It’s easy enough to do. We all find ourselves defaulting to such ideas whenever we are met with anything we think is wrong. It’s natural. We are, as a species, unique in that we tend to want to make the world better for everyone else. Despite arguments about “selfishness” in every segment of society, people generally want to make the world better for their fellow men.
Unfortunately, that’s a very subjective thing.
Every day it seems, I encounter someone who’s wants to outlaw something for some noble reason. Perhaps they are religious and want to outlaw pornography. Maybe they’re crusaders hoping to outlaw hate speech. Who knows. It can be anything, and they are all what I term as “true believers”. They are convinced of the righteousness of their cause, and will do whatever it takes to legally enforce their beliefs.
Here’s the thing though. What they are assaulting is another person’s freedom. They seek to take away one person’s right in an effort to shape the world into their ideal. It’s OK, they argue, because as a society we must do whatever it takes for the betterment of society. That sounds fine and good right now. But what about when someone decides your activities are offensive?
When you pick and choose freedoms to permit others, you are opening the door for others to pick and choose your own freedoms. Perhaps you think pornography is wrong. That’s your right. However, the moment you take a step towards removing it from the world, then you have impacted my rights to decide for myself and for the producer of that pornography to speak freely. However, you can easily crusade to prevent pornography being shown to our children. This, I feel, is much more noble so long as you propose no measure that interferes with an adult’s right to view such material. There is the difference.
Freedom, in this nation, can’t mean freedom for only a select few. It must mean freedom for all, even those you fundamentally disagree with. It means that one person must have the right to keep and bear arms, while another must have the right to not keep guns. It means that while I find their message disgusting, hate groups must have the right to speak that message. It must mean freedom for every single one of us.
Some day, we will live in a world without racial prejudices and sexist ideologies. Some day, we will find that freedom for everyone is a much easier concept to swallow than it is now. But until then we have to fight for everyone else’s freedoms, even if for no other reason than to protect our own.
An attack on any freedom is an attack on every freedom. We must fight those attacks with every weapon we can muster and with the determination of Leonidas. We must summon the courage of the warrior cultures of which we are all decended, regardless of what continent that culture is from. We must face assaults on our freedom with vigor and resolve, or else our freedoms will disappear one by one.
They’ve already started, and have been for years, but it’s not to late to get them back. But we will have to fight for them.
