On one side is the CEO of the world’s largest company, the president of the United States and a growing chunk of the Fortune 500. On the other side is a solo wedding photographer in New Mexico, a 70-year-old grandma florist in Washington and a few bakers.
One side wants the state to conscript the religious businesswomen and men into participating in ceremonies that violate their beliefs. The other side wants to make it possible for religious people to live their own lives according to their consciences. (Tim Carney, Washington Examiner)
Who should decisions be left up to – you, the free market, or Government? Should government be in the business of constantly reducing your choices? Ben Shapiro has some words on minorities and what protects you MORE, given what we saw in Indiana these past few days where we saw the Left decide that the kinds of freedom that they do not approve of cannot be allowed to exist – even if that Freedom is in plain language in the First Amendment. Infringement via in ideological war in which one side despises Constitutional Freedom? Emphasis mine:
That system is a heck of a lot safer for minorities than a system by which government regulates the proper conduct of voluntary activities. Black Americans should know that, given that Jim Crow was not merely a system of voluntary discrimination but a government-enforced set of regulations designed to ban voluntary transactions involving blacks. Gays, too, should understand that freedom is far preferable to government-enforced societal standards governing consenting transactions, given that government used to be utilized to discriminate openly against homosexual behavior.
But the left has rewritten the concept of freedom to mean “whatever the government allows you to do,” and leftists now insist that government cannot allow discrimination — unless, of course, the government is itself enforcing discrimination against religious Christians who don’t want to violate their belief in traditional marriage.
And it goes for many other things as well. As Erik Erikson keeps saying “You WILL be made to care”. Steve has a similar vein thing in his post:
The politics is not about Jerry or Susan, but about a difference in ideas. The “It takes a village” people on the left give you the impression that what they mean is families hunkering down or standing up together but at the end of the day what they really mean is that everyone gets taxed and some central planners manage everything. yes, there is still some private giving, but that continues to decline as the government, with the help of folks like those at GSP, push more and more into what was once the private sphere. Choices grow more limited. As the government and regulatory burdens grow there is less free capital for private giving. Opposing their plans is a sign of weakness, mimicking these privately (the way we did it for hundreds of years before) is hypocrisy, and operating outside the controlled space of central planners will be mocked.
Both are fascism – the stricter definition as opposed to the mere words blithely thrown around in political protests by people who have no idea what it really is, which is total Government control. The meat of Shapiro’s observations::
Same-sex marriage, it turns out, was never designed to grant legal benefits to same-sex couples. That could have been done under a regime of civil unions. Same-sex marriage was always designed to allow the government to have the power to cram down punishment on anyone who disobeys the government’s vision of the public good. One need not be an advocate of discrimination against gays to believe that government does not have the ability to enforce the prevailing social standards of the time in violation of individual rights. There are many situations in which advocates of freedom dislike particular exercises of that freedom but understand that government attacks on individual rights are far more threatening to the public good.
We are reaping what has been sown. The Right (especially our elected officials, Republicans) walked away from the ramparts of the Culture War, the Left willingly and gleefully scaled those heights and took them, ready to implement Gramsci’s vision. Nothing but the Collective and everything inside the Collective. Thus, Shapiro’s closing line is anathema to the Left, for an individual and his freedom, by definition, is outside the Collective:
You do not have a right to my services; I have a right to provide my services to whomever I choose. If you believe that your interpretation of public good enables you to bring a gun to the party, you are a bully and a tyrant. So it is with the modern American left, to whom freedom now means only the freedom to do what it is the left wants you to do at point of gun.
Bit by bit, however, the Left has taken its normal Marxist Class warfare and morphed it into the Democrats’ special interests groups and thence onward to “protected class” – and have used anti-discrimination laws to rend what used to be the American melting pot – no clearer example than over the last couple of days where the Left pitted its groups against those that have ignored it.
Freedom – it used to be what we stood for but the Left has prostituted its meaning. Once the realm of the individual, with the caving of the useful idiot Republicans and (in this case, Christians who have been so Heavenly minded they are of no worth here), the radical idea that each citizen was sovereign has now in danger of being snuffed out. For if Government can demand a given thought pattern from its people, there is no freedom at all.
