via lawsuits<\/a> any day.<\/p>\nBut why is it so, so hard to just live and let live?\u00a0 Let\u2019s do a test.\u00a0 I\u2019ll list a contemporary challenge to a civil liberty, and we\u2019ll see how many comboxers insist that the government is *absolutely right* to coerce the citizenry on that particular topic:<\/p>\n
What we teach in the public schools.<\/strong> The voters, or the administration, or the local moral majority is just certain that the poor children are languishing for lack of _______________\u00a0 contentious religious or moral teaching being included in the public school curriculum. It must be taught! Otherwise children won\u2019t learn what to think!<\/p>\nWhat children must be taught, anywhere at all.<\/strong>\u00a0 Heaven forbid that parents be trusted to educate their own children.\u00a0 Parents are lazy, stupid, and dangerous.\u00a0 The state can be trusted.\u00a0 The state will preemptively ensure that your children are properly reared.<\/p>\nWhat products a business must sell, and to whom.<\/strong> Now now, let\u2019s not get carried away.\u00a0 It\u2019s perfectly okay for business owners to deny services to certain customers under certain situations, for all the approved reasons.\u00a0 It\u2019s okay not to stock pre-approved you-don\u2019t-have-to-stock-it items.\u00a0 The important thing is that you, the business owner, don\u2019t get to decide what business you conduct.\u00a0 The government will tell you.<\/p>\nAm I keeping this dangerously open-ended?\u00a0 Yes I am.\u00a0 Because I\u2019m so mean.\u00a0 Because if you tell me \u201cfreedom of religion\u201d, I don\u2019t think to myself, \u201cFreedom to practice the approved religions, and restrictions on practicing the weird religions those wrong-headed people subscribe to.\u201d<\/p>\n
That\u2019s what freedom is.\u00a0 It\u2019s radical.\u00a0 It includes the right to be wrong.<\/p>\n
Quick Interlude: There\u2019s \u201cFreedom\u201d and there\u2019s \u201cFreedom\u201d<\/h2>\n
In Christian thinking we distinguish between license<\/em> and freedom<\/em>.\u00a0 \u201cI have a right to kick puppies\u201d is license: Taking upon yourself the right to do something evil.\u00a0 Freedom<\/em>, in the license-vs.-freedom conversation, has more the sense of \u201cemancipation\u201d.\u00a0 Think: \u201cI\u2019ve been freed from the desire to kick puppies.\u201d\u00a0 The puppy-kicking-lust no longer dominates me.\u00a0 I\u2019ve been liberated from my slavery to this temptation.<\/p>\nThat\u2019s not the sort of freedom I\u2019m talking about just yet.\u00a0 But we\u2019ll come back to it.<\/p>\n
(PS: I have no desire to kick puppies, and never have.\u00a0 You might say I was preserved from puppy-related sins from my very beginning.\u00a0 For which I am grateful.)<\/p>\n
Back to our Topic: The Oppression Impulse<\/h2>\n
The kind of freedom I\u2019m talking about right now is the free-will kind of freedom.\u00a0 That radical freedom that brings so much suffering on the world.\u00a0 You and I, made in the image of God, are endowed with the ability to choose right or wrong, life or death.\u00a0 It is dangerous and scary.\u00a0 It is also supremely good, in that it is the thing that makes virtue possible.<\/p>\n
Without radical freedom, that precious homemade birthday card given to you by that dear little child, the card with the weird stick figures on it that probably do resemble you more than you\u2019d like to imagine, that card has no meaning.\u00a0 Radical freedom is what makes it a gift from the heart, a sign of love.\u00a0 That same radical freedom allows you to be the person who\u2019d jump in front of a bus in order to save the giver of that card.<\/p>\n
(Mostly you use that freedom to politely listen to one more senseless attempt at a knock-knock joke. Which, after a while, begins to make the bus increasingly appealing. But you use your choice muscle to resist that base urge to check the bus schedule.)<\/p>\n
The trouble being that radical freedom gives us the option to be wrong and to do wrong.<\/p>\n
What Place for the State in Protecting Us from Ourselves?<\/h2>\n
We mostly understand that the role of governments is to govern: To keep things under control.\u00a0 We have laws against many of the kinds of murder, because we know that killing innocent people is wrong.\u00a0 We have laws against slavery, under our new improved efforts at living the constitutional life, because we know that keeping people as chattel is wrong.\u00a0 The law exists to assert morals, there\u2019s no way around it.<\/p>\n
The US Constitution is different than other forms of government in that it rejects the notion of preemptively saving us from ourselves.\u00a0 Murder is illegal, but the Constitution says that the state may not preemptively swoop in and deprive you of all your could-be murder weapons, on account of how you might maybe choose to use them badly because other people sometimes do.\u00a0 There\u2019s a direct link between the right to bear arms and the notion of \u201cinnocent until proven guilty.\u201d<\/p>\n
Good law also strikes a balance in the severity of the moral infractions it enforces.\u00a0 Lying is evil, but not every lie is illegal.\u00a0 The law restricts itself to prohibiting certain kinds of lies \u2014 perjury, forgery, breach of contract \u2014 but does not involve itself in your duplicitous dealings concerning the Easter Bunny and who ate the last slice of cheesecake.<\/p>\n
Much of the debate over religious liberty, or any other civil liberty, comes down to deciding: How serious is this matter?<\/p>\n
The Current Challenge to Religious Freedom<\/h2>\n
The United States is going through a phase, culturally, where what we want is for everything to be fixed, and we want it fixed our way. Rampant STD\u2019s?\u00a0 Let\u2019s fix it via a massive mandatory vaccination campaign, since telling people not to sleep around would impinge on our dearly held value of sleeping-around-is-important.\u00a0 Low graduation rates? Let\u2019s fix it via a bigger, meaner, stricter compulsory education program . . . these programs have never actually succeeded in causing restless, immature teens to value education, but the thought of letting a 16-year-old work for a few years until he comes to his senses* is unthinkable.<\/p>\n
[Yes, now I\u2019m getting specific in my combox testing.\u00a0 You\u2019re going to tell me that it\u2019s important we mandate your favorite cause, because There\u2019s No Other Way.\u00a0 Thank you for proving my point.\u00a0 We are a fix-it culture, and we want it fixed our way.]<\/p>\n
It is currently unthinkable that a woman could be given a health care savings account into which to funnel some of her wages, and be trusted with the choice as to whether she wanted to spend that money on contraceptives or not.\u00a0 We must have employers buy her the contraceptives directly!\u00a0 It is the only way! The method of paying people money and letting them decide how to spend it is not an option!<\/p>\n
That\u2019s the threat.\u00a0 Previous generations of Americans worried that their fellow citizens were not religious enough. This generation worries they are too religious \u2014 or more accurately, the wrong kind of religious.\u00a0 We\u2019ve traded out one religion for another, in our trendy faith-that-must-be-embraced thinking.\u00a0 That the New Think isn\u2019t called \u201creligion\u201d doesn\u2019t change what it is: A set of beliefs about the world and about morality.<\/p>\n
Do you believe in religious freedom?\u00a0 Probably not.\u00a0 It always was a crazy idea.<\/p>\n
\u00a0<\/p>\n
*It was not unthinkable a century ago.\u00a0 Time was, public high school graduation ages varied from as young as 14 to as old as early-twenties.\u00a0 You went when you could, and graduated when you\u2019d mastered the material.\u00a0 I know.\u00a0 Crazy.\u00a0 Knowledge of history will do that to you.<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Let\u2019s not delude ourselves: The United States has never quite lived up to her ideals in the civil liberties department.\u00a0 Compared to the competition, of course, the US Constitution was and remains quite the breakthrough.\u00a0 If we\u2019re going to have to constantly fight the oppressiveness-reflex, give me a country where we can do it via […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1209,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[21,103,110,6],"tags":[144,53,145,147,143,146],"class_list":["post-409","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-economics","category-homeschooling","category-rant-o-rama","category-stick-that-corner","tag-contraceptive-mandate","tag-gay-marriage","tag-hobby-lobby","tag-hpv","tag-religious-freedom","tag-vaccination"],"yoast_head":"\n
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![\"File:Bill](\"https:\/\/commons.wikimedia.org\/wiki\/File:Bill_of_Rights_Pg1of1_AC.jpg\")
<\/a><\/p>\n