Excellent points. I agree entirely with your position on the concept of rights. I do have a different, though not incompatible, observation to add though.

Both liberals and conservatives tend to see their opponents as a monolithic mass. Notably, both you and Marcotte blithely take for granted that the position that rights come from God is uniformly accepted by conservatives. Such a religiously-based position is, after all, easy to refute. As an atheist, I agree -- but as a political conservative who believes in limited government, I think it’s a position I’m not obligated to identify with. The world is not divided neatly into ignorant conservatives and intelligent, coherent liberals. I suspect that what offends you about Marcotte, really, is that she fails to live up to the expectation that it does. I sympathize. I wish everyone could argue rationally. In reality though, at the terrible risk of sounding elitist, most people’s worldviews have more to do with a sort of tribal affiliation than they do with rational understanding. Most conservatives support their tribe – and most liberals are doing nothing more than supporting theirs. You, I, and (I hope) most of the people reading this comment are unusual because we are capable of using a more rigorous set of epistemic standards. The best of us fail at times, but we do at least have the capacity. It may be that, at least at this point in her life, Marcotte is simply too caught up in the passion of her convictions to think about them seriously.