Sultan Knish
Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis called the right to be left alone
the "most comprehensive of rights and the right most valued by a free
people." It would even be fair to say that without the right to be left
alone no other rights exist.
Amendments
one through ten of the Bill of Rights are essentially an enumeration of
the ways that government is obligated to leave people alone. This is
most explicitly true of the First Amendment which definitively sums up
areas of human life into which government under no circumstance may
trespass on.
Unlike other amendments, the territory that the
First Amendment deals with is intellectual and spiritual, the world of
ideas, the realm of faith and the defining right of political advocacy.
The freedoms of the mind, heart and voice are the most essential of
freedoms because they free us to be individuals. They allow us to have
our own values. Without these freedoms, no society is free.
Those
who sought to undermine these "Freedoms from Government" did so by
offering alternative "Freedoms of Government." Countering the Founding
Fathers' DMZ's of self-determination, they promised freedom from social
problems. A second Bill of Rights would offer the freedom from fear and
want. Instead of a liberation from government, the new rights would
trade social benefits for freedoms. A right would not mean a zone of
freedom from the government, but a government entitlement.
The
Orwellian inversion of rights has meant that civil rights perversely
take away rights. No sooner is a right created than it is used to
deprive other people of their rights. Instead of rights freeing people
from government repression, they act as a means of government
repression. Freedom is treated as a limited commodity which, like
wealth, must be redistributed to achieve maximum social justice.
The
right to be left alone, freedom of speech and conscience, have taken a
back seat to the redistribution of freedom. Government rights violate
individual rights by compelling everyone to participate in the process
of distributing entitlements.
A wedding photographer in New Mexico
was ordered by a court to participate in a gay ceremony violating both
her First Amendment rights to Freedom of Religion as a Christian and her
right to Freedom of Speech as an artist. A baker in Colorado was ordered
to make a gay wedding cake or face penalties ranging from fines to a
year in prison. The ACLU is after even bigger game suing Catholic
hospitals for not engaging in abortion contending that patients are
being deprived of their rights.
The fundamental issue in all
these cases is whether our rights are defined by the ability to be left
alone or by the opposing ability to compel others to do what we want
them to. Is the right to force someone else to participate in your
wedding or perform your abortion more compelling than the right to opt
out of being forced to engage in behaviors that violate your deepest
religious convictions?
America is a nation founded by religious
dissenters. Its founding documents, from the Declaration of Independence
to the Constitution and its Bill of Rights make the moral case for
dissent. The Declaration of Independence begins by setting out a moral
case for separation, for the divorce of authority, based on the moral
principle of individual freedom. It makes government conditional on
liberty, rather than making liberty conditional on government.
Today
the national establishment is intolerant of dissent. It traps the
current of freedom in dams of entitlements. It pits the right to be
against the right to receive and makes certain that the right to
receive, not only the property of others, but their very conscience,
mind and liberty, always wins out.
The United States is following
the European course of rendering the distinction between the state and
the church irrelevant by making the state into the church and mandating
that everyone worship it. As in 19th century Europe, deliberate clashes
are being stirred up between the values of the state and religious
values for the purpose of demonstrating that the values of the state are
supreme.
The expansion of state power is rapidly becoming
limitless. The old legal justifications that linked Federal intervention
in civil rights to interstate commerce and public accommodation have
given way to a redefinition of any and all establishments as public
accommodations. Courts argue that once an individual begins to sell a
product or service, he loses access to all his Constitutional freedoms.
The
core issue transcends the hot button social issues such as gay marriage
and abortion embraced by the elites of a permissive society and
addresses the deeper inversion of rights that is at the heart of the
problem.
Reproductive
rights and gay rights activists both campaigned to be left alone. There
are still gay protests with placards arguing that their marriages are
no one else's business and pro-abortion rallies demanding that
politicians stay out of the bedroom. But if the marriage of Adam and
Steve shouldn't be at the disposal of Harry and Julie, why should
Harry's bakery and Julie's talent be at the disposal of Adam and Steve?
If the government should stay out of the bedroom, then why must it dive
into the bedroom to compel the owners of companies like Hobby Lobby to
subsidize violations of their faith?
Cases like these show that
the issue is not rights, but control. If the only way to obtain what you
call your rights is by compelling someone else to give up theirs then
what you are really demanding is not a right, but a means of imposing
your values and your convictions on someone else. And that is not a
matter of civil rights. It is an ideological and religious war with
government siding with whoever has the most money to invest in strategic
campaign contributions for the culture war.
Individual rights
exist in the empty spaces that government is forced out of. Government
rights however do not exist until everyone is forced to provide them.
That is true of the redistribution of wealth and property, but it is
even truer of the redistribution of freedom and the confiscation of
conscience.
Whatever right government has to the seizure of
wealth, it has none to the seizure of conscience. If there is any place
that the government has no right to intrude, not in the name of social
justice or political correctness or the progressive utopia awaiting us
on the other side of the regulatory mirror, it is the territories of the
First Amendment, sacred not only in idea, but also in practice.
There
can be no faith, no ideas and no individuality without the First
Amendment. Without the right to be left alone in your beliefs, your
values and your convictions, there can be no other rights and the very
notion of rights, no matter how often it is used to describe everything
from free health care to gay marriage, cannot exist.
And it is into this sacred territory that the judicial activists of gay marriage have dared to intrude.
Rights
can either be defined by the virtue of the individual in his liberty or
the virtue of the government in its authoritarianism. But it cannot be
defined by both. Either you have the right to be free or you have the
right to the property and the service of another human being. The choice
is the fundamental one between freedom and slavery.
Social
justice denies the virtue of freedom, it rejects the possibility of
self-determination without external intervention, it dismisses the idea
that people can be free without a system of redistributing freedom from
the oppressors to the oppressed so that the oppressed become the new
oppressors. It rejects any alternative to entitlements as entitlement
and any alternative to privilege as privilege.
The moral argument
for freedom is the self-organizing principle of individuals. The moral
argument for compulsion is that the system is superior to individuals.
The left has chosen central planning in human rights as it has in every
other area of life. It believes with the paradoxical perversity of
doublethink that freedom can only come from government because only a
central authority is qualified to provide the equal distribution of
freedom within carefully planned limits.
This
abrogation of freedom is the logical end result of the left's entire
pattern of reasoning which rejects the individual for the collective,
the working man for the planner and the people for the ideological
expert. These forms of repression are expressions of its rotten notion
that the left may do anything and everything in the name of freedom
except actually allow the people to be free.
Without the right to
be left alone, there are no other individual rights. Without individual
rights, there is no such thing as a free society.
Every group
is sooner or later faced with choosing whether it wants to win a final
conclusive victory over its enemies or whether it wants to be free. The
tyrannical choice is tempting, but it unleashes a cycle of conflict and
repression that can only end with extermination. And once that choice is
made, the formerly oppressed forfeit all their moral authority as they
abandon freedom for tyranny.
No comments:
Post a Comment