SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom, who became internationally known for his campaign a year ago to legalize gay marriage, said on Monday he considered wireless Internet access a fundamental right of all citizens.
....
"This is a civil rights issue as much as anything else," Newsom said.
Does that mean wireless access is more of a civil right than the right to self defense?
More of a civil right than the right to own a dog of your choice -- which Newsom (a would-be pit bull exterminator) opposes?
To further illustrate how hopeless this argument is, there's no longer basic agreement on the definition of a "right." Newsom (and the people who share his philosophy) tend to see rights not as rights, but as obligations. Thus, in their minds, the "right" to wireless Internet services would not mean that I have a right to wireless if I go out and find a Internet service provider and pay for it. According to the Newsom rights doctrine, other people should be obligated to pay for my wireless Internet service.
If this is a right, why stop there? Shouldn't I have the right to telephone service too? How about mail services (as Justin suggested earlier)?
Or a house, maybe?
If I thought of rights the same way that Newsom does, my "right" to own a gun or a pit bull would not mean I'd have the right to go out and buy them, but that the government (the taxpayers) should give them to me!
(None of this is to suggest that "free" WiFi is necessarily a bad idea, mind you. I just don't think it's a civil right.)
posted by Eric on 10.04.05 at 11:06 AM
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Comments
I was with you all the way down to the final parenthetical.
Freedom isn't free. The only right is the right to be left alone. Rights are what government cannot do to you, not anything government does for you.
Otherwise, I demand my right to a limousine, a chaffeur, and a butler. Ocean liner, too.
I wish Gavin Newsom had come out against homosexual marriage. That way, it wouldn't be associated with the rest of his ideas, which are all Leftist, statist, pap. Homosexuals must break with the Left.
For many politicans and people, especially of the leftliberal persuasion, anything they want becomes a right. Now I believe, with the Founders, that rights not delegated to the government stay with the people. But these are not entitlement benefits, but freedom from interference. That, I'm afraid, is a dying idea. I have a right to be considered handsome and athletic and successful, too. Gavin Nuisance...God, what a putz.
EssEm · October 4, 2005 11:17 PM
Gavin Nuisance -- excellent. I'm going to have to start calling him that.
The Anti-Idiotarian Rottweiler
Don?t bang your head!
I was with you all the way down to the final parenthetical.
It's not "free", Eric.
But you knew that.