by Jason Stotts
Today is the Fourth of July or American Independence Day. It’s a day when we celebrate the freedoms we have by enjoying spending time with our families, having barbecues, going to parades, and watching fireworks. It’s a day when we should be contemplating what freedom is and what it took to achieve it.
This has made me think about Operation Choke Point (OCP) and the erosion of freedom that began under Bush and escalated under Obama. In OCP, the Obama Administration and the DOJ are going after “undesirable” entities and trying to get rid of them by cutting of their access to banks and financial services. The two most targeted areas, or at least the two areas who are vocally standing up for themselves, are porn and firearms. I’ve already written about this in terms of porn (The Obama DOJ and the War on Porn), but what I want to point out today is something different.
In both the porn camp and the firearms camp are people who are vocally rejecting this draconian and clearly immoral use of the government to try to stomp out things with which they do not agree. Each camp stresses that they should have the right to do the things they’re doing because they’re not harming anyone. Each camp is, to this extent, right. The problem is that these two camps don’t like each other and each would be happy to see the other fall to the Obama DOJ. Of course, not everyone in each camp thinks like this, there will always be exceptions, but it holds true for the general view of each side. But each side would like to see the other fall and so refuses to come to their aid.
The problem is that if we don’t defend freedom in principle, then we can’t provide a real defense of it at all. If I think the government should stop you from what you’re doing because it offends me, then what possible objection could I offer if my own actions offended someone else? We need to stand together to fight against this tyrannical destruction of our rights to live the kinds of lives we want to lead. As long as we violate no one else’s rights, there should be no restrictions on our actions.
We must either stand for freedom on principle, or fall individually one by one, and this is especially true of things that we don’t like and don’t agree with.
You either stand for freedom on principle or you don’t.
Choose.