You have your version of freedom. I have mine. Freedom of movement. Why? Do we need the right only to be able to seek economic opportunity in other places or so we can get a taste of a different climate or topography? Is that all there is to it?
From the very beginning, we were a nation that was made up of people who voted with their feet. Each of us has our own hierarchy about what, which of all of the values on the huge menu of life are most important to us. The concept is so ingrained in us, when people complain too loudly about something we remind them they have the right to move. Sometimes we'll even offer to help them pack. There's the door. Don't let it hit you in the ...
From the beginning of the European incursion into American, people voted with their feet to live in communities in line with their beliefs, even if it meant that they had to build those communities themselves from scratch.
About half of the Pilgrims were "Separatists", while the rest were not. The Separatist Pilgrims had found their religious freedom in Holland, but there was something else there which they found that left the location wanting. Rather than staying in Holland & working to convert their Dutch countrymen to be more English, they voted with their feet. They risked death crossing an ocean & were willing to suffer the hardships of scratching out their ideal community from wilderness. The non-Seperatist Pilgrims had more secular reasons for leaving England. The ideals of the two groups weren't in conflict, so they joined together.
Different people, from different places, with different ideals did the same thing in wave after wave, each group finding or building a place in line with what they were seeking. It worked for generations. It worked for different, sometimes differing religious beliefs. Each group found a place. It survived revolution & was built into the law of the land.
As mobility became easier, when people could actually vote with their feet with greater & greater ease, something started happening. A cry to create a right to "just in case"... I might want to live elsewhere & if I do, I don't want to have to put up with having the ideals of those other people inflicted upon me. Never mind that the community you were moving into had worked for the people who were living there, had settled there had worked for them, sometimes for many generations. The children of those generations also had voted with their feet if they disagreed with the communities their parents had settled.
But the just in case people wanted to vote not with their feet. Instead, they wanted everywhere to have a watered down version with mixed "universal" appeal, so they no longer had to vote with their feet. They began to demand that government remake all of the communities in the country to a homogenized version of what had made the place. In the process, they took away the ability of others to have or make a community they wanted to live in.
Freedom of movement lost most of it's meaning. Y'all can move, but your primary reason to do so is no longer relevant. You will be taxed to teach children things which may be contrary to your beliefs. You can kinda vote with your feet by putting your children into private school or you can teach them at home with the "state" looking over your shoulder, but you still have to pay the taxes to support secular humanist schools, even if 100% of the parents in the school district have the same religious beliefs. It became important to stop people like those stuffy old Puritans from passing down their beliefs to their children in the way that previous generations had, because what they had been doing no longer fit with the new improved thinking.
Anything smacking of religion had to be pulled out of all public schools, off of all public property, out of all local governments, as we had to protect "just in case" people & "hind end voting" people against any feet voting people's idiosyncrasies, especially if they were religion based.
Might be time to see if the feet work again, but most people will have to seek it outside of the United States, because real religious freedom, freedom of association or the basic principle as to why that has any meaning is getting pushed out of the country in the name of "expanding" freedoms. Men made as their own gods is the dogma that stole the right to worship as one wills, free from any government intrusion.
When you can make yourself unhappy, just knowing that there is some community half way across the country that has rules that are less enlightened than you think they should be, think about why. Maybe you're afraid that those nutty, fringe ideas might migrate over to where you are, so they must be dealt with by building walls of laws around them, to contain them.
Why has the push from the religious right been directed at the Federal government? Imagine empowering feet voters again, regardless of their ideologies.
But government never was the source of ethical clarity in America! It is the people.
Amen!