The Ginsburg Question

U.S. Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg has proclaimed (during a visit to Egypt, of all places) that the American Constitution is passé and compares unfavorably with, for example, Canada's Charter of Rights and Freedoms. Mark Steyn, who's had his run ins with—and been a spanner in the works of—our land's horrid "human rights" machinery, sets the foolish woman straight:

By design, [Canada's Charter] excludes property rights, which Locke, Montesquieu, and other irrelevant dead guys all saw as an indispensable condition for liberty. It embeds identity-group preferences as a constitutional principle. And it empowers hack bureaucrats to determine the appropriate balance between genuine rights such as free speech and the pseudo-“rights” doled out by the state’s social engineers. It represents, as do many of the more fashionable constitutions admired in the Times piece, a precise inversion of the definition of “rights.”

In that way, it epitomizes "human rights" in our time, an endeavour that pays lip service to genuine human rights—the ones that ensure that your government or some supranational body doesn't capriciously harass you and push you around—even as it uses the idea of "human rights" as a means of exerting power and control over others. That's why I'll take the U.S. Constitution, a document that has stood the test of time, over our Trudeaupian Charter, a product of multiculturalism, that specious, toxic and discredited social doctrine, any old day of the week, month and year.

Update: Multiculti 'splained (and 'sploded).