Posted on 09/01/2011 6:47:34 PM PDT by ReformationFan
Unfortunately, many Americans have become inured to the trampling of freedom of association. You can work your fingers to the bone starting a business, and the government becomes a partner that contributes nothing but extracts much. It not only shares your profits and regulates you to death, but, more to the point here, dictates whom you must serve and the bases on which you may hire and fire people. And woe betide he who doesn't bow before Leviathan.
A recent example of this is the Wildflower Inn, a Vermont B&B. After devout Catholic owners Jim and Mary O'Reilly refused to host a "wedding" reception for two lesbians, they were sued by the ACLU. As a result, they have had to expend resources retaining a lawyer for a case that they will no doubt lose and that will likely end with their having to pay monetary damages. Of course, the O'Reilly case is just one of many. In fact, today, Leviathan's tyranny has reach a point at which you can be put through its meat grinder if you refuse to hire a cross-dresser or a Muslim woman who insists on wearing an eighth-century drape to work.
And tyranny is the word for it. After all, no one would deny that you have a right to include in or exclude from your home whomever you please. So why should you lose that right simply because you decide to erect a few more tables and sell food or to rent rooms to travelers? It's still your private property, paid for with your money, created by the sweat of your own brow. Oh, yeah, that's right. At one time a lawyer in a black robe declared such places "public accommodations" — and, as we all know, legal decrees alter reality.
(Excerpt) Read more at renewamerica.com ...
I heard about that Vermont case a while back on FR. Scary.
I sent an email to the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty, which I heard does some really great work defending our basic freedoms (basically the ACLU for real Americans). I suggested they take the Vermont case and reach out to that couple, but I didn’t hear back.
If a restaurant became a dining club, what would a hotel become? A hospitality club?
Just for curiosity’s sake, was it with a court or with a law that the whole “public accommodation” trouble began? I’d like to put a finger on the exact spot. I’d also like to see how homosexuals managed to wedge their way into coverage by a provision of law which was obviously intended to end racial discrimination. When it was only about race, almost nobody complained, because that seemed decent enough. Gender raised a few more eyebrows. Then the gay monster plunged in and Katy bar the door.
Richard Frothingham's 1872 "History of the Rise of the Republic of the United States," Page 14, contained the following footnote item on the condition of citizens of France:
"Footnote 1. M. de Champagny (Dublin Review, April, 1868) says of France, 'We were and are unable to go from Paris to Neuilly; or dine more than twenty together; or have in our portmanteau three copies of the same tract; or lend a book to a friend: or put a patch of mortar on our own house, if it stands in the street; or kill a partridge; or plant a tree near the road-side; or take coal out of our own land: or teach three or four children to read, . .. without permission from the civil government.'"
Clearly the government of France laid an oppressive regulatory and tax burden on citizens, deprived them of freedom of association, and on and on, robbing them of their Creator-endowed liberty and enjoyment thereof.
Frothingham observed that such coercive power constituted "a noble form robbed of its lifegiving spirit."
While, in America, a people who had been devoted to a "spirit of liberty" (Edmund Burke) since embarking on their journey to the new world, framed a Constitution to "bind" (Jefferson) their representatives in government by its "chains" and free individuals for the "pursuit of happiness," as long as they did not trample on the equal rights of their fellow citizens.
Wow! That footnote sounds just like America today.
His idea doesn’t seem like a bad idea at all. Of course anything that would threaten the left’s stranglehold over their ability to attack the right to association will eventually be challenged in Court by them so by whatever means this idea is promoted there must also be preperation to take on the legal battles as well.
In many ways this is a cultural idea similiar to home schooling whereas those that join the cause will be hopefully conservative / libertarian and like minded morally and culturally to at least a certain degree. It would involve social and business networking to a large degree.
America absolutely NEEDS a conservative / libertarian cultural revolution. It is ironic because much of the success of the left-wing today came about due to the counter-culture. They pushed slogans like ‘tune in / drop out” which reflected leaving the establishment. This is in some sense similiar in that it is suggesting that we do things to leave the current left-wing over regulated system and find ways to do business, to school our children, etc... which would hopefully make the current liberal left-wing establishment meaningless to our lives.
Thumbs up for this writer for thinking out of the box and for looking for solutions.
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