Robert Tracinski:
What interests and concerns me about the fight over Indiana’s religious freedom law is not its implication for gay weddings and whether pizza will be served at them.
Much more important are the basic principles that are being invoked to argue against the Indiana law. These arguments set out to define religious freedom out of existence, and they end up defining all freedom out of existence.
At the end of last year, I complained that “The basic problem with the left’s conception of freedom is that it doesn’t really have one.”
The left’s operational concept of freedom is that you are allowed to do and say what you like—so long as you stay within a certain proscribed window of socially acceptable deviation. The purpose of the gay marriage campaign is simply to change the parameters of that window, extending it to include the gay, the queer, the transgendered—and to exclude anyone who thinks that homosexuality is a sin or who wants to preserve the traditional concept of marriage. Those people are declared outside the protection of the law and in fact will have the full weight of the law bear down upon them until they recant their socially unacceptable views.The point is not whether you agree about which views are or should be socially acceptable. The point is that this is not a concept of freedom. It’s a regime of state-controlled ideas, softened by an amorphous zone of official tolerance.
Indiana Shows the Left Has No Concept of Freedom.
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