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I'm sorry, I hate to break it to you, but citing dictionary definitions doesn't actually prove anything. Go out and look at real political discourse, and tell me that, well, almost any political term is actually well-defined in practice. Conservative, liberal, democrat, republican, socialist, fascist, feminist, racist, you name it, the term has been virtually stripped of meaning. People slinging the term like an insult, people wrapping themselves in the term to score political points, academics deconstructing the term for fun. See also: denotation vs. connotation Heck, I'll even cut you a break and let you just use the discourse that appears in those gloriously-editor-mediated "major media outlets" without having to muck about with the hoi polloi that wouldn't know what the OED was if you (laboriously) hit them with it; it's still the same result. "What's the point of discussing silly made-up rights" Well, to take one silly made-up right that has been the topic of much recent political discourse, there's the "right to healthcare" that has been making the rounds, which certainly can't be found in the Constitution or any discussion of rights of any significant age (such as the classic discourse of the Founding Fathers or Enlightenment philosophers), unless you squint really, really hard. And, if you feel that isn't a silly, made-up right, well, I'm sure you can manage to find someone who will say "the right to pursue a career unfettered by non-gender-fair obligations like childbirthing" isn't either. "Right" has been ill-defined for a long time; it fits right in to that list I gave above. (Which, by the way, is a heavily abridged list; as I said, you name the term it's probably been stripped of all meaning, used to signify group membership more than any original denotation it may have ever had, with only rare people using it "correctly", and they not understood by any but those other rare people who use it "correctly".) |