Rights Don’t Come With Responsibilities

 As more ‘libertarians’ hive off into the realm of right wing idiocy, a good portion of them usually give you this line, or something like it, “rights come with responsibilities!” Or, maybe something like this, “without responsibilities, rights are just entitlement!” Any number of other bullshit lines like that, really. To be fair, they’re not entirely bullshit, the problem is the word responsibility, but not its true definition, but the bastardized version people use today, especially right wingers.

So, what do I mean by that? In short, the word has been corrupted. A responsibility is properly defined as a natural obligation, something you are obligated to deal with as the consequence of a choice and/or action on your part. You have a kid, you’re responsible for its well being. You ram your car into someone else’s and break their leg, you’re responsible for helping deal with the damage, even if it is truly an accident. If you did it deliberately, you owe even more responsibility. But the word’s definition has been corrupted over time to include arbitrary 'responsibilities.' Gays who were jailed last century for their ‘choice’ were told they had to 'take responsibility’ for their actions and sit in a cage. People busted with certain plants the government doesn’t like were told they had to 'take responsibility’ for their choices and go to jail or prison and have their lives destroyed. In short, people, especially conservatives in my experience, use the word responsibility as a stand-in excuse to place arbitrary impositions on people they don’t like for doing things they don’t like. People have a justifiable allergy to the word nowadays, given its misuse and abuse over time.

So no, rights don’t come with responsibilities. You either have a right or you don’t, it’s that simple. Choices and actions come with consequences, and some of those consequences are justified and unavoidable, and some are good and some are bad. Some bad consequences are simply due to people being assholes, and should be avoidable, and those are the ones that conservatives especially want to pass off as ‘responsibilities.’ They’re not, and no one should accept them as such.