Special rights

Special rights is a term originally used by conservatives and libertarians to refer to laws granting rights to one or more groups that are not extended to other groups. Ideas of special rights are controversial, as they clash with the principle of equality before the law.

Potential examples of special rights include affirmative action policies or hate crime legislation with regard to ethnic, religious or sexual minorities or state recognition of marriage as a group with different taxation from those who are not married.

Concepts of special rights are closely aligned with notions of group rights and identity politics.

More recently, social conservatives have used the term to more narrowly refer to measures that extend existing rights for heterosexual couples to gays and lesbians, such as in the case of same sex marriage, or that include sexual orientation as a civil rights minority group.

The term is also used internationally, for example Sonderrechte in Germany, but it is used also about special traffic right-of-way exceptions given to emergency response and military vehicles.

The basis behind the argument of the term is based on whether it should be considered just and legal for a law to treat various parties unequally. For example, in the US Constitution the prohibition on bills of attainder require that laws do not single out a single person or group of persons for specific treatment.

Another example is the equal protection clause in the Fourteenth Amendment. Both sides argue that the other side is or has traditionally been singled out and so the law is either needed or unnecessary.

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