The many court cases where people have refused, in a business capacity, to serve or participate in events such as gay “weddings” that they find morally offensive, have been “balanced” by judges with the “right” of some individuals to force others to violate their conscious as a condition of doing business. The courts have found the 1st Amendment to be inferior and gone so far to declare that the suspension of one’s 1st Amendment rights is a prerequisite for living in civilized society!

The state is effectively assisting bullies, even against those who are tolerant but draw the line at being forced to use their personal creative abilities to promote and endorse what they oppose! All this in order to “balance” people’s “rights” to serve the greater goal of an activist government.

Daniel Greenfield describes this as the “redistribution of freedom.”

“Those who sought to undermine these ‘Freedoms from Government’ did so by offering alternative ‘Freedoms of Government.’ Countering the Founding Fathers’ DMZ’s of self-determination, they promised freedom from social problems. A second Bill of Rights would offer the freedom from fear and want. Instead of a liberation from government, the new rights would trade social benefits for freedoms. A right would not mean a zone of freedom from the government, but a government entitlement. “The Orwellian inversion of rights has meant that civil rights perversely take away rights. No sooner is a right created than it is used to deprive other people of their rights. Instead of rights freeing people from government repression, they act as a means of government repression. Freedom is treated as a limited commodity which, like wealth, must be redistributed to achieve maximum social justice.”

For the Left, “rights” are a dispensation from government, or the Volonté Générale. Nothing, then is god-given or inalienable. You only have rights that the state decides you have.

What the state giveth, the state taketh away.

Thus, both inalienable rights, and “positive rights” such as a “right” to welfare or handouts from the state, are for the state to dole out to the degree that those in control decide. Your “rights” then become a balancing act, not only between rights, but between individuals for the same “right.” The only “right” you really have then, is to accept whatever you are rationed. And that rationing will always be according to the dictates of an elite few. This is antithetical to the Civic Heritage that lies at the core of American society. Greenfield further notes:

“Rights can either be defined by the virtue of the individual in his liberty or the virtue of the government in its authoritarianism. But it cannot be defined by both. Either you have the right to be free or you have the right to the property and the service of another human being. The choice is the fundamental one between freedom and slavery.” “Social justice denies the virtue of freedom, it rejects the possibility of self-determination without external intervention, it dismisses the idea that people can be free without a system of redistributing freedom from the oppressors to the oppressed so that the oppressed become the new oppressors. It rejects any alternative to entitlements as entitlement and any alternative to privilege as privilege. “The moral argument for freedom is the self-organizing principle of individuals. The moral argument for compulsion is that the system is superior to individuals. The left has chosen central planning in human rights as it has in every other area of life. It believes with the paradoxical perversity of doublethink that freedom can only come from government because only a central authority is qualified to provide the equal distribution of freedom within carefully planned limits.”

From each according to their freedom… to each according to their political pull in the social corporatist scheme that is Progressivism.

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