No

by robertsloan2

Created on: April 24, 2009

The concept of freedom is hardly overrated.

It's been severely underrated all my life. Yes. Laws do curb certain activities that nearly anyone would agree ought to be curbed - threats to life, property and health are pretty natural things to want to defend. But are you aware entire groups of people do not have any right to self defense?

Those considered mentally ill don't have the right to even verbal self defense without any trace of anger being considered pathological, however justified their complaints. Anything that happens, they can be easily railroaded for it. The people who think criminals who are consigned to institutions for the criminally insane get off lightly have never seen a psych ward or understood the conditions of one. Those people may often be in for life without parole, even if innocent.

Children in school do not have a right to self defense. In many, many schools, a child who's being physically bullied will be suspended right along with the bully if they get picked on and beaten up three times, on a "three strikes" clause. One teenager I knew took my advice about that and performed a nonviolent protest. He refused to hit the other kid back on his third time being beaten up. He was expelled from the school for getting in fights, something the bully of course wanted. Most bullies view suspension as a little earned vacation along with their fun.

Children also don't have a right to their earnings, even when they work in televison or they're Olympic level athletes whose earnings later on would be enough to set them up for life. At least one 18 year old athlete had to sue her parents for squandering the millions she'd earned. Child stars sometimes need to do that too.

Whole classes of people get deprived of even basic rights like that. But let's go beyond that to the philosophical point that freedom stops when it impinges on other people's life, liberty and property. I am not advocating that robbery, assault or murder should go unstopped.

The vast majority of laws aren't about those things anyway. They're about who you can marry. Who can inherit your stuff, which is yours and the state should not be able to decide as it does in some states that your blood kin are entitled to the lion's share of it however they treated you and whatever you think of them. What you can do for recreation when, ranging from substance use including quite harmless substances like marijuana or herbal supplements. What you can plant on your own land. In many towns you're required to plant grass and keep a suburban lawn even if you'd rather tear out the whole thing and do a Zen rock garden.

Then there's when. Plenty of people who aren't practicing Christians and a large number of practicing Christians would like to be able to buy wine or liquor on the day of the party or the wedding instead of it being shut down by a local blue law. Sometimes they drive great distances to do so. Other businesses are forced to shut down early on Sundays or religious holidays whatever religion if any the employees or owners belong to.

Restaurant and now bar owners are forced into a hard no-smoking position even if they'd prefer the compromise position of having a well ventilated smoking area.

A thousand freedoms are curtailed every day regardless of what the local people think of them. They're things that wouldn't matter if they were just the rules of private clubs or churches. If you join a church, go through its period of education and acceptance, then you know that church's rules and have agreed as an individual to abide by them even if you disagree with some and the church can rightly throw you out of the congregation for breaking them even in deliberate civil disobedience.

Freedom of religion is the worst abused in this country with the number of blue laws enforcing a specific style of Christian-labeled living, a narrow Puritanical view that often gets called Christian and ignores such obvious churches as MCC or the very old and respectable Unitarian Universalist that have more open, liberal, freethinking slants. Certain types of Christian practice get a great deal of legal support and no other religion gets that kind of special treatment, which is unconstitutional.

Ath eists have been fighting over those for all my life, and still haven't managed to end the Sunday blue laws or many other religious-based laws that do nothing but support custom and invade people's private lives about things that do not harm other people's lives, property or freedom.

My being pagan does not mean that a Christian is less Christian. In fact, many Christian friends have told me that I have more in common with them than with an atheist, and this may well be true. I've got Jewish friends, Islamic friends, Buddhist friends, the different revival religions lumped into "pagan" are as numerous that it's probably as many as Christian churches but the difference is that most of the pagans aren't saying "mine is the only true religion, the only way to live." I have known some atheists to say that and get as dogmatic about materialism.

I'm not saying religious debates don't get fierce on all sides.

What I'm saying is that their place is private life and the rules of churches and private organizations like social clubs. You can have a club that requires everyone to show up to events dressed in medieval clothing. I used to belong to one. You can set as many rules as you want in any sort of private group. It's when membership is not voluntary that it becomes oppression.

That is where I draw the line on freedom, and I don't think it's ever been truly upheld in this country. I love the US constitution - but it's been so violated over history and even recently that the poor battered thing is more a cry of hope than a guarantee of freedom. Anything can be used to class a group of people as not having a full set of civil rights, it seems, and religion for all that the Constitution declares freedom from any special treatment for a church, is behind most of the laws that curtail people's freedom.

Currently, gay marriage is finally up as a controversial issue.

Freedoms always are when they are claimed by someone who was previously shut out. The main arguments against it are the "sanctity of marriage" which is spurious because that word itself implies a church's position. Churches and religions don't remotely agree on it, plenty of churches including Christian ones perform religious marriages that aren't legally recognized.

One solution that someone proposed was to get the state out of the marriage licensing entirely and eliminate legal marriage, just leave it to the churches and the people and don't make any legal changes due to a person's marital status. That could work because that would actually give freedom to other patterns of culture such as polyamory, polygamy and polygyny that are practiced in other cultures around the world - and some of those people become American immigrants. When they have kids they pass on their way of life. They can't practice it because the marital definitions of a particular stream of Christian practice don't condone that marital pattern.

Well, the people who practice it don't belong to those churches by and large either.

Fraud - oh yes, fraud is real crime. Fraud gets you profit at someone's expense, it's often verbal robbery. Certainly keep that on the list of crimes. If you made polyamory legal, it still ought to be illegal to just cross state lines and promise monogamy to spouse next, only giving her the rude awakening about the other family after she's consummated it.

Some things are just wrong.

Fewer of them are just wrong to everyone than you'd think though, looking at the laws on the books and the way people live - or are forced to live.

What about nudists? What about hot sunny days and a woman who'd like to bare her chest to get a tan? Only a few rare places she can do that and there'd better be a high fence and private club all over it to do so. What people wear is subject to the law. In many places it's illegal to wear clothing of the opposite sex. Tough luck for transvestites and transgendered people in transition. Or for that matter, some young girl who just grabbed her brother's shirt. It gets enforced differentially but that cute image of a teenage girl or attractive woman wearing her boyfriend's shirt that's a bit oversize is just as illegal as that drag queen.

Most of all in principle, a person should have the freedom to walk away from a bad situation. To emigrate from a country where they're discriminated against to one where they're not. To drop all of a church's special strictures if they leave the church. But I can't do that in this country - and while I have no interest in a polyamorous marriage for myself, I would breathe easier if I knew that the people who did could practice it openly.

So freedom is underrated, not overrated.

The legal system in this country is so complex that no one can count on being law abiding. You can't just go live by the laws and not worry about it, almost anyone can be arrested for something that went on the books a hundred years ago and custom changed. In New Orleans, a woman has to walk three paces behind a man. It's not enforced - but could be if a cop really wanted to arrest the gal and she hadn't done anything wrong. Lots of sweep laws like that.

I think we need to return to the Constitution and start questioning any of the laws that do not involve harming other people, especially those in matters of religious custom.

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