It's All About the Parking
Jacob Sullum | November 9, 2007, 12:05pm
For years neighbors have been complaining about the swinger parties at a house near the intersection of Cedar Ridge Drive and Interstate 20 in Duncanville, Texas, a Dallas suburb. City officials didn't like the parties either, but they were powerless to do anything about them. "Although the city has regulations pertaining to sexually oriented businesses," The Dallas Morning News reports, "it has not been able to document business activities at the home." So this week the Duncanville City Council passed an ordinance banning "sex clubs" in residences. The ordinance defines sex club as "any premises, person or organization that is presented, advertised, held out or styled as, or which provides notification to the public that it is a swinger's club; an adult encounter group or center; a sexual encounter group or center; party house or home; wife, spouse or partner-swapping club; or that it provides permission, an opportunity or an invitation to engage in or to view sexual activity, stimulation or gratification, whether for consideration or not."
Although the ordinance is all about sex, city officials insist that it isn't:
"We are not addressing what activities are going on," [Councilmember Johnette Jameson] said. "We're addressing the traffic. We have to be good neighbors to each other."
Mayor David Green agreed that nearby residents have been bothered by the influx of cars coming to the home.
"People can't find parking," he said. "It's really detracting from the neighborhood."
If parking is the issue, shouldn't the ordinance apply to any regular activity that attracts a lot of people? What about cookouts, book clubs, and Tupperware parties? I guess the assumption is that only sex can attract the sort of crowds that create parking problems.
[Thanks to lunchstealer for the tip.]
Brian Courts | November 10, 2007, 2:29pm | #
How anyone can make a strong claim that "rights" are well defined, have only specific characteristics (e.g., are negative, are individual) is beyond me.
Well, I think there is something to recognizing that the concept of "rights" is subjective and open to debate, but I think they
can be arrived at logically, in principle, at least. The real problem, it seems to me, is that to arrive at anything logically you need to start from a moral philosophy based on a set of fundamental axioms and ultimately we will not all agree on what those axioms are. Now all that is again "in principle" as I doubt anyone has a fully-formed self-consistent moral philosophy built from the ground up. But I guess the point is that arguing about a word like "rights" tends to obscure the more fundamental questions the lead us to give a particular meaning to that word. Plus, given its history it comes with a lot of un-stated baggage that makes getting to the real issues difficult.
Having said all that, I will take issue with the part where you (and the long passage you quote) seem to say that rights, whatever they are, are both individual and collective. In my moral philosophy that isn't so and never will be. For me, only individuals matter because of the simple and undeniable truth that only individual have the consciousness to feel pain, pleasure, suffer, form intentions, have desires, fears, etc. In other words there is
one conscious entity - the individual.
Trying to assign any of those characteristics above to a group of more than one person is inherently impossible - there is no group consciousness. The fact is that groups have no existence outside of some individual's decision to define one. Trying to assign rights to a group that is a creation of the human mind to begin with ought to just scream out with danger since you're talking about allowing some individual to ultimately decide what a group is and who qualifies for it's group treatment (whether that treatment is good or bad). That idea should worry everyone.
And that idea also leads directly to the pragmatic reason to avoid thinking of "group rights." Almost all of the evil done to people in this world since mankind evolved has stemmed from a belief that you
could attribute substantive characteristics to groups. Of course those characteristics were always used to justify all manner of "special treatment" of the individuals that some person decided to assign to that group. So, even if one
could argue that some benefit could come from thinking of a collective right, the history of what that kind of thinking makes possible is so bad that I'd be willing to give it up for that reason alone (even if I wasn't certain to my core that it is simply morally wrong and impossible to do).
