Free The Rights Revolution by Michael Ignatieff

community of rights-bearing equals and a community of self-governing nations.

IV
RIGHTS, INTIMACY, AND FAMILY LIFE
    D URING THE PAST FORTY YEARS , the rights revolution has penetrated the most intimate spheres of private life. As rights talk moved from the public sphere to the family dinner table and then into the bedroom, it overturned sex roles, the family division of labour, and sexual identity itself. The rights revolution has become a sexual revolution, and in the process, it has transformed all our most important social relationships: between men and women, between parents and children, and between heterosexuals and homosexuals.
    All liberal democracies have gone through the same social transformation. The only distinctive aspect of the Canadian pattern has been the speed with which courts and legislatures have responded to demands for children’s rights, easier divorce, abortion rights, the equation of marriage and co-habitation, and the full entrenchment of rights to sexual difference. The fact that these rights were conceded speedily does not mean that they wereconceded without a struggle, however. Nor does it mean that the struggle is over. Women still do not earn equal pay for equal work and the burdens of unpaid child care still fall disproportionately upon them. Homosexuals still do not enjoy the same rights to marry, to adopt, or to inherit pensions and other assets from their spouses. 1 Yet even though the rights revolution in private life remains unfinished, it is hard to imagine that it will not run its full course. The reason is simply that the rights revolution appeals to an idea of equality and against this idea there is no remaining court of appeal.
    The demand for equal rights in intimate life is also a demand for recognition. I’ve said a lot about rights and very little about recognition. It’s time to define the term. Recognition is a very Canadian idea, since it was a Canadian philosopher, Charles Taylor, who first put it into common parlance among political philosophers. 2 To recognize someone in common speech is to put a name to a face, to single him or her out from a crowd. To be recognized is to emerge from anonymity, to be seen and acknowledged for what you are. When you are recognized, you cease to be a nobody and you become a somebody in someone else’s eyes. Groups are fighting for a similar kind of recognition. They want the majority to recognize them, to see them anew, to acknowledge that they are equal, not only in law, but also in moral consideration. Equality of rights is the precondition for recognition, but it is not sufficient to ensure it. When individuals and groups seek recognition, they want their equality recognized, but they want their differencesacknowledged as well. Beyond legal equality, groups seek acknowledgment of the value of their culture, heritage, and distinctive point of view. Struggles for recognition typically require a group of people to recognize themselves first, to overcome their own shame or lack of self-worth and then project an image of themselves as they wish to be seen by the watching world. Once this process occurs, the struggle turns into a demand that the watching world change its view of the group, engage with its own clichéd or stereotyped views and reach out to its members both as equals and as people whose differences from the mainstream are to be acknowledged and welcomed.
    The whole difficulty about recognition turns on the question of whether it means acquiescence, acceptance, or approval. 3 When a majority grants a minority rights, is it required to acquiesce to, accept, or actively approve the practices of this group? Certainly gay groups, for example, are asking not just for toleration, but for approval. And approval seems to follow from the idea of equality. But does equality of rights necessarily require equality of approval? The majority has conceded equality of rights to homosexuals, but this seems not to imply approval, merely