Natural-rights libertarians reject egalitarianism, regarding it as a revolt against nature. On that premise, the only valid rights are those that give effect to self-ownership and private property. All rights created to give effect to egalitarian values are phony rights, and as Lew Rockwell has explained, “phony civil rights put your life in danger.”
Murray Rothbard was against all phony rights, “all ‘rights’ for special groups,” with no exceptions. He explains:
Government has been used to create a phony set of “rights” for every designated victim group under the sun, to be used to dominate and exploit the rest of us for the special gain of these cosseted groups. . . . The malignant New Class grant themselves and accredited victim groups ever increasing power to exploit, dominate, and loot an ever-dwindling group of middle-aged, white, English-speaking, Christian and especially heterosexual male parents.
These rights are constructed within the civil rights framework, which is convenient for constructing phony rights because civil rights law is “preapproved” as “our shared values.” Fighting against phony rights means rejecting the Civil Rights Act, and nobody wants to do that. They prefer to suppose that the Civil Rights Act has been hijacked to suit Far Left and communist ideals or that civil rights law is being “misrepresented,” and if correctly interpreted, its worst excesses will be avoided. However, the truth is that this legislation is designed to achieve precisely the goals it is in fact achieving. All these phony rights are a feature, not a flaw, of this legislation.
In discussing the criminalization of “harassment,” which is defined by the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) to include offending members of protected groups, Rothbard situates the roots of phony rights squarely in the civil rights apparatus: “The start of the evil can be pinpointed precisely: the monstrous Civil Rights Act of 1964, specifically Title VII, prohibited discrimination in employment on the basis of race, religion, sex, and other possible characteristics.”
Additional characteristics have since been incorporated within the 1964 definitions, as “sex” is now deemed by the Supreme Court to include sexual orientation and gender identity. The New York Times reported:
The Supreme Court ruled on Monday that a landmark civil rights law protects gay and transgender workers from workplace discrimination. . . .
. . . The vastly consequential decision extended workplace protections to millions of people across the nation, continuing a series of Supreme Court victories for gay rights even after President Trump transformed the court with his two appointments.