When I was young, the American Right was the group most associated with trying to legislate morality. Now, decades later, the tides have changed. The left is trying to use its morality as a bludgeon to force people to submit to their progressive politics.

An op-ed at the Salt Lake Tribune presents seven ways to “save America’s soul,” a claim that certain moral choices are the only way to protect America’s goodness. The piece completely ignores the moral arguments against these seven, trying to make the case that Leftism can’t be debated because the opposition is inherently evil by definition.

I’m going to address each one. From the op-ed:

1. Abortion rights for women must be supported. While abortions should be legal and rare, the solution is to make unwanted pregnancy rare. Quality sex education in school and easy access to contraception would help. Let’s put abortion clinics out of business by taking away the need for them!

Let’s start with a bang.

Look, I’d like to see the demand for abortion reduced to zero. However, let’s also face the fact that abortion activists aren’t actually working toward making abortion unnecessary. They’re encouraging people to get abortions, and demanding the American taxpayer help foot the bill.

Contraception is already incredibly easy to access.

County health clinics provide birth control pills for those who can’t afford them, though they are available at pharmacies for less than $10 a month. Condoms can be found inexpensively in every drug store in the country, and are also provided for free at clinics.

How much “easier” could the access possibly be?

And yet, there’s still a demand for abortion.

So let’s not pretend that supporting abortion rights has anything to do with eliminating them.

2. There can be no compromise on equal rights for all. Everyone should have equal rights and protection under the law!

The problem, of course, is that the Left simply does not want equal rights. They want superior rights granted based on DNA.

They lash out at men or “whiteness” for causing whatever ills they decide are relevant at that moment, calling for men to lose their jobs and even property simply because of their existence.

These people don’t want equal rights. They want to reverse the sins of the past by creating new state-enforced inequality, so they can exact some form of revenge.

How is that good for America’s soul?

3. With immigration, there are areas for compromise. But like abortion, let’s reduce the need for immigration. Most people who want to immigrate are doing it for economic and security reasons. Instead of them fleeing bad situations, let’s do a better job of helping those people and their governments with these issues. Foreign aid for these kinds of projects has been decreasing. That is shortsighted. Good people are leaving these bad situations. Let’s help them stay and make those countries more successful!

I’m sorry, but their problems are not going to be fixed by our foreign aid. Their problems will instead be subsidized.

Recovery after a natural disaster is one thing. But places that have managed to destroy themselves, like Venezuela, aren’t places we need to devote our resources to. Countries that have squandered their own resources to such a degree that they are now destitute will not be helped whatsoever by foreign aid.

This is called “enabling,” and it’s never a good thing.

4. Climate change has been studied for more than 40 years, and a consensus that it is human caused has existed for more than 20 years. The last-breath argument against human-caused climate change seems to be that it is some “natural cycle.” There is no “natural cycle” that can explain the degree and speed of the warming we have seen the past 40 years. While there are ways that the Earth can cool quickly — think nuclear winter, large asteroid impact or very large volcanic activity — no such mechanism exists for sudden warming. It is time to move aggressively and quickly into solution mode.

Nearly none of the above is true.

Climate change models have been spectacularly wrong at predicting the present, and even the past. There is no consensus, and no data to support one. It’s time that scientists figure out exactly what the hell they’re talking about before they further destroy entire economies. Especially since the climate has changed throughout the millennia, and nothing occurring right now is even out of the ordinary, let alone unprecedented.

How does reversing progress and modernity save anyone’s soul?

5. The bottom line for gun control is that all sales of guns must have background checks and automatic weapons must be illegal.

Good news! Automatic weapons are already illegal. Since 1935!

As for background checks, most all legal gun sales already require them.

The sales you have to be worried about are black-market sales that already bypass the law. Pro tip: Those will keep happening even if you ban them again.

Feel-good efforts proposed by know-nothings that can’t possibly prevent crime won’t do anything for America’s soul. In fact, they are the kind of authoritarianism that invariably leads to the most immoral societies.

6. While the Affordable Care Act had its problems, it was much better than where we are going now. Medicare for all is the simplest and most efficient solution. While there is room for how to get there, it is time for America to catch up with the rest of the advanced world in supporting health care as a right!

There’s so much wrong in this one point that many books have been written to disprove it all.

Universal health care, regardless of what label you slap on it, ultimately requires massive, and ever-increasing spending by the government to provide subpar health care — it creates rationing, which quite literally means death panels. If watching the UK’s NHS and judicial system not only refuse to treat an ill child, but also refuse to allow the parents to take the child elsewhere to get treatment didn’t convince you that universal health care is inherently monstrous, then you have a problem.

That is the future of any universal health care scheme. Health care is not a right, but a service provided by people, so creating unlimited demand requires rationing. If it’s controlled by the government, which has no competition, the situation can’t possibly innovate and improve. A system that will force people to die and forbid their treatment simply because it’s more cost effective is not how you save a nation’s soul.

7. The last tax package has produced an unsustainable deficit whose impact will likely fall mostly on the young (they will be paying the interest and the principal), the poor and the elderly. There are reasonable compromises in both taxes and a sustainable safety net, but they will only be found if there is a return to more balance of power in our legislative branch. One area where the economic safety net needs to be expanded and strengthened is for those adversely affected by the move away from fossil fuels. Not only could carbon fees reduce CO2 production, but a part of those fees could be directed toward helping those people and their communities.

Only a liberal would think that allowing people to keep the money they earn is a sin. I honestly don’t need to offer anything else on that one.

But this is what progressives think. This is what they call morality. Taking money from people to do things that may or may not benefit anyone, simply because they think they are wiser, and should be allowed to experiment with our lives. At the end of the day, the Left wants to return to a tiered society of unequal power and restricted rights. Imposing that on people is the definition of immoral.