and accepts the result, as it did for women's rights. If the public does not, if it has moved on from compassion fatigue to rights fatigue, then those sentiments will start to show up in voting booths in the new civil war between the reds and the blues.
Mr. Henninger is deputy editor of The Wall Street Journal's editorial page. His column appears Fridays in the Journal and on OpinionJournal.com.
