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The Democrats' Human Rights Fallacy

Amy Curtis
Amy Curtis  |  December 22, 2025 1:00 PM

Over the weekend, my X mentions were a fascinating place to be. Why? Because I had the temerity to point out that healthcare, housing, and education are not "human rights." My observation came after Democrat Seth Moulton, who is still clearly doing penance for once questioning boys in girls' sports, said those three things are human rights.

"I don't think this is just a Mamdani thing in New York City," Moulton said. "I think it's really important that Democrats across the country have an affordability agenda, and let me tell you what mine is."

"Three fundamental things are just human rights," Moulton continues. "And those three things are housing, healthcare, and education. If you can put a roof over your head, if you can't afford healthcare for your family, and if you can't send your kids to a good school regardless of what zip code you live in, then you don't have the same chance at the American dream that everyone is supposed to have."

Nothing that requires the labor of another person is a human right. To argue that such things are human rights is to argue for indentured servitude, at best, or slavery, at worst.

Then again, Moulton is a Democrat, and they do like their slaves and indentured servants. But I digress.

The most interesting argument against my position was from The Atlantic writer James Surowiecki who asked, "Aren't you pro-life?"

This argument pops up all the time when the issue of "human rights" is on the table. The Left seems to believe that in order to be pro-life, you must also enter into a suicide pact with their big government ideals. Failure to support a massive, fraud-ridden, authoritarian welfare state, they argue with a straight face, means you only care about babies up until birth.

That, of course, is a lie and a fallacy.

But there's another, even more idiotic, layer to this argument. See, Surowiecki believes that if you oppose requiring the labor of another person, you cannot be pro-life because having a baby...requires labor.

The mind reels.

If you can't tell the difference between declaring housing, healthcare, and education — three large segments of our economy and employment base — human rights that shouldn't cost the consumers anything, and engaging in sexual activity that leads to pregnancy, I can't help you.

There is, of course, a right to life enshrined in our founding documents. No one has the right to kill an unborn child because he's inconvenient or unwanted.

And while my objection to labeling housing, healthcare, and education "human rights" is rooted in opposition to the forced labor it requires, my actual motive for opposing such a move is far simpler.

I see what Democrats have done with the things they claim are "human rights," and it's clear they only want to control those things so they can use them as leverage to force political and social compliance.

Don't believe me? Look no further than what they said and tried to do during COVID. Democrats were practically salivating at the thought of withholding healthcare from the unvaccinated. They doled out vaccines and monoclonal antibody treatments on a racial basis in some areas, arguing it was only "equitable" to do so.

Despite thousands of words of federal regulation concerning the rights of disabled children to have access to public education, they shuttered the schools for months, setting back learning for all students, but especially for those with special needs. This includes my son, who was at the tail-end of years of speech therapy. Thanks to some ill-timed missing front teeth in the fall of 2019 and COVID shutdowns in the spring of 2020, he was never able to complete speech therapy. While his speech improved dramatically in the year and a half he was being treated, some of the effects linger to this day. And he was one of the lucky ones.

Speaking of education, I'm pretty sure it's Democrats who fight tooth and nail against school choice, which is one of the reasonable ways to use our tax dollars to improve education. In my home state of Wisconsin, Democrats opposed Scott Walker's implementation of a school choice program. Meanwhile, nearly one-third of kids in Wisconsin's public schools can't read, and Black students in Milwaukee Public Schools — the state's largest and most expensive district — test at the bottom nationally in reading and math. Despite these realities, Democrats keep shoveling good money after bad into failed public schools, opposing school choice, and attacking homeschoolers. The latter two groups routinely outperform their public school peers socially and academically, which is why Democrats hate those alternatives to public schooling. But if education is a "right," who are the Democrats to say parents cannot exercise that right in the way they best see fit?

And housing? Well, for that, we go to Boston and Mayor Michelle Wu, who is being investigated by HUD for discriminating against white people in the city's affordable housing program.

See? Housing is a right.

Unless you're white.

I didn't mean for that to rhyme, of course, but there is no better encapsulation of the Left's hypocrisy than that. 

Meanwhile, those things that are actual rights, like free speech, freedom of religion, and the Second Amendment? Democrats are loath to respect and preserve those actual rights. Free speech is subject to "hate speech" legislation and "misinformation" rules. Freedom of religion is constantly under attack in places like New Jersey and Pennsylvania, where pro-life pregnancy centers and Catholic nuns are dragged into court because the state wants to force them to violate their beliefs. In Washington, Democrats attack the Catholic sacrament of confession until backlash made them retreat, for now. And Democrats haven't met a gun they didn't want to ban, and they'll lie about gun deaths and defensive gun use to push that agenda. 

They have an inverse understanding of rights, and it gets to the heart of my argument: the only reason Democrats are pushing for these things to be "human rights" is not about altruism. It's about control.

When Democrats control where you live, where your kids learn, and whether or not you have access to healthcare, they'll make sure they reward their preferred demographic groups and punish the rest of us. They've already done it, and they'll continue to do it. Moreover, they're proud of doing it.

And when they selectively tolerate our actual rights, they control what we say, how we worship, and how we protect ourselves from tyrants; they make it clear it's about nothing more than power.

We cannot let them have it.