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All well and good, in the abstract. But civil rights, racial and ethnic indentities, the historical trajectories that actually are embodied as people are not abstract principles. They concern people's lives.
Imagine sitting at an open conference table and discussing somebody else's civil rights, and offering opinions on the priorities, including which various subgroupings of people to include and exclude, and various political, social, and economic methods to pursue.
Are you ready to step up to the mic in such a context? If you are not an Iranian, then whatever you say is probably not really relevant to the immediate issues at hand.
The legal concepts of civil rights are just crude sketchs, statements of principle, without any of the much more meaningful developement that each group needs to elaborate their fair position in their society.
In other words civil rights are not homogeneous recipes that can be cranked out by the un-involved. You absolutely need `standing' as the legal beagles say. That is, you have to have a stake in the outcome. That is, the general potentials of your own life have to be at stake in the outcome of anything you advocate. This makes you a socially responsible participant.
So, as a very practical matter, Iranians have to conceive what they mean by various human rights, and then pursue them as part of their internal political processes. This is how a people and or a nation becomes the actualized historical entity that it is.
And in turn, we have to understand that our participation, that is to say, the presumption that we have the right to advocate this or that prescription for this or that problem, is a form of oppression---albeit a much lesser one than air strikes.
Believe me when I say I have had to work out the deep logic of civil rights on the ground with real people. The above is the way it works best. Facilitate if you can or are asked. Otherwise some form of neutral material support is about all that is called for.
There is a kind of respect involved between people, but a respect with a certain distance. This is very difficult to explain in the abstract. These are living dynamics between people, and that is where you can discover what a civil right really is. It isn't equality, since nobody is equal to anybody else. That is just a legal term of art. We are not the same. The deeper meaning of civil rights lays in these nuances of respect. I don't presume to talk for you, you don't presume to talk for me. This is how freedom and equality are actualized in living relationships between people.
Let's turn it around. I was almost never bothered or almost never brought up religious practices and traditions, until the the rightwing Christians started prescribing what I should and should be allowed to do in my own society. They presume to speak for non-Christians, from the high moral authority they claim issues from their god almighty.
What makes the rightwing Christians so loathsome and despicable is their presumption to impose their standards of conduct on the rest of us. Technically, they are not violating any legal civil right through this sort of political advocacy---except when they manage to make law. Rather, what they have really done is violate the social contract of mutual respect, the underlying principles of fair and democratic political conduct. They have violated the entire realm of mutual respect that is supposed to exist between people in an open society. They have destoryed the old American adage, live and let live. The endless abortion fights illustrate these points in great detail. I say, if you are against abortion, then, well, don't have one. Duh.
If someone points out that is exactly what the Iranian clerical orders are doing, I would probably agree, provided I read articles that were written by Iranians in Iran. But that is an Iranian battle. We have our own battles to take care of. And in these, we definitely do have a stake in the outcome and we know it.
And if you think about it, if we manage to rein in the right and chill out the Christians, we will be doing the rest of the earth a big, big favor---promoting human rights by solving our own mess at home.
CG