Posted on 06/25/2014 6:10:26 PM PDT by markomalley
I hate to be the bitter partisan of the group, but I think it helps to use Thomas Sowell’s Vision of the Anointed to see how Carl’s five kinds of American liberty are sometimes applied in today’s America. Sowell argues that the “anointed” – those progressive intellectuals and their sympathizers – decide what is justice and then impose their vision on society – often on behalf of “mascot groups.” The anointed want to help these groups, but even more, the anointed want to feel like they are helping and, if force to choose, they will choose the feeling of being helpful over the reality of actually helping.
Well, let’s look at the controversies over the virtual disappearance of conservative speakers at elite college commencements, the harassment of Christian college groups, the Obama administration forcing the Little Sisters of the Poor and Hobby Lobby to pay for contraception coverage, the lawsuits against proprietors who do not want to provide services to gay weddings, and the hounding of Brendan Eich. You can get to any one of those outcomes by reference to Carl’s five kinds of liberty. A little economic liberty here (for Mozilla pressuring Eich), a little classical-communitarian liberty there (for Bowdoin wanting to harass Christian groups off campus and other colleges for excluding conservative commencement speakers), and a little personal autonomy liberty elsewhere.
But you notice that it doesn’t really hold together. The Little Sisters of the Poor don’t get the benefit of classical-communitarian liberty, and people who don’t want to provided services to gay marriage ceremonies don’t get economic-liberty or personal-autonomy protections, while campus Christian groups don’t get either classical-communitarian or personal-autonomy protections in their internal organization.
You can hopscotch from one kind of liberty to another to get the desired result, but I think that the left’s behavior in all of these cases is best explained by making an addition to Sowell’s categories. Rather than mascot groups you have “open season” groups. That means that certain groups have found themselves obtrusively on the “wrong side of history” in the view of the anointed, and they must be broken and made a public example regardless of the liberty interest that they might normally have if they were upstanding members of society.
You can see this in the case of the Little Sisters of the Poor and Hobby Lobby. You had the argument that if they were granted a waiver for offering contraception, then suddenly it might become legal for any restaurant to refuse to provide service to African Americans. It was both legal and practical nonsense. The Religious Freedom Restoration Act allows for the sacramental use of peyote in prescribed circumstances without allowing everyone else to claim a religious right to inject heroin. The Religious Freedom Restoration Act’s “least restrictive means” model would have allowed the government to find a less restrictive way to provide contraceptive coverage while allowing a conscious exemption to the relatively small number of objectors. The difference (and the cause of the hysteria) is that objectors to the contraception mandate are an “open season” group while those few who have a legal exception to use peyote are not – at least not yet. And if you are part of an open season group and in the way of the anointed, the left will care about none of your five kinds of liberty.
Didn't see it coming... insightful.
Jews were the last “open season” group.
Leftest can justify any means necessary in their minds for the “greater good”. The “greater good” is all they can see in their blinders existence.
Leftest are gravely dangerous people when given power.
You have liberty to serve the revolution, comrade.
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