Group Rights

I was thinking about our group rights conversation the other day.
The idea of rights vesting within groups, instead of within individuals, is dangerous for multiple reasons.
As I said in our conversation, I think one of the greatest dangers posed by the idea of group rights is that the rights cannot be universalized without extremely negative consequences. On its face, the notion that certain people should be entitled to rights simple because of their membership within a subset of the larger population seems to be extremely minority friendly. That minority groups could get advantages vis a vis the majority population could help those groups achieve parity with the majority. However, attempting to universalize this concept though would mean that a given majority group should also get the same rights as the minority. This appears to destroy the concept of special protections, in the form of rights, of minority groups, leading to a balkanization of societies.

Another reason why the concept is dangerous is because the concept of group rights begs the question as to how to define a given group. There are Catholics all over the world, but are American Catholics, Latin American Catholics, Southeast Asian Catholics, African Catholics, and European Catholics alike enough to justify special group rights vesting in "Catholics"? Or are other differences within the broad group of "Catholics" worthy of protection? How the questions of group affliation and identity are defined are extremely important and difficult, such that to attempt to vest rights within a specific "group" seems inordinately difficult to me. A simple answer would be to let groups define themselves, but doing so wouldn't account for differences within groups that could lead to propagation of discriminations based on differences within those groups. I am not sure, and I could do the research on this, but I believe the federal legal structure dealing with American Indians allows for registered Indian tribes to define the members of their tribes how the tribes choose. This could lead to, and I believe has based on a hazy memory of a news article to the same end, situations in which economically and politically enfranchised majorities within tribes could define out members of the tribe, such that for federal legal purposes those disenfranchised members of the group no longer are able to avail themselves of whatever special benefits come from being a member of the tribe. However, as I stated, I am unsure as to the legality of such a move. I am just attempting to use the hypothetical to highlight definitional problems with groups as another problem inherent within the concept of "group rights".

We can talk more about this later.