David McElroy

We do a very poor job of disagreeing in this country. You’d think we would be experts at it, because we do so much of it. But we’ve developed a culture in which most people are far more eager to tell everyone else why he’s wrong than to understand why there’s a disagreement — much less what to do about it.

I’m never sure whether to be amused or frustrated at the extent to which some people are outraged when I outline a position on a controversial issue that doesn’t stick to the accepted framing of the issue. Some of the nasty email I received about my Monday article concerning the moral right to make your own choices — even if they’re the “wrong” choices — are perfect examples.

Look at comments from two different emails and tell me whether you think these folks read the same article:

“Your just a homo lover,” one person wrote. “You make me sick the way you want to hurt my rights, God not approve the fudgepacker lifestyles and I don’t either. Quit bowing down to the gay agenda and stand up for liberty and religion.”

“It’s obvious you are simply trying to find an excuse to justify bigotry because of your own homophobia and hatred of gay men,” another reader wrote. “Unless the law requires those in the LGBT community be treated with dignity and respect, none of us will live in freedom.”

Try to put aside your own feelings about the issue for a moment and look at the bigger questions. How have we gotten to the point that people such as these can be so certain that there are only two possible positions that they each assume I’m on the other side of their (obviously correct) position? How could both of them have missed my point so badly that they’re angry enough to write this sort of email to a total stranger?

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Jack Phillips is the owner of Masterpiece Cakeshop in suburban Denver, and he doesn’t want to make wedding cakes for gay couples. In my mind, that makes him a bigot and a lousy businessman. But as a free man, he has the moral right to be a bigot, even if I believe he’s wrong.

It’s easy to support individual freedom when the individual in question is sympathetic and says all the right things. The real test of whether you support freedom or not is whether you support people who want to use their freedom to do things you don’t approve of.

This issue is at the heart of a controversy that’s raging in this country today. The battle lines are generally seen as gay people and their allies on one side vs. social conservatives and some religious people who object to homosexuality on the other side. Those on one side say that business owners must be forced to do business with gay couples against their will. Those on the other side say religious freedom is at stake and that they should be able to decide not to do business with gay and lesbian couples. But framing the issue this way misses the point.

The only real issue is whether human beings have the right to make their own choices about who they want to voluntarily associate with.

If a person has the freedom to decide who he wants to associate with, he’s free to choose to associate only with left-handed green-eyed ex-convicts if he wants. He’s free to choose to associate only with beautiful people. He’s free to choose to associate only with people of his own religious group. He’s free to shun religious people entirely. He’s free to shun gay people or Asians or people who he thinks smell funny.

In other words, a free man has the moral right to make decisions that neither you nor I agree with.

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When the Maryland state Senate was considering a proposal to legalize medical marijuana, Annapolis Police Chief Michael Pristoop had the perfect rebuttal to this “outrageous” idea.

Pristoop testified to a Senate committee that marijuana is so harmful that 37 people died in Colorado on the first day of legalization there.

Many of us were immediately laughing at Pristoop, because we recognized the story of the 37 dead people as satire making fun of the crazy claims and fears of the drug warriors. Only an idiot could be blind enough to fall for that, right?

Although I laughed at Pristoop, too, I quickly started thinking about something else. What happened to Pristoop happens to all of us at times. We might not embarrass ourselves as publicly as Pristoop did. We might not fall for such obvious satire as he did. We might even be a lot smarter than he is.

But I’ve noticed that we all have our own blind spots. We all have assumptions we’ve made that we can’t even consciously identify. We all have beliefs that are so deeply held that we don’t question them. And as a result, we can all be fooled by anecdotes that support what we’re already inclined to believe.

Pristoop has spent his career as a cop in the context of the “war on drugs,” so he’s inclined to believe that recreational drugs are evil and dangerous. So every story of someone abusing drugs and paying a price resonates with him. He believes those stories — whether they’re true or not — because they reinforce something he’s already certain about.

He’s completely sure that Colorado made a horrible mistake legalizing drugs. Since much of the focus of police work ever since he’s been a cop has been arresting people who use and sell those drugs, he has to maintain his belief or else admit that he’s spent much of his career doing something pretty evil. No normal person wants to believe that. It’s easier to simply stick to what he’s been taught.

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