If you aren't free to be wrong, you aren't free

If you aren't free to be wrong, you aren't free

http://www.ocregister.com/articles/media-608400-many-one.html

""But when it comes to authoritarian expression of "true" beliefs, it's the progressive Left that increasingly seeks to impose orthodoxy. In this rising intellectual order, those who dissent on everything from climate change, the causes of poverty and the definition of marriage, to opposition to abortion are increasingly marginalized and, in some cases, as in the Steyn trial, legally attacked.

A few days ago, Brendan Eich, CEO of the web browser company Mozilla, resigned under pressure from gay rights groups. Why? Because it was revealed he donated $1,000 to the campaign to pass Proposition 8, California's since-overturned ballot measure defining marriage as between one man and one woman.

In many cases, I might agree with some leftist views, say, on gay marriage or the critical nature of income inequality, but liberals should find these intolerant tendencies terrifying and dangerous in a democracy dependent on the free interchange of ideas.

But what started as liberation and openness has now engendered an ever-more powerful clerisy – an educated class – that seeks to impose particular viewpoints while marginalizing and, in the most-extreme cases, criminalizing, divergent views.

Today's clerisy in some ways resembles the clerical First Estate in pre-revolutionary France, which, in the words of the historian Georges Lefebvre, "possessed a control over thought in the interests of the Church and king." With today's clerisy, notesessayist Joseph Bottum, "social and political ideas [are] elevated to the status of strange divinities ... born of the ancient religious hunger to perceive more in the world than just the give and take of ordinary human beings, but adapted to an age that piously congratulates itself on its escape from many of the strictures of ancient religion." ""

Science doesn't accept anything as settled. There is no truth, only assumptions. I have beliefs, which I consider settled, but which I grant others a right to their opinion.

I have rights, some of which are listed in the US constitution. I believe in the literal interpretation of the constitution. I believe in my right to my understanding of the constitution.

Violating my rights, is a big fucking deal.