Group Rights Trump Individual Rights

Political, economic, and religious freedom can only exist where there is liberty and freedom of the individual.  Group rights that determine a person’s rights on the basis of belonging to a given ethnic or racial group, as presently advocated by multiculturalists and by affirmative action laws, nullify the rights of the individual.  Group rights greatly reduce the freedom of the individual in that his rights stem only from the group; if he does not belong to the group, his rights are curtailed.

“Individual rights and group rights,” says Balint Vazonyi, “are mutually exclusive; we cannot have it both ways.”  Ethnicity, race, sex, or party affiliation today increasingly determine the person’s rights.  This is reminiscent of Hitler, who once said, “The individual is nothing.  The group [the Nazi Party] is everything.”  When group rights get the upper hand, gone are the “unalienable rights” given to the individual by his Creator so admirably expressed in the American Declaration of Independence.  Indeed, the great documents of freedom…know nothing of group rights, and neither does Christianity.


Alvin J. Schmidt, Under the Influence: How Christianity Transformed Civilization, p. 259