This article is a second shoe dropping. In my 1992 book Gay Ideas, I pointed out theoretical problems in contemporary academic understandings of gay identities - of what it means to count as a homosexual being. In particular, I criticized the view widely dubbed "the social construction of homosexuality," which holds that lesbian and gay identities are to be understood on a par with abstract expressionism or baseball as social forms and forces that have not always existed and that are clearly the products of culture rather than nature. Just as there were no baseball dugouts or color-field paintings in the 12th century, neither (the social constructionists claim) were there gays, lesbians, or homosexuals back then. I argued that all the standard interpretations and defenses of the social constructionists' thesis contain some flaw of concept, logic, or fact.

In this essay I criticize contemporary academic understandings of gay identities along another dimension. I point out the moral, practical, and political deficiencies and dangers inherent in these understandings and in the wider received opinions and dominant paradigms at work in contemporary Leftist-dominated academe. Again, my perspective in the main is critical rather than constructive, though along the way I flag some attractions of traditional political liberalism.

If the current intellectual trends that have taken over the social sciences and humanities are absorbed into law and society generally as governing styles of thought, they will have dire consequences for the defense of rights. In particular, should these trends come to govern in the courts and case law, they would have disproportionately disastrous consequences for gay rights. They would cause privacy rights to collapse into equality rights, which, in turn, would collapse into speech rights, which, however, would prove to be untenable.

The trends march under a variety of banners: post-structuralism, social constructionism, deconstructivism, and the new historicism - collectively, postmodernism. Institutionally the trends have clotted together under what is coming to be called cultural studies, an emerging discipline which also includes a fair number of old ideas and styles of thought recycled and transmuted from the last century - notably the debris of Marxism. For the uninitiated, here are five minutes of "Postmodernism 101."

All the trends that make up postmodernism have as their central saint and hero, archangel and evangelist, the French philosopher Michel Foucault, whose most influential books are Discipline and Punish (1975) and The History of Sexuality (1976). What these trends have in common ideologically is Foucault's belief in the cultural or social origins and nature of meaning, values, identities, knowledge, and power. But culture itself (the more modern deconstructive postmoderns hold) is not one uniform thing but a multi-strand, ever-changing thing, so that "meaning," "identity," "knowledge," and "power" themselves are always plural, ambiguous, fuzzy, multiform, strained, even contradictory. In definition or understanding, everything is both determined by and inevitably, in turn, dissolves into its social context. Nothing has meaning or value in itself, and the meaning of no "thing" - be it a text, individual, or institution - is stable. Everything is both socially constructed and yet also self-deconstructing.

Because in the postmodern view everything is dependent on its relational placement for its meaning and even for its existence, there are no free-standing individuals, only shimmering variable "types." Within this view that the world is composed of socially constructed yet slippery "types," the postmoderns dilate and alter the Marxist belief that the core contests of power and meaning lie in the structures and struggles between classes. They believe that contests of power and meaning range across any number of differences, but especially differences of race, gender, and sexuality: the postmodern trinity. Since these types are social constructs or products rather than, say, natural properties, they take their meaning from their relations toward and against each other and other types, identities, and concepts.

In consequence of postmodernism's belief that the source of meaning, value, and existence is the interrelatedness of concepts or types, there can be no "real" world outside of, beyond, over and against the web-like lattice of concepts, a world that could either underwrite concepts or provide a pivot for a critical assessment of them. As a result, truth for Foucault and his followers is not to be understood as correspondence - a match-up of a proposition or statement to the world. Concepts do not hit or miss the world; they create it - are constitutive of it. Truth is the coherence of the web of concepts that make up the world.

In ethical consequence, the truth does not make you free and does not - indeed cannot - provide ideals and guidance for a society. Rather, truth for Foucault is a "regime," a thing with effects. It is just whatever concepts influence and sway the mind. Truth is the going regime of ideas in a society - whatever the regime's coherence happens to be at the moment. Truth acts as a social lens through which one views, interprets, and constructs everything. One can never step beyond this social lens, which is embedded in and perhaps even constitutes the mind, and which filters and manipulates all we take in.

For postmoderns, the distinction between fiction and fact, myth and reality, collapses. Language and ideas are never essentially descriptive. They are always means of persuasion, never tools for independent critical inquiry and assessment. The postmodern lesbian philosopher Cheshire Calhoun puts it bluntly: "The point of telling gay and lesbian history. It is a political one." Rhetoric is all, reason nothing.

In the postmodern view, politics permeates all our ideas, and the values that inform that politics are always, like everything else, culturally determined. Since the meaning of a thing is derived from its social context, there can be no values lying outside of a society on the basis of which one could evaluate or criticize the society itself. And so, postmodernism is deeply committed to moral relativism between societies.

Because knowledge is a product of social forces rather than derived from nature, science's claims to objectivity and impartiality are always bogus, cooked up to hide whatever political agenda the science as a social project is necessarily pushing. But the reverse is also true in postmodernism: knowledge is power - not in the sense that practical wisdom enables us to do things efficiently, but in the sense that what is in our minds determines who we are, and so, in the end (it is claimed), determines how we will act. Thus postmodernism is deeply committed to cultural determinism.

In the evolving modern age, power has become ever more diffuse in its scope, ramified in its penetrations, and refined in its manipulations. And it works not so much by pushing and shoving as by luring and inducing. In the first instance, its effects are on the mind. It does not cause or coerce a person to do something against his or her interests; rather it seduces one into viewing oneself in a certain way, as having certain interests, even desires, as being a certain type of person, and then into acting in accordance with the type.

With this sketch as a background, I want to suggest that the rights most important to gays - privacy rights, equality rights, and speech rights - if brought within the force field of postmodernism, will telescope into each other and implode. First, the dependence of the individual on the social - the social construction of the individual - will eliminate the unique self as a vehicle for privacy by dissolving the individual into a type or types. But then, in turn, the social relativity of values will undercut the core rationale for the equality rights that should protect individuals as types. Finally, because of the social relativity of meaning and the interpenetration of knowledge and power, individuals as types become contested zones of meaning - battlefields in what are now called the cultural wars, where to win means to control meaning and thus to control ideas and speech. The ability to articulate ideas is cultural war booty, rather than part of the agreed-upon ground rules - the "Geneva conventions" - of cultural warfare. And so further, freedom of thought and rights to free speech, too, must finally go by the boards.

In the postmodern view, it is a mistake to think of personal choice and individual decision-making as motor concepts in social theory. There is no individual prior to social processes. The individual (or what we mistakenly call the individual) is a product of culture, a social construction. The individual is at most a bud or excrescence emanating from the social mind or what postmoderns call "social discourses." But as the plural "discourses" suggests, society is not of a single mind. So the constructed thing is not a unity. The "individual" is simply the point where a number of social identities intersect. The constitutive identities themselves, though, according to deconstructive principles, are disparate and contradictory.

But then, there is no thing that is properly called a person if by person we mean a creature with ends of its own choosing and the ability to revise those ends in light of critical self-reflection. First, the individual cannot have a core content or identity of its own making; nor can it have a core set of desires over and against what is socially imposed on it, so the first requirement of personhood cannot be met. Second, socially imposed categories affec,t even effect, self-perception. Indeed it is chiefly through the social causing the self to perceive itself as a certain type (say, homosexual) that the self becomes the type and comes to have desires in accordance with it (say, homosexual ones). And so, the second prong of personhood, call it autonomy - the ability to critically assess and revise one's ends - is also beyond the horizon of possibility for the socially constructed individual.

Further, there is no, and can be no, privacy in the sense of the personal - a region of activity in which a person, simply as a person, is sovereign in her decisions and in her ability to act on them. More specifically, there are no "central personally-affecting values" - the formulation for privacy rights offered, for example, in Roe v. Wade (1973), the Supreme Court case that held that abortion is protected by the right to privacy. In postmodernism the individual cannot have core interests or make core decisions that privacy protects against social forces. For social manipulations and interests have invented the individual's interests.

To sloganize: No persons, no rights. Foucault himself saw that, once the individual is dissolved as a source of independent desire and autonomy, appeals to rights are pointless against the ever more ramified and sinuously intrusive state. Rather, at the end of Discipline and Punish, Foucault feebly supposes that micro-level resistances to the state will somehow automatically spring up form within the very webs of power laid out by the state. This assumption seems to be little more than a pledge taken to the Hegelian dogma that theses always contain within themselves antitheses that spring up automatically from them.

Beyond "the personal," other senses of privacy also wither under the postmodern gaze. In postmodernism, there cannot even be a sense of privacy that emanates from and guarantees a person's control of his or her own body. In the postmodern view, the body is not a constitutive factor in the individual, but is at most a blank slate over which the gas-cloud-like social mind drifts and writes its script, which the individual then reads off to find out what type of person she is. The body as a principle of uniqueness, as a determinate source of desire, as a receptacle of pleasure, and as an essential instrumentality of freedom - all this is denied by postmodernism. The fine filaments of the social, especially operating through the mind of its target, are like a spider's cocoon that gradually encases, obscures, and desiccates the body. Or as Foucualt, inverting Plato's Orphic maxim, puts it: "The soul is the prison of the body."

In its most recent abortion ruling, Planned Parenthood v. Casey (1992), the Supreme Court surprisingly put a great deal of emphasis on the body as the source of the "general right" of which the case holds abortion to be a part. We hear twice of a right to "bodily integrity," of a right to "the ultimate control over one's destiny and one's body ... implicit in the meaning of liberty," and of "the right to physical autonomy." But on a postmodern understanding of the body, the Supreme Court would be benighted, should it now reverse its 1986 "homosexual sodomy" decision, Bowers v. Hardwick, and find a right to gay sexual privacy in Casey's right-granting talk of the body. For the body, in this understanding, is at most a valueless, inert, functionless nothing.

In sum, individual uniqueness and distinctiveness have no place in the postmodern view, and with their vanishing so too vanish the conditions and equipment with which to assert privacy rights. But postmoderns generally do not bemoan this disappearance. Under a lingering Marxist, mechanically feminist, or conservative communitarian sway, postmoderns hold the impoverished view that privacy rights are merely either a bourgeois power grab by and for the propertied elite or a means of insulating pornography and domestic violence from the law. Lesbian legal theorist Ruthann Robson in her 1992 book Lesbian (Out)law claims, for instance, that "there is nothing inherently private about sex. ... Privacy is ultimately dependent on the legally sacred concept of private property."

Rather than prizing privacy rights, postmoderns put a premium - or at least appear to - on equality rights. For instead of viewing an individual as an individual, postmodernism always views the individual as a type or cluster of types. The individual is constituted as the intersection of diverse social forces, roles, identities, and interventions. And indeed, if the individual is always to be viewed as a type or kind, then the sorts of rights that the postmodern theorist might reasonably attempt to assert are rights to equality - rights, that is, which protect individuals as belonging to some type, kind, identity, or "difference." In current federal law, such protected groups include blacks, women, Latinos, paraplegics, resident aliens, illegal immigrant children, Democrats, Marxists, veterans, people with AIDS, and Mormons. Future law might protect queers, the homeless, drug addicts, punkers, skinheads, students, and ex-cons.

The problem for postmodernism, though, is that the relativisms that rest at the core of its commitments will undo attempts to give any adequate analysis of equality and inequality. And this failing explains why postmodernism rarely gets beyond mantra-like invocations of The List of its favorite "differences" - race, class, gender, sexuality, and other othernesses - to analyze equality, as though what equality rights are and who has them are somehow obvious, the elasticity of The List notwithstanding.

The specific problem confronting postmodernism (it will turn out) is that its ethical relativism eliminates any analysis of equality that turns on an understanding of oppression or oppressed groups. This result is perhaps ironic, for given the usual make-up of The List, this sense of equality - equality as non-oppression - is the one about which postmoderns give every appearance of being centrally concerned.

Now the postmoderns are right about a couple of things here. First, equality in its fundamental sense is not to be understood as merely formal equality - the treating of similar cases similarly, making sure that everyone has equal access to whatever other rights there are. Foucault and his followers have shown a great sensitivity to rules that are neutral on their face but that in application disadvantage some group. Thus, for example, a law that bars sex both to unmarried heterosexuals and unmarried homosexuals is hardly neutral in its application though it formally treats gays and straights identically.

Second, in expanding The List of contested social categories well beyond familiar Marxist categories of class and wealth, postmodernism implicitly appears not to be concerned primarily with substantive equality, either. We can have millionaire gays and millionaire blacks who are nevertheless oppressed. And there are poor folk who are nevertheless oppressors; indeed such people make up the bulk of neo-Nazi movements.

Equality is neither a merely formal nor a substantive principle, but is, I suggest, a structural one. Equality is chiefly a principle of non-degradation. Inequitable treatment is the holding of members of a group in lesser moral regard, as less than full human beings, by virtue of their group membership alone, independent of any behavior that might constitute them as members of this group. It is not inequitable to treat murderers in lesser moral regard, since they are classified by what they have done.

But this sense of equality as non-degradation presupposes a culturally-neutral claim that each and every person presumptively is worthy of equal regard and that we have some means of determining this moral fact outside of the moral twists and turns of any given society. Due to its relativistic commitments, postmodernism can never provide this presumption.

If a society thinks, in the manner of the Supreme Court's 1857 Dred Scott decision, that slavery is acceptable because blacks are lesser beings, and if values are socially and historically specific - all culture-bound and culturally determined as postmoderns claim - then there is no fulcrum and lever with which one could dislodge this belief about blacks by showing it to be false. But then, if blacks are inferior, they are not treated worse than they should be when they are treated as slaves rather than as full persons.

We can tell from within a culture (say, from its jokes and slang) that some group is humiliated, held in contempt; but without culturally-neutral values, one cannot tell whether that group does or does not indeed deserve that contempt. Without such values, we cannot know that certain groups aren't simply being put in their proper place. Postmodern theorists like Judith Butler, author of Gender Trouble, brand as fascist any appeal to culturally-neutral values and the metaphysics such values inevitably entail. But without such values we are unable to tell when ill treatment and ill-will are warranted and when they constitute oppression.

The moral relativism of postmoderns leaves them unable even to refute Nazi views on homosexuals:

"Himmler recounted to his SS generals the ancient Germanic mode of execution for homosexuals - drowning in bogs - and added: 'That was no punishment, merely the extinction of an abnormal life. It had to be removed just as we now pull up stinging nettles, toss them on a heap and burn them.'" (from James Steakley's 1975 The Homosexual Emancipation Movement in Germany)

The moral relativism of the postmoderns destroys the very foundations of the sort of equality which they want to espouse.

When, as in postmodernism, there are no culturally neutral criteria with which one could properly show to be false a socially held belief that some group is worthy of derision, all one can do is to change the belief itself from within the culture, thus transforming the culture into a different one with its own, new values, which again, thanks to moral relativism, are unassailable. Inevitably, then, under postmodern pressures, equality rights have no separate standing from concerns about how to persuade people to change their values. At best, equality rights against oppression and degradation must be abandoned in favor of rights to free speech, by means of which one side or faction in society tries to upgrade the status of certain groups within the culture.

But most postmoderns have not embraced free speech rights. Ruthann Robson, for example, guts the First Amendment in one sentence: "The First Amendment is a rule of law with its roots in European liberal individualism and property-based notions. Its value to lesbians must be decided by us, not assumed by us." Free speech rights are good only if they "assist us" - i.e., us lesbians. This stance, holding that asserted rights really are rights only when the asserting group says they are, does away with free-speech rights altogether once some other competing and winning group makes the same claim for itself: "we believe in free-speech rights only when they work for us, and we've won, so no speech rights for you." In short, majorities, on this account, get to determine what rights there are - which is to say the "rights" are not rights at all, but majority privileges.

Perhaps the best-known postmodern attack on the First Amendment is Stanley Fish's 1992 article entitled "There's No Such Thing as Free Speech and It's a Good Thing, Too." Fish holds that speech "impinges on the world in ways indistinguishable from the effect of physical action." This position is silly when taken literally, as it would imply that I can move mountains with my mind and tongue as easily as with dynamite and a steam shovel. What Fish is really doing is taking the postmodern pledge that people's ideas determine what they do because they determine who they "are." To make people good, we, like Plato's Philosopher-Kings, must control what people hear and must hold them legally responsible for their utterances as though these were thrown knives - only worse.

Speech for postmoderns is nothing but politics by other means. It cannot be subject to rules other than those of political power, which include the acceptability of its suppression through the machinery of majority rule. Fish's hope is that majority rule, free of the burdens of the First Amendment, will choose to suppress such speech as the shouting of "faggot" and so sweep in a millenium of gay liberation. After all, how else could one do that but with words? Liberation on this account will be cheap, quick, and easy, because talk is cheap, quick, and easy.

Fish gives no acknowledgments to the sorts of arguments made by traditional liberals in favor of free-speech rights - arguments like those from John Stuart Mill's On Liberty (1859). Fish fails to see that the free exchange of ideas is the chief means by which we critically assess our beliefs to see if they are warranted and is what allows us, to a significant degree, to evaluate courses of action without having previously performed them ourselves. It is this critical capacity of speech, language, and thought that distinguishes words conceptually from actions and that positions them as things that centrally need to be protected if individuals are to be autonomous, and so warrants speech's protection even if these produce incidental harms in the world of action.

Lessons of recent history should teach us that Fish's hope of liberation through the control of speech is a misguided fantasy. When governments suppress speech, it is lesbian and gay speech that they suppress first. In February 1992, the Canadian Supreme Court accepted Catherine MacKinnon and Andrea Dworkin's analysis that pornography may be legally banned because it is degrading to women. After this ruling, the very first publication in Canada to lead to a bookseller's arrest was the lesbian magazine Bad Attitude. The Glad Day Bookstore, Toronto's only gay bookstore, continues now to be harassed by customs officials and police just as it was before the MacKinnon-rationalized decision, because the police view gay sex itself, in whatever form, as degrading to the humanity of its participants.

It is not just lesbian feminists who should fear unleashed censorship. The New York Times (June 29, 1994) reports that "earlier this month, the America Online network shut down several feminist discussion forums, saying it was concerned that the subject matter might be inappropriate for young girls who would see the word 'girl' in the forum's headline and 'go in there looking for information about their Barbies'."

The cost of postmodernism is high. It eliminates privacy rights, equality rights, and free-speech rights. Ironically, it turns out that postmoderns themselves, when they deign to descend from their ivory towers, also believe that the cost of postmodernism is too high. When confronted with the real world and the need to act politically, they resort to what they call "strategic essentialism" - essentialism here is a code word for the assumptions about human nature that are embedded in liberal individualism. Postmoderns recognize that their own sort of relativistic talk will not get them anywhere in the real world, and that they will have to resort at least to the strategies, styles, and cant used by liberal humanists - that is, if gay progress is to be made. But bereft of the substance and principles of liberalism that are its real tools and that postmodernism supposes it has destroyed, liberal strategies will hardly be effective.

Moreover, despite postmoderinism's thick jargon and tangled prose, there is no reason to suppose that the courts won't eventually see through the postmodern bluff and, like Toto, pull back the curtain of its liberal guise to reveal machinery which conservative justices can effectively use to further restrict rights.

It is not too difficult to imagine a scenario in which Justice Scalia signs off an opinion upholding the mass arrest of gay Marchers on Washington by block-quoting Stanley Fish: "In short, the name of the name has always been politics, even when (indeed, especially when) it is played by stigmatizing politics as the area to be avoided by legal restraints."

Indeed the Supreme Court's most recent gay case gives evidence that it is already able to co-opt postmodern discourses as means of oppressing gays. In its June 1995 St. Patrick's Day Parade ruling, the Court voided the gay civil rights protections of Massachusetts' public accommodations law as applied to parades. In order to reach this conclusion, the Court had to find that Boston's St. Patrick's Day Parade constituted political speech despite the fact that the Court could find no discernible message conveyed by the parade; as far as any message went, the Court analogized the parade to the verse of Lewis Carroll and the music of Arnold Schönberg. What to do? Well, the Court sought out a source that would claim for it and against common opinion that all parades are inherently political. And where better to find such a source than in postmodern beliefs that hold that everything is politics? The Court quoted the requisite claim about the inherently political nature of parades from an obscure 1986 academic book Parades and Power: Street Theatre in Nineteenth-Century Philadelphia, which, on the very next page after the one quoted by the Court, signals its intellectual allegiances: "The concepts framing this study flow from ... E.P. Thompson ... and Raymond Williams." These two men are the Marxist scholars who founded cultural studies in England. The Right-wing Supreme Court here used postmodern Marxist scripture to clobber gays.

It used to be that tyrants - be they shah or ayatollah - would simply deny that human rights violations were occurring in their countries. But in the last few years, tyrants have become more "theoretical" and devious. Their underlings have been reading Foucault. Now, when someone claims that a ruler is violating some human right, say, religious freedom, the ruler simply asserts that while the purported right may well be a right in Northern European thinking, this fact have no moral weight in his own way of thinking. Indeed, if, as postmoderns claim, values are always historically and culturally specific in their content, then the ruler can claim not only that North European thinking about rights need have no weight in his own thinking, but moreover that it cannot have any weight in his own thinking, determined as it is by local conditions and cultural forces. Recently Muslim fundamentalists have defended their religious cleansing of Coptic Christians out of Egypt by asserting that there is no international human right to religious freedom.

In a similar spirit, Saudi Arabia's ambassador to the United States took out a full-page ad in the Sunday New York Times titled "Modernizing in Our Own Way" (July 10, 1994). The ad couched moral relativism in pseudo-liberal verbiage - appealing to "rights to our own basic values" and "respect for other people's cultures" - in order to justify Saudi Arabia's barbaric departures from "Western human rights."

For a gay example of such judgment-arresting relativity, consider the case of the 19-year-old Jamaican reggae singer, Buju Banton. In 1992 he had a hit song, "Boom Bye Bye," with lyrics that translate approximately to "Faggots have to run or get a bullet in the head." A spokesman in the singer's defense claimed, "Jamaica is for the most part a Third World country with a different ethical and moral code. For better or worse, homosexuality is a deep stigma there, and the recording should be judged in a Jamaican context."

If postmodernism is right, such fundamentalists, ambassadors, and spokesmen are irrefutable.

Surprisingly, such moral relativism has even infected Amnesty International - a group that is a conceptual joke if the very idea of international human rights comes a cropper. Through the 1980s, British, Dutch, and American sectors of Amnesty International argued that people arrested for homosexual behavior should be classified as prisoners of conscience - Amnesty International's blanket designation for those whose human rights have been violated. But for a long time, these arguments were drowned out by Third World voices, which claimed that while sexual privacy may be a right in some First World places, it certainly is not where they speak. If postmodernism is right, these Third World voices are irrefutable. Finally, in 1991, "hegemonic" Western voices got the Third World to go along with the reclassification of gay sex acts, but no without a proviso holding that ny work that Amnesty International directs at enforcement of rights to sexual privacy should be as deferential as possible to local conditions. No other right recognized by Amnesty International comes with such a morally deflationary fillip. Human rights won this battle, but in a way that holds out the prospect that they will lose the peace.

Comment by Niclas Berggren, Ph.D.

While I remain sympathetic to much of Professor Mohr's critique of postmodernist thought, I have one major problem with it: the discussion of rights and the nature of values.

While postmodernism seems to hold that there are no objective factual statements, I, along with Professor Mohr and most others, espouse the view that there is a valid distinction to be made between factual statements and value statements. For this reason, I find it unnecessarily confusing that these two types of statements are not analyzed separately in the article. That is to say, it is conceptually conceivable that one can disagree with postmodernism's claim that all statements are normative at base and still agree with its notion that normative statements are not external to social mechanisms. This refers to two separable issues: what is normative and what the nature and origin of normative statements is. Personally, I agree with Professor Mohr that there are non-normative statements; I disagree with him that normative statements can be objective (i.e., not morally relative); and I disagree with postmodernism that values are solely shaped by social forces.

In the reasoning above, this primarily becomes problematic in connection with the philosophical concept of rights, where rights are treated as if existing objectively and external to individuals (note that I am not discussing actual legal rights here). In this, Professor Mohr seems to be joining forces with Robert Nozick, who in his influential work Anarchy, State, and Utopia (New York: Basic Books, 1974, p. ix) simply asserts: "Individuals have rights, and there are things no person or group may do to them (without violating their rights)." Really? If so, one has to be able to specify the origin of such rights, and this Nozick does not do - and nor does Mohr. He does, however, hint at one possible motivation - and one which I consider a logically fallacious. In essence, the claim is that x because ~x is seen as undesirable. That is to say, it is alleged that rights exist because without them, the world would - due to resulting moral relativism - be a dreadful place. But this allegation simply informs us that some people - in this case represented by Professor Mohr - have a certain set of values and that they think that laws should be designed in accordance with these values. What else is said? We are not, for instance, given any rationale for why certain rights are universally valid. We still know nothing about whence they come. Does a god reveal them? Even so, why should we find the moral code thus revealed compelling? We are, indeed, left wondering.

And we are left wondering for the simple reason that all values are subjective, i.e., value statements are not in any way related to truth, only to individual emotions or tastes. That this is so has been convincingly argued by Bertrand Russell in his essay "Science and Ethics" and by philosopher J. L. Mackie at Oxford University in his book Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong (London: Pelican Books, 1977). Hence, the moral relativism so dreaded above is really an inherent, integral component of any system of ethics. Some group of people may aver that their particular value y is objectively authoritative; another group may do the same with reference to ~y. Of what assistance is the respective claims of universal applicability and objectivity (i.e., non-relativism)? None! The reason is elementary: there is no way anyone can demonstrate that his set of values is superior to anyone else's simply by calling them something. For some further reasoning on this issue, see the essays "On Morality" by Fredrik Bendz and "The Human Basis of Laws and Ethics" by Frederick Edwords.

But does this subjectivity of values not lead to the type of problems outlined by Professor Mohr, including Third World leaders continuing in their maltreatment of gays and lesbians? No, the subjectivity of values is a statement of fact, and as such, it merely describes the nature of people's thinking in the normative realm of affairs. If values are subjective, then calling my own values (which happen to include the view that gays and lesbians should not be maltreated) "objective," "universal," or "non-relative" alters nothing at all (aside from introducing a factually misleading classification). What causes these problems is the fact that my and Professor Mohr's subjective values are at odds with those of some political leaders - the fact that they are at odds cause us to see it as a problem that gays and lesbians are maltreated, and they are maltreated because of the actual values held by the leaders.

There are only two basic ways to affect the ways gays and lesbians are treated in these countries: either to try to change the desires of the leaders (to induce them to feel sympathy toward gays and lesbians) or to try to force them to change their policies by threatening to cease with pecuniary assistance, or something of the kind. Mere rhetoric about "rights" obviously - and predictably - does not help.

Can it be concluded from this that there are no rights or that rights are incompatible with moral relativism? No and no. We can say, however, that there are no objective rights; rather, in theory, all asserted rights are based on subjective values. This does not render them useless as concepts - it simply means that I must motivate why I think others should adopt them. It may very well be, on the other hand, that postmodernism, regarded as incorporating moral relativism along with several other propositions about reality, render any practical defense of rights infeasible - but that is no reason for dismissing moral relativism. As always, it is not wise for one to throw the baby out with the bathwater. As it happens, one can be a believer in the subjectivity of ethics while rejecting other parts of postmodernism - and hence retain a meaningful notion of rights.

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