Essential Rights and Contested Identities: Sexual Orientation and Equality Rights Jurisprudence in Canada

Abstract

In this article, I shall examine sexual orientation as a human rights issue. The reasons why discrimination on the grounds of sexual orientation should be considered an issue of human rights have been articulated by others, and I do not propose to repeat their arguments here. Rather, I seek to examine in a more critical way some of the analytical problems that may arise in fashioning human rights protection. While the substantive goals of human rights struggles are surely commendable—freedom from persecution and from invidious discrimination, or more positively framed claims to the means necessary to live a decent life—thediscourseof rights has been the subject of critique, for example, by the Critical Legal Studies movement in the United States. Rights claims, it has been argued, reinforce the separation of the individual from community. The focus on abstract rights undermines the substantive claims of groups and individuals within society by reifying formal (but ultimately alienating) individual rights. Of course, the CLS critique itself has been subjected to sustained criticism, particularly from the schools of Feminist Legal Theory and Critical Race Theory (and the intersection of the two). The CLS attack on rights is criticized for its failure to recognize both the substantive and the symbolic impact of concrete rights victories. Furthermore, it has been argued that rights struggles can be contradictory and complex.

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