If bigots can be stripped of rights,
will your rights be the next to go?

By David McElroy · June 5, 2018

In a free world, nobody would be forced to associate with someone else against his will. In a free world, nobody would be forced to buy from someone against his will. In a free world, nobody would be forced to sell to someone — or hire someone — against his will.

In a free world, all associations are voluntary. In other words, if any transaction is forced — for either party — that is not a transaction between free people.

Free people have liberty to make their own decisions — whether I agree with their decisions or not. Free people can be kind and loving if they choose. Free people can be open-minded and decent. But free people can also be hateful and mean-spirited if they choose. Free people can be greedy if they choose.

If human beings are not free to make their own decisions about their associations, they are not free people. Whoever dictates what their decisions must be has taken away their natural right to live as free men and women.

If you insist that a man do business with another man against his will — whatever the business is — you are asserting that you own him. You are asserting that it is your right — or the right of some political group — to make decisions for him. You are asserting that he isn’t free to live his own life. You are asserting that he must obey you and bring about your desired outcome.

In a moral world, people treat each other with love and respect and dignity. They have tolerance for differences in belief and they are civil and fair to one another even when they hate each others’ ideas.

But morality is a choice. You can’t force someone to be moral. You can only compel them to obey you — through politicians — by using force or threat of force. You can threaten to take away their property or their livelihood or their physical freedom. Coercing people to obey your idea of morality is evil.

I think that those who won’t do business with those they disagree with are bigots. If I owned a bakery, I would be happy to bake cakes for gay couples’ weddings. Even if I hated the people — or if I simply disagreed with what they were doing — I would want to make the money. I think it’s bigotry to refuse to do business with people because of what they are. I find that immoral. I find their refusal to be a direct contradiction of the teaching of Jesus for me to love others.

But it is evil for me to compel others to obey my ideas of morality. It’s evil for you to compel others to obey your notions of morality, too. Every human being is born with the right to make his own decisions. Everyone has a natural right to deal with those he chooses to deal with. No one has a natural right to force others to do business with them.

If a bigot can have his natural rights taken away from him, what makes you think your rights are safe when the majority decide they disagree with you?

The irony of defending the freedom of bigots today is that freedom for all was a liberal idea. Those who insist that bigots must obey their own moral code call themselves liberals, but they fail to understand the principles which drove classical liberals to conceive of liberty for every individual.

I wish we lived in a world in which everyone loved one another and everybody treated one another in a brotherly way. I wish we lived in a world where everyone had good will toward others, even those we disagree with. I would love the outcomes which most of you want just as much as you do — but I refuse to be seduced by the evil of coercing other people just to force them to obey what I believe is right.

If you choose your political or social positions according to consequences, you will always find yourself having to shift your alleged principles as the world changes around you. But if you understand core principles of right and wrong — how people have the freedom to make their own choices, even if you disagree — you will never contradict yourself, because you choose principle over consequences.

We are all born with natural rights which can’t be given or taken away. (I don’t agree with him about everything, but John Locke wrote beautifully about this idea.) You don’t have the right to interfere with someone else’s life, liberty or property, but you do have the right to choose the people with whom you interact.

Any person who forces you to obey his idea of morality — whether it’s a conservative trying to enforce conservative social norms or a progressive trying to enforce his version of equality — is someone who believes he has the right to make other people’s decisions.

If this is you, don’t pretend you support individual freedom. You don’t. You support slavery. The only remaining argument is how much of a man’s life you claim the right to control.

One person — or a group of people — controlling other human beings against their will is evil. If that’s what you support, you need to know you’re on the side of evil, not freedom.

There will come a day when the majority disagree with you. If you’ve supported the notion of using coercion to compel people to obey you, don’t be surprised when you are one day forced to obey when you are the one in the minority.

If you one day lose your rights, don’t blame anybody but yourself.

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When I first heard about this, I thought it must be satire. When I discovered it was real, I was appalled, but I still thought it must be a one-time thing from some nutty activist. But it turns out it’s the latest bit of pandering to a bunch of far-left activists who believe that a man can become a woman if he decides to claim he’s a woman. As everybody knows, men have prostate glands. Women do not. Period. End of story. Men can get prostate cancer. Women cannot. But political activists are so eager to pretend that a man claiming to be a “trans woman” is really a woman that they are insisting that “women” be included in public health messages about the issue. This is nothing but political virtue-signaling. If you’re a man, you know which parts you have. You know that you ought to be screened. Nobody is made any safer by dragging far-left gender ideology into simple medical reality.

Every time someone tries to tighten requirements around the use of absentee ballots, I hear screams from Democrats and others on the political left that such efforts are nothing but “suppression of black voters.” These protests have never made sense to me, especially because it’s never been a secret that absentee ballot fraud goes on all the time in certain areas. (Everybody knew it when I worked in politics.) The people who engage in such fraud are rarely caught — often because the local political establishment approves of the crime — but a Democrat who won a primary election in Clay County, Alabama, last year has pleaded guilty to this sort of cheating. Terry Andrew Heflin was running for a place on the Clay County Commission. He was caught ordering seven absentee ballots in the names of various voters and sending them to his post office box — after which he used the ballots to vote absentee for himself seven time. Did he have other people cast additional fraudulent ballots? We’ll never know. But in a primary in which he was able to win with only 141 votes, it wouldn’t take many fraudulent votes to change the election. The next time you hear “civil rights activists” claim that it’s just “voter suppression” to hurt blacks which is at the root of efforts to stop this fraud, remember Terry Heflin. If you care about fair and honest elections, ballot security and voter identity should matter to you.

A state legislator in Maine has been stripped of the ability to speak in the state Legislature — and her votes are not being counted on legislative issues — all because she made a truthful social media post. Rep. Laurel Libby (R-Auburn, Maine) opposes allowing boys to compete against girls’ teams in school athletics and she’s become known for making an issue of it. On Feb. 17, she posted on Facebook about a recent example that she found outrageous. She posted side-by-side photos of a boy named John who competed last year in a state track event and won fifth place against other boys two years ago — and a photo of the same boy (now called Katie) who won first place in the same event this year against girls. Whether you find this outrageous or not, Libby is clearly being honest and truthful about the objective facts of an issue of public importance. But the state Legislature censured her. Democrats decreed that she could not speak in the House and that her votes would not count on legislation — until she apologized for the outrage of telling the truth. She refused and her constituents have been unrepresented in the state House since then. The people who promote this ideology are out of touch with reality and won’t rest until they force the rest of us to join them in this delusion. But even if you agree with “trans” ideology, you should be appalled at this heavy-handed attack on political speech.

The late Steve Jobs was at the center of our culture’s transition from analog to digital. He co-founded Apple Computer. He led the team that revolutionized personal computing with the first Macintosh. As CEO of Apple, he led the development of the iPhone and later the iPad. You would think the children of such a man would be surrounded by technology. But Jobs and his wife Laureen didn’t let their children use iPads. Their home had few screens of any kind. Even though Jobs spent most of his time developing and selling Macs and iPhones and iPads, he was home with his wife and children for dinner when he was in town. The family ate together at a simple wooden table in their kitchen — and there were no digital devices or focus on popular culture. Instead, he’s said to have guided his family toward deep discussions of art, philosophy and education — with no iPads to be found. If the man who guided the development of such products chose a different path for his own children, does that suggest that his digital experience taught him that children need human connection, not screens? And does it suggest the possibility that we might be better off if we made the same choice for our families?

For four years, Donald Trump’s supporters screamed that everything that went wrong was the fault of Joe Biden. They were sometimes right and they were sometimes delusional. (Anybody who knows me understands that I can’t stand Biden any more than I can stand Trump, just for different reasons.) But for two months, Trump has rampaged through U.S. political life — vandalizing pretty much everything in sight — and the vast majority of his supporters are silent at best. Many watch as he blows up the world economy and they make excuses for him. They’re in absolute denial, even about things that Trump is doing very intentionally. Anybody who understands economics and history knows that tariffs are a terrible idea from a pragmatic point of view. Anybody who values individual freedom knows that tariffs are massive taxes on individuals — and they’re a tool of political control over the ability of people to trade freely. Trump is the antithesis of everything which political conservatives stood for just a few years ago. It’s far past time for people who claim to be conservatives to reclaim the principles and values which they used to claim — and stop this mad man before he can accelerate the day when we experience economic and social collapse. Open your eyes to reality and reject this lying narcissist.

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