Red State Blue State Nanny State
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I am not a Catholic. I have no problem with women choosing to use contraception to prevent a pregnancy. I think it’s great when an insurance company covers it.
But just who in the, heck, does the President and his Congressional supporters think they are? How did they come to the conclusion that they actually have the authority to force a religious institution to abandon its tenants of faith? This bill is not about women’s rights, health or contraception.
It’s about a government over reaching its authority and insinuating itself further and further into our private lives.
Who is to blame for this? We are. We have become dependent on the “nanny state”. To many of us are happy to trade away a few personal freedoms, for the government’s promise of a life without worry or want. We want the government to protect us from being offended, or inconvenienced by our neighbors. We want businesses to be regulated so that their profits are handed over to the government and redistributed, so that we can have free health care, a grocery allowance, and subsidized housing. Most dangerous of all, we want the government to be our conscience.
Both liberals and conservatives want the government to restrict behaviors that we find immoral or offensive. We want airwaves censored from sex, violence, and obscene language, yet we continue to tune into shows and buy tickets to movies that contain those very things. Some want women to be able to have an abortion any time, anywhere, for any reason, and some feel that there is never a justifiable reason to abort a baby. Many of us choose our elected officials on this issue alone. Meanwhile we fail to teach our children that a sexual relationship carries with it some heavy responsibilities, and requires a certain level of maturity. We want the government to prevent banks from charging penalty fees when we fail to handle our finances responsibly. We want the police to crack down on drunk drivers, speeders, and red-light runners, but we complain about rogue cops when we are the ones who get caught. We no longer have the ability to make very basic judgments for ourselves.
The Founding Fathers designed our Constitution to limit government. I’m sure they never intended for the Bill of Rights to be twisted and perverted into a device that allows the government to become our teacher, our parent, our God. We need to resurrect our common sense and good manners. We need to stop confusing legal with moral and take responsibility for our own clean living rather than imposing it on others. Most of all we need to use our patronage and our pocketbooks to effect social change rather than placing power that should belong to the people into the hands of the government.
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A Peaceful? Protest
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Now that Time Magazine has made The Protester “The Person of the Year”, I have been giving a lot of thought to the First Amendment Rights to peaceable assembly and to petition the government for a redress of grievances. We hear a lot about our constitutional rights, what we don’t hear a lot about is our responsibilities in exercising those rights.
There are many ways to petition our government officials. We can write or email them. We can gather signatures on a petition. We can call them and we can vote. We can even gather in large numbers in a show of unity to call attention to an issue. That is what is meant by the right to peaceably assemble.
A peaceful assembly respects the rights of those not participating to go about their daily lives and does not try to impede them by blocking streets, sidewalks, or the entrances to buildings. A peaceful assembly does not destroy public or private property. People do not commit crimes against one another during a peaceful assembly. A peaceful assembly respects the rules of usage for public parks and open spaces. A peaceful assembly respects the rights of others to use public parks and open spaces and does not occupy them for an unreasonable amount of time.
When the purpose of a gathering is to call attention to its cause by being willfully disruptive or destructive, when it causes an inconvenience to those not participating by obstructing their access to places were they have a right to be, then the gathering is no longer a peaceful assembly. It is an act of civil disobedience. Civil disobedience is an unlawful act and is not protected under the constitution.
To understand the difference between the two acts we need to understand why we have this right.
The Constitution was written by men who had a healthy mistrust of government. They wanted to limit the government’s intrusion into our daily lives. The First Amendment spells out some specific rights that allow us to maintain control of the government and the individuals elected to serve us. Not all countries enjoy this kind of freedom. In places such as China, and Middle Eastern theocracies, the people have no other choice but to engage in civil disobedience in order to confront the injustices their governments force them to endure. But because our constitution gives us lawful and civilized ways to keep our government accountable to us, an act of civil disobedience is not only unnecessary it is counter productive.
When a gathering becomes a disruptive nuisance to a community there will inevitable be someone who seeks to remedy the situation and prevent future problems by suggesting regulation. It seems reasonable enough, lets protect the public by restricting, how many may gather for a rally, where they can gather, how long they can gather. Before long political correctness takes over and along with protecting public safety, the government decides that it should protect us from being “offended” as well. Now along with the restrictions already in place comes a restriction on who can gather. Now you have to submit your agenda to code compliance to make sure it does not encourage disruptive behavior. See how this goes?
We all have a right to have our grievances heard, but we should also be good neighbors and citizens. The First Amendment was not meant to allow an “anything goes” approach to addressing our concerns. When we abuse our rights, we set in motion the means to erode them.
Observations and Opinions of a Middle Aged Housewife 