Human Rights and the Family

Abstract

The conjugal family seems to be under assault from the rights revolution. Rights claims have relentlessly sliced into the family from diverse angles: divorce rights, reproductive rights, gender rights, sexual orientation rights, marriage rights, children’s rights, birth rights, affiliational rights, parental rights, de facto parenting rights, custody rights, families of choice rights, and so on. Some lament that this historic institution is dying under the trauma of these rights assaults. Others see this trauma as the creative turmoil of renewal, rebirth, and re-creation. In The Rights Revolution, Michael Ignatieff, former director of Harvard’s Carr Center for Human Rights Policy and current leader of Canada’s federal Liberal party, points out that the last thirty years have been marked by new conflicts over the status of marriage and the family in liberal democracies. According to Ignatieff, the “rights revolution” aims at transforming society’s most basic conjugal and kinship relationships (85). Its “central idea” is that each individual has “the right to choose the life we lead and that we must fight to exercise this right against all comers” (99). Whether this passion for rights means the death of the traditional family or its radical metamorphosis into new forms, nevertheless it is evident that this revolution has set itself against the historic institution of marriage. Ignatieff denounces as “downright tyranny” political attempts to sustain a public ethos protective of the traditional conjugal family (102). Claims that the historic Acad. Quest. (2009) 22:63–78 DOI 10.1007/s12129-008-9098-y