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Are free societies laying the foundation for their own destruction? I fear they are. In the name of tolerance, free societies are accepting behavior that will eventually make tolerance and freedom impossible if the trend continues.

I’m a strong advocate of tolerance for people in our society who don’t look like us. Many people today are eager to reject people with the wrong skin color or wrong religion. I wrote recently about why you’re simply a bigot if you hate Muslims in general — or if you hate members of any group just because of their color or religion.

Most Muslims I know are very much like me, but they simply have strongly different religious beliefs and cultural practices. Many others, though, have habits that are very similar to those of other westerners, maybe for good and maybe for bad. But there are some with beliefs and actions that make them unfit for free societies. Those are the ones I’m worried about — not because they’re Muslims, but because they reject the freedom of the rest of us to live with our own cultural and legal standards.

I don’t want anyone imposing his religious or moral codes on me, whether it’s radical Muslims or the members of the Westboro Baptist Church. I’m perfectly content to tolerate those people believing what they want to believe. I’m even content to tolerate them hating those of us who disagree with them.

What I’m not willing to tolerate — and what I don’t think any free society can tolerate — are those who take actions to prevent the rest of us from being free, simply because they’re offended by our beliefs or practices.

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There’s serious disagreement over what Edward Snowden is. We can all agree on the basic facts of what he did, but we disagree about what to call him. He worked for the U.S. National Security Agency and contractors for the NSA. He saw things that he thought were wrong, so he turned over a lot of U.S. government secrets to a couple of newspapers, exposing details and making allegations about the government spying on its own people.

But is Snowden a hero or a villain? For many of us, he’s a hero. He’s exposed spying that we assumed was secretly going on. For those of us who believe this, he’s a hero for risking his life and his future to expose something that he believed was morally wrong.

The people who call Snowden a traitor fall into two camps. One is the group of politicians and bureaucrats who already knew what was going on and didn’t see anything wrong with snooping on the rest of us. Although I find that position legally and morally repugnant, it’s to be expected. It’s the other group of people who are more problematic. That’s the people who want Snowden arrested and put into prison because he broke the law.

I observed this conversation Saturday between a friend of mine and one of his friends. He started by posting a statement in support of Snowden, and the woman responded.

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If you send your children to private religious schools, you might be part of something that “encourages division,” according to Barack Obama.

Speaking to a couple thousand people in Northern Ireland earlier this week, Obama said that children going to schools in line with their parents’ faith — Catholic and Protestant, in this case — is a bad thing that “discourages cooperation.” Although the connections between certain things in his speech seem tortured and unclear to me, it sounds as though he’s comparing religious schools to segregation.

“Because issues like segregated schools and housing, lack of jobs and opportunity — symbols of history that are a source of pride for some and pain for others — these are not tangential to peace; they’re essential to it,” Obama said. “If towns remain divided — if Catholics have their schools and buildings, and Protestants have theirs — if we can’t see ourselves in one another, if fear or resentment are allowed to harden, that encourages division.  It discourages cooperation.”

So according to Obama, letting people make the choice about how to educate their children is tantamount to “segregated schools and housing” and “lack of jobs and opportunity”? Really? In which alternate reality does he find this to be true? Freedom of association is a good thing — and people have the freedom to make choices that you don’t approve of.

To me, the attitude embodied in this speech betrays a couple of things.

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