A pair of Republican would-be presidential candidates outdid themselves this week, trying to explain how freedom was best served by allowing parents to skip out on vaccines for their children. For Rand Paul, the legitimate health concerns of many parents were far outweighed by the need for irrational, wooly-headed parents to be able to exercise their anti-science thinking. "It is an issue of freedom," he declared. Paul, under serious fire for his comments, attempted to backtrack later on, and in fairness other Republican leaders condemned him for his statements. Yet the stance of Chris Christie and the younger Paul on vaccines are a reminder that many on the Right have very strange ideas about what constitutes "freedom."
The idea that parents should be free to allow their children to become carriers of preventable diseases like measles is hardly the oddest notion coming from the self-proclaimed standard-bearers of liberty. The Affordable Care Act was government tyranny in its attempts to ensure that all Americans had health insurance, conservatives and libertarians continue to argue. Far better, obviously, to the denizens of the Right that U.S. citizens be allowed the "freedom" to die from lack of health insurance, the "freedom" to be denied coverage due to pre-existing conditions and the true liberty of being bankrupted by medical bills. One might be tempted to assert that my portrayal of the Right's opposition to the ACA was hyperbolic, except, of course, that members of the audience at a Tea Party debate loudly cheered the idea that the uninsured should be left to die, revealing their true feelings about the issue. It would seem obvious that it is hard to express your innate right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness if you've died from lack of insurance, but this has apparently escaped the proponents of "freedom."
For many on the Right, "freedom" is somehow equated to pointless wars in the Middle East, especially in the invasion of Iraq, where right-wingers heralded a new birth of freedom in the region. Over three thousand U.S. soldiers became martyrs to the Right's ideas about freedom and liberty, but the dead, and the wounded who returned from the war, will be hard-pressed to pursue happiness. No matter, conservatives assert, it was done for "freedom," and they make no apology. The obsession with the so-called "rights" of the unborn on the Right has helped give rise to incredible levels of violence against abortion providers in the name of protecting the freedom of fetuses. Over 4,700 instances of violence against abortion clinics have been documented in the past twenty years, and eight clinic workers have been murdered by those who assert that they are "pro-life." Given how often their ideas about freedom lead to destruction, one might be forgiven for mistaking the philosophies of the Right with respectable death cults.
In the view of the Right, "freedom" is best served by attempting to pass bills that legalize discrimination against gays and lesbians, done in the name of religious liberty. Nothing, apparently, screams freedom like allowing businesses to refuse to serve members of the LGBT community. If many conservatives had their way, abortion would be outlawed immediately, with no exception for rape or for incest. Nothing so obviously says "freedom" more than forcing women to bear children they don't want and cannot care for. And nothing promotes liberty more than allowing your employer to choose what kinds of birth control you can and can't have, naturally.
Liberty is apparently ill served by basic safety regulations, which conservatives and libertarians often target as burdensome and intrusive. Far better to allow all American workers the freedom of being killed in preventable accidents, like the explosion of a fertilizer plant in Texas. Nothing insults freedom so much as the very idea of a minimum wage, according to the Right. Better that all employees enjoy the liberty of being paid as little as their employer feels like, if the Koch Brothers had their way.
Freedom means allowing the wealthy to distort the democratic process through legalized bribing of our elected officials. When pressed, some on the Right will assert that this is freedom, because everyone can give what they want, and thus all are equal. But this sounds like Orwellian equality; all are equal, but some are indeed more equal than others. Liberty is suppressing votes through restrictive Voter ID laws. Liberty is gerrymandering districts to artificially keep themselves in power. Liberty, in short, is anything to preserve the special privileges of those who have always had them, in the face of apparently frightening demographic and cultural changes.
Imagine a scenario where all the dreams of conservatives and libertarians were put into practice. Does anyone really suppose that such a right-wing utopia represents true freedom? Beware those who mouth "liberty" and "freedom" with their lips, while working to ensure that a bastardized version of freedom prevails--they seek to liberate only themselves, while enslaving everyone else.
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