GEORGE TEMPLETON
COMMENTARY
By George Templeton
Gazette Columnist
Born Free
The song goes, “Born free, as free as the wind blows, as
free as the grass grows, born free to follow your heart.” Freedom
is feeling and conscious belief. It shapes our society. Modern Liberty, by Charles Fried, describes
both the emotional-intuitive and the rational side of freedom. Is more
freedom always better, the paramount goal, and what we really want?
Examples
In West Virginia State Board Of Education versus Barnette
(1943), the Supreme Court condemned a law requiring that children recite the
pledge of allegiance, writing: “If there is any fixed star in our
constitutional constellation, it is that no official, high or petty, can
prescribe what shall be orthodox in politics, nationalism, religion, or other
matters of opinion, or force citizens to confess by word or act by their faith
therein.”
In Planned Parenthood versus Casey (1992) concerning abortion
restrictions, Justice Kennedy wrote, “At the heart of liberty is the
right to define one’s own concept of meaning, of the universe, of the
mystery of human life.”
These examples acknowledge freedom of the mind, conscience,
and self-determination as important elements in liberty.
More Freedom
Freedom is to do as we wish and go where we will, but only if
we do not harm others. It is not spontaneous individual action,
permissive recklessness, the unencumbered self, the ideal of democracy, or revoking
business regulations that protect the public. It is not the availability
of materialistic choices, and is more than independence from others. It
is a competition between individual and collective interests, between absence
of coercion, means, and opportunity. Group control is necessary to
prevent self-interest from creating feuds that destroy the cooperation
requisite to civilized behavior. When business and their super-packs
become “people” we indirectly pay for their negative ads.
Their propaganda employs a nebulous freedom and emotional patriotism, using
them as indoctrinating tools.
Ideology
Ideology gives the true believer a sense of purpose and worth
through identification with a true cause. It does not exist to serve the
individual. They serve it. Ideology knows what mankind is supposed
to become and what we were designed to do while asserting freedom as its
purpose. It teaches an unchanging absolute truth. It claims the
only correct interpretation of the Founding Fathers’ philosophy and religion
while ignoring the social, cultural, and political realities of their time.
Liberty
Self-governing liberty, by agreed upon laws of our own making,
is the degree to which individual freedom becomes typical. It is the
triumph of the individual over the masses that would compel the minority to
conform. Liberty
has political, civil, and economic dimensions that cannot be maximized while
reducing government control. It is not majority vote. The
“will of the American people” can become an excuse for government
repression. Individual liberty takes precedence over the collective, but
individuals cannot be truly free without being responsible. Fanatics fear
liberty more than persecution and the truth more than the devil.
Opportunity
and means are necessary to carry out free will. Liberty requires stability, security, trust, mutual
respect, a reasonable distribution of wealth, and paths for personal
improvement, allowing planning one’s future. Government has a duty
to promote the welfare of the people so they can become free.
Equality
We feel increasingly equal when we are all on the same boat;
though forcing our presence there compromises our freedom. The equality
of human worth does not mean identity or refer to skills. There will always be
differences and perceived unfairness but that does not justify envy. There
will always be the poor, but we will be our brother’s keeper instead of competitor?
Rights
Rights are the facets of liberty that should be protected by
law. They are often fought for instead of given. We have a right to
defend against those who try to use us and no right to use others. Our
rights do not come from or depend on the state, but the state enforces and
determines the content and details of those rights. Without individual
rights there can be no liberty, but individual liberty requires the support and
constraint of others.
Laws
Laws reflect the wisdom that comes with learning how to live
together. When conservatives want to reverse what they interpret as
radical legislation from the Supreme Court bench, they would destroy our
hard-earned knowledge that comes from the trial and error of history.
Laws can come from and be about special interest groups, even implying the
reconstruction of society and human nature. Equal opportunity is reverse
discrimination and freedom is slavery to responsibility.
Slippery socialism is not what is threatening freedom.
Consider:
Free Speech
The bumper sticker reads “Welcome to America, now
speak English”. Language is a tool for thinking and is the
embodiment of culture and values. To restrict that is to deny the
individuality and heritage of a person.
It is not a case of a minority forcing their language on the
majority. Democracy allows voting for “English only” but that
denies choice and authorizes government repression. English needs no
defense, but free speech needs to be defended from property rights. The public
library has designated free-speech regions because freedom means both freedom
to speak and the public’s freedom to hear, and it requires a place to be.
Sex
When America
chooses to define its values by what it hates, it reveals to the world that it
is willing to defile liberty. Gay marriage is an issue of equality.
Sexual orientation is about freedom. People’s sex lives are their
own business. What bothers conservatives is that homosexuals might be
recognized and allowed, but liberty disavows any persecution of homosexuals.
Constitutional changes to force a definition of marriage down our throats are
not more freedom. It is like making sex for purposes other than
procreation illegal so that citizens won’t be tempted.
Empowering Women
In the 1920 debate over women’s right to vote, Benjamin
Hubbard wrote, “The Feminist, instead of having the affections of a
normal woman and a regard for duty, has no affection for either man, child,
church, state or God. She is a moral anarchist, obsessed by her personal
importance and vanity.”
A political organization, called Evangelicals and Catholics
Together (ECT), and the Republicans, intrude on women’s health, desiring
to defund Planned Parenthood and prescribe viewing of abortion movies.
Dogma
The Roman Catholic Church was the unchallenged authority on
political, economic, and social matters prior to the time of the
Reformation. It exerted great power over the lives of people and
exercised the right to interpret the Bible and provide the final word on the
meaning of the scriptures. The church was the divinely appointed
custodian of the truth.
The New England Puritans were influenced by the Calvinist
school of theology. All of man’s actions, thoughts, and feelings
bore moral significance and were screened to determine whether they were in
accordance with the will of God. Thus the Puritan lived in a glass city
under the constant supervision by spiritual police.
Liberty
is fundamental and given by Nature’s God. Without morality society
becomes cruel, regressive, and disordered. Christian soldiers are free
when they are obedient to the moral order established by God, even if that
denies kindness, compassion, and the respect for the liberty of others to make
wise, informed choices. What they want is to force the lifestyle they feel
is best for America.
Contraception and Health
The issue regards how Catholics treat non-Catholics.
They believe that religious liberty gives them the right to discriminate
against women who use contraception. This is about religion using the
power of the state to influence, versus the desires of some to be free of that
kind of influence.
Nobody forces Catholics to take birth control pills.
They don’t approve of and will not tolerate your using them. You
could be fired for using birth control for contraception or required to prove
that your miscarriage was accidental. Your individual freedom does not intrude
on their liberty to not use birth control. When you spill your soda pop
in the ocean, you do not own the ocean and when ECT denies birth control it has
no right to intrude upon the health of non-Catholic women.
The Affordable Care Act requires everyone to buy insurance.
Individual freedom is compromised to a social responsibility to provide for the
sick, old, and poor. The state takes care of those who gamble their future.
The law requires that they be treated in the hospital emergency room even
though they have no insurance or money. It is not free enterprise when
the insured pay several percent of the price asked of the uninsured.
Those of us who have insurance end up paying for those who have none.
Intellectual Freedom
When does education become indoctrination? HB 2562 wants
to sneak the Bible into K-12 classrooms under the guise of academics while
ignoring the contributions coming from other religions. It is not
academic freedom because the politicians want to take charge and in a
kaleidoscope of repressive, intimidating bills decree classroom language,
prevent liberal bias, deny global warming, and restrict supplemental books and
magazines that they consider threatening to conservative ideology.
Republicans argue that American culture is religious
fundamentalism and that our youth are losing their moral foundation and souls.
They would return us to the time of the Pilgrims, when there was no separation
between church and state, a time before Ben Franklin’s practical
vocational academies started to undo the theocratic caste system.
The Rev. John Cotton Mather, during the colonial period,
claimed that children were “of death, of hell, of wrath”.
They were predestined to burn in Hell just as most adults and were born
essentially bad. Jefferson, Franklin, Locke, and Rousseau would not
agree. Republicans feel that the state knows better and must become
involved in teaching their morality.
Conservatives claim a liberal bias if Intelligent Design (ID)
cannot be taught in the classroom, and they argue this on the basis of critical
thinking and teaching the controversy, but ID does not come from the recognized
scientific establishment and it is hard to find a job using it. Legitimate
science recognizes no controversy to critique.
With Liberty
and Justice for All
The intent of a law bears on whether it aims for liberty or
is a grab for power and money. Liberty
exists though it is hypocritical to claim that it can be quantified.
Intent is hard to prove. It exists in the eye of the beholder who sees
injustice, persecution, and conspiracy behind everything he disagrees
with. Critical thinking about freedom is important if we are not to lose
the moral high ground when the world concludes that we do not care about the
liberty of our own people.
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