This week, in order to celebrate the one year anniversary of Freedom Reconnection, I will be posting a three-part post written by Stephen L. Hall, which breaks down civil rights and what that means, and addresses how the Social Justice Tyrants and our government use a law that was created to right wrongs of the past to limit our freedoms.
Please remember as you read this that this is only part one. Tuesday I will post part two, and on Wednesday, the actual anniversary date of the site, I will post part three.–FR
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Originating in Latin, our English words to distinguish certain legal concepts need to be understood and defined in order to properly discuss the concept of Civil Rights.
The root of many Latin words, and consequently many English words, begin with “civ” as the very foundation of society itself: civilization, civics, citizen, and civil. There are many words in both languages representing government as different words such as nation, state, and government, but for our purposes we will just use “state”.
Civic comes from the root, civis, meaning citizen. In English, when we use the word civic it denotes a relationship or interaction between a state and the citizen of that state.
Civil comes from the root, civilis, meaning that affecting one’s fellow citizens. In English, the word civil denotes an interaction between one citizen and another citizen.
For every citizen, their civic and civil relationships are very important but for this discussion it is the very distinction between the civic and the civil which will be important. In the wee years of England, there were two different courts, the king’s court, which was only concerned with activities of the citizen against the state, and the ecclesiastic courts, or the church courts, which were concerned only with private disputes between citizens.
The issues addressed by the King’s court would eventually become our criminal cases, while the issues dealt with by the ecclesiastic courts would become our civil cases. All of these courts were subject to the review of the King’s Bench, from which we derive our appellate courts and procedures and in America, the Supreme Court.
For all the fear of liberals that conservative want to establish a theocracy or that our legal system might be dominated by religious zealots; that is the very origin of the legal issues most prized by them. If it were not for the Church and her courts, there would be no civil courts to push their civil rights, identity politics, agenda.
The distinction between civic and civil still exists in law but needs to be more clearly defined and taught. Civic has all but been lost in our language, but its meaning is very important. Few schools even teach classes in civics anymore. However, civic cases, in law, properly include crimes, any administrative hearing regarding a regulation of fine, and traffic and moving violations which get classified as crimes because of the missing umbrella designation as a separate civic offense. All civic cases are distinguished as between the state and a citizen; the state is always a party litigant in a civic case.
On the other side, civil cases, still called civil cases, include contract dispute, property disputes and dispositions, torts including negligence (also called civil wrongs), and any case between two citizens. Though civil cases before an administrative agency, known as contested cases, are often improperly treated by those agencies as if they were civic in nature.
I have been involved in a civil rights case where the state has both claimed to be a party to the case and simultaneously claimed that they were not a party but merely presenting the case for the complainant. In that case the attorney for the state’s Attorney General’s Office called the case both a contested case and an administrative hearing in the same document. The fact that the court did not care how important these distinctions are is not relevant, but dear reader I ask you to be smarter than that court, not a very high standard.
Looking just at what is civic for the moment, between the state and the citizen, on one extreme we have prohibitions or limitations of the citizen’s actions; these we call crimes. On the other extreme, we have prohibitions or limitations on the state’s actions; these we call rights. Rights and crimes are always civic in nature, one guaranteeing non-interference by the state the other limiting the citizen’s actions. They are mirror images of each other.
It is the same with what is civil, between one citizen and another, on one extreme we have a prohibition or limitation of the citizen’s actions against another citizen; these we call torts, the civil equivalent to crimes. On the other extreme, we have a guarantee of non-interference from our fellow citizens; these we tend to mislabel property rights or contractual rights because we lack better words, but sometimes interests is used in place of rights, however I think a more proper term would be ownership. Thus, on one side are torts limiting citizen’s actions against other citizens, and on the other side ownership guaranteeing the non-interference from other citizens.
Now that the field is set, it is crystal clear that rights are civic in nature, not civil. So the very phrase civil rights is an oxymoron. Civil rights cannot exist. The “civil rights” laws and the courts readily admit that the laws create a civil cause of action in the nature of a personal injury tort. In other words, “civil rights” are a legislatively created tort, or cause of action, between two citizens.
As a type of personal injury, one would think that the cause of action could be handled by any normal court between the two litigants. That would be too rational. States have created special agencies with their own rules outside the normal rules of civil actions.
Being most familiar with the State of West Virginia, let us list just a few of the differences in a “civil rights” case. When a complaint is made, the state agency investigates the claim at no expense to the litigant, or at least they pretend to investigate, there is no way of knowing if they actually do. The rules before the agency do not permit discovery of the investigation so the accused goes into the hearing largely blind.
Another agency subsidizes the claim by providing free legal services, while the accused must provide for their own lawyer. When the agency repeatedly ignores the deadlines in the case, there is little or no recourse for the accused. Discovery is used by the state’s attorneys to run up the costs, and the agency makes rulings to also run up the costs to the accused. Much worse goes on, but let us leave it at that.
Why would state agencies be so one-sided in their approach to a case to which they ostensibly have no stake? Because they really do have a vested interest in the outcome of the cases. The entire agency only exists to deal with this single specialized type of civil case. The state’s attorneys are in a specialized division which only exists to handle “civil rights” cases. Their salaries and their continued employment depend upon them finding ever new instances of “civil rights” violations.
Thus, the state is made a party of interest to the very cases that they are deciding. They treat this civil case as if it were civic, specifically criminal. The state employs both the administrative law judge as well as the attorneys for complaint. They pretend that they have no interest in the cases while their very jobs depend on continuing to find illegal discrimination. The state, in reviewing the state’s actions never seems to see any conflict of interest in this. That is the danger in having specialized single-issue courts.
This is the real reason people keep pushing for more “protected groups” as well as increasingly subjective and speculative expressions of “discrimination”. What is not “discrimination” today will probably be “discrimination” tomorrow. This is the financial incentives on the part of the state for pushing identity politics, the state employees dependent on the “civil rights” industry.
The fuel for corruption in the “civil rights” industry, as corruption always does, grows out of people pretending that this situation is different, it’s special. Special agencies and courts must be constructed to eliminate such a pernicious plague upon society. In the hyperbolic words of Justice Warren McGraw of the WV Supreme Court, “discrimination is an act akin to treason.” Something akin to treason must be serious. Corruption becomes acceptable once one convinces themselves that they are on the side of the angels fighting against treason itself.
Civil Rights laws pretend that they are based in the 14th Amendment of the Constitution. Essential to understanding this Constitutional provision, in the context of the “civil rights”, is the first three words of the second sentence, the phrase “No state shall . . . .” The 14th Amendment is a prohibition against state action, and not a prohibition against an individual’s actions; against civic discrimination not civil. As such, the 14th Amendment is best understood simply as an expression of the Rule of Law that everyone is equal before the law, not that everyone should be equal in the eyes of their fellow citizen.
What purpose is the redundant adjective civil? All cause of action in tort are civil in nature. The word civil in the civil rights act, is meaningless.
What purpose is the false noun rights? Hyperbole, to inflate discrimination almost to the level of treason so that people will not demand or expect the same level of protection for the accused as is afforded every other defendant to an accusation.
The lie lies in the very deception of the name “civil rights”. They are not rights, they are discussing a tort. The cause of action is treated as a civic wrong, not a civil cause of action. To distort the name of something is to distort people’s perception of the thing itself.
