Exculpations Crybabies: Eternal Victims

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Just about everybody can claim a position in the rights brigade: those who smoke and those who don't; those who demand shelter for the homeless and those who support the right of the homeless to refuse shelter; those who claim rights for fetuses and those who want the right to make their own choice for abortion; those who want their teenagers taught to use condoms and those who insist on the right to keep their kids ignorant of such things; campus hoodlums who insult their fellow students and college administrators who promulgate censorious "rules of conduct" to prevent their students from giving offense to this or that ethnic group, sexual preference, or body type. Their "rights" give their claims -- whatever they may be -- an absolute air, and any attempt to thwart their claims turns them into victims.

Under the corrosive influence of victimology, the principle of individual responsibility for one's own actions, once a vaunted American virtue, seems like a relic. "I have this image," says Roger Conner, executive director of Washington's liberal American Alliance for Rights & Responsibilities, "of human beings as porcupines, with rights as their quills. When the quills are activated, people can't touch each other." That touchiness, Conner adds, "is the visible fruit of the rise of self-absorbed individualism" over the past several decades. "The R word in our language is responsibility, and it has dropped from the policy dialogue in America. A society can't operate if everyone has rights and no one has responsibilities."

Public affairs professor William Galston of the University of Maryland says the practice of blaming others stems from unrealistic expectations of the modern, risk-avoiding age. "If something bad happens to us," he says, "we are outraged because our lives are supposed to be perfect. Two generations ago, if infants were born with birth defects, it was considered an act of God or an act of nature. Today if the baby is not absolutely perfect, the tendency is to believe the doctor is responsible. We've created a set of social expectations and a legal structure in which the blame game can be played as never before."

The combined result of those trends is to make a travesty of what used to be called plain common sense. To be sure, charlatanism and dishonesty exist, and their victims deserve the law's protection. Yes, bigotry is inexcusable, and those who suffer by it, as well as others, are right to oppose it, backed by the full weight of law. Certainly job discrimination on the basis of sex, age or disability is not only morally unconscionable but illegal.

But what to think, for example, about the new area of litigious behavior that has blossomed and might be dubbed emotional tort law? Last March Julie Rems, 26, who is deaf, competed in the early rounds of a Miss America contest in Culver City, Calif. Though she was warned that Miss America rules precluded anyone assisting her onstage, Rems nonetheless brought on an interpreter who helped her lip-read questions. Rems lost the contest and sued the pageant committee and others, charging violation of her civil rights as well as "embarrassment, humiliation and degradation." The case has not yet come to trial.