Kinetix

I'm with the first person to reply to the OP. Rights may be a construction of society or the state, but as a society we ought to be doing away with the idea that it's good and proper to withhold rights from certain "classifications" of humans. However, to agree with him, there is also the fact that someone is "always dragging their feet on that." You don't need to look any further than the history of the United States; while there were progressives willing to extend their definition of "citizen" and associated rights to African-Americans, there were still a lot of people who opposed the idea of African-Americans being given rights in equal measure to the dominant racial category of the nation. Even today, when most people would explicitly state that all Americans deserve equal rights, you still encounter people here and there who drag their feet on issues like police brutality, residential segregation and consequent segregated schooling, treatment of racial minorities by the criminal justice system. Perhaps the reason for that foot-dragging is that you simply have a lot of people who don't want to admit that the state or society has not fully extended that mysterious and ephemeral concept called "rights" to all citizens and that thus the nation's citizenry is not as equal as many would expect.