David McElroy

Those on the progressive left are just flat-out lying when they claim they believe in individual rights. They certainly believe in group rights, but in their vision of the world, individuals have no rights that “society” doesn’t graciously allow them to have.

We’re told that society has the right to control us because of the “social contract” that we allegedly have with government. I don’t know about you, but I never got my copy of the contract to read and agree to before people with guns started coercing me to obey their will.

Let’s be clear. The so-called social contract is just an excuse to control you. What it means is that the people who expect you to obey them have invented a reason that you’re required to obey. Is that a contract? Or is that a one-sided demand, enforced at the barrel of a gun?

I’ve talked before about this social contract fiction, but it comes up again today because of a two-minute video clip from a U.S. Senate candidate in Massachusetts — in which she defends the progressive left version of the social contract by trying to justify higher taxes on people who make more money.

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For much of my life, I’ve been stymied by the question of what I was. I could tell people how I made my living, but I wasn’t sure how to define myself. I went through a serious identity crisis when I was 29 years old.

I had been operating a publishing company for about three years, but the company failed and I had to shut it down. It was the first major failure of my life, and it threw me into a tailspin. Up until that time, I had defined myself as a businessman and as a newspaper editor, but everything felt hollow at that point. I realized that I had a serious question: “What am I?”

I spent the next year in a general state of depression and despair. I’m not sure how I made it through that period. Nothing seemed to matter. And every day, the question from the face in the mirror mocked me: “Who are you, David?”

After considering and discarding a million ways of defining myself, I finally found an answer to my existential crisis, but that answer scared me even more than the nothingness of the depression had. It felt true, but I somehow felt like a fraud to say it. I was an artist.

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When I was in college, I had a good friend who was struggling with his sexuality. He and I had gone to church together for years, and he eventually started having more conversations with me about the morality of homosexuality. He never said he was struggling with his own identity, but it was obvious.

After college, he joined the Army and became a Green Beret, which was a shock to all of us who had known him as an artistic and laid back guy. He was in the Army for a couple of enlistments and did quite well.

He also “came out” as gay while he was in the Army. A number of the other soldiers knew it and some proportion of them were gay, too. Everybody knew it, apparently. Regardless how you feel about whether sexual orientation is a matter of choice or not, I can’t figure out why it has anything to do with whether someone is capable of taking a job that requires him to kill people or fulfill other specific jobs to support people who kill people. It’s just not relevant to the job.

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