>[!summary] Rights versus Culture, Tradition, or Values >In this essay, Scott Long challenges the tension, purported by fundamentalists, between human rights and tradition, culture, and/or values. Long concludes that human rights advocacy is not necessarily in contest with culture, and can even defend communities and religious freedom. --- >“Culture talk” increasingly opposes itself to “rights talk.” Rights are treated as invaders. Sexuality has turned into a key battleground in the conflict. (Long, 2005, p. 3) The fifteen years after 1990 have seen strides in the visibility of activism around sexuality and gender identity. There are many causes. One is the spread of democratic governments in the 1980s and 1990s— as dictatorial regimes receded and civil society asserted itself. The emergence of concepts, such as "lesbian," "gay," "sexual orientation," and "gender identity," have caused cries of inauthentic import or cultural imposition. Sexuality is ripe for, and rife with, symbolic meaning. Fundamentalists fear sexuality escaping from the "tradition" contained in it. This is metaphor for larger anxieties around cultural, social, or political change. From this, "they extend their attack on the logic and essence of human rights themselves." >One feature of fundamentalist discourses is the way their different terms collapse into one another. “Culture” loses its variety and becomes indistinguishable from “morality,” and “morality” from “religion,” which in turn is defined by and often defines “tradition.” Collectively they can colonize “nationhood” until it becomes not a political entity but a rhetorical weapon. All these words will run through the examples of the backlash. In all cases, however, fundamentalisms strip these terms of ambiguity or negotiability. They become, in the fundamentalist vision, not ideas to be debated or environments in which to live, but mandates enforced by law. (Long, 2005, p. 6) Fundamentalists attack human rights frameworks by appropriating its language, "claiming that individuals' rights violate the 'rights' of the 'community' to enforce morality— and silence." >Cultures are made up of faces. They are not monoliths; they are composed of diverse individuals, each contributing to and minutely changing what the culture means and does. When a culture is reinvented for ideological purposes as a faceless, seamless whole—incapable of dissent from within, so that any dissenter automatically becomes an outsider; incapable of changing, so that growth seems like destruction—it has ceased to be an environment in which people can live and interpret their lives. It has become a rhetorical weapon to be wielded against individuals, a tool of repression. (Long, 2005, p. 16) >The role of human rights principles, unquestionably, is to mark out spaces of personal freedom, to affirm areas where individual privacy and dignity and autonomy should prevail against state or community regulation. But human rights principles also defend communities. They guard them against measures which, by isolating or marginalizing people, threaten the whole body politic with epidemic disease. They protect minority and subcultural communities against change or uniformity forced on them by the state. They ensure diversity both among communities and cultures, and within them. (Long, 2005, p. 17)