Students at the Miami University in Ohio are suing the school after it wouldn’t let them erect a cross on its campus to express their pro-life message.
Filed by the Alliance Defending Freedom on behalf of Miami University’s Students for Life, the lawsuit alleges that the university violated their rights to free speech and expression because it wouldn’t let them erect a cross on it’s [sic] Hamilton campus, which recently hosted an event on the “Perspectives of Free Speech,” according to WLWT5. The suit also asks the university to change its policies regarding campus postage and seeks monetary damages.
Here’s the problem. People have one of two options regarding how to deal with one another. One is through force. The other is through choice and reason.
The feelings of the anti-abortion people at Miami University are understandable. Students who favor abortion get a choice, while they do not. But does this mean the people who run the university must be forced to display their crosses and messages? By what right? Isn’t it ultimately up to the persons who own and operate the university to decide? Students who dislike pro-abortion messages and prefer anti-abortion messages are free to go somewhere else to school. If it’s that important to them, it would have been a consideration when first selecting a university. Wouldn’t it?
Yes, I know tax money flows into all or most universities. My answer? Get the tax money out of all universities. Separate education and state precisely because education is so important.
My position has nothing whatsoever to do with typical “liberal-conservative” debates. Because those are not the real debates. Too often, one side is saying, “I have a right to force you to tolerate my opinion, but you have no right to force me to tolerate yours.” It’s a war of all against all with no discernible solution. That’s because somebody will have to give in to the force of the other.
That’s not the way it should be, and it’s not the way it has to be.
Yet nobody on either side seems willing to understand or grasp this. When dissenters criticize Obamacare and the welfare state, leftists and progressives sneer, name-call and shriek. It’s because they feel entitled to impose forced “charity” on the population, usually because it makes them feel good about themselves and in the eyes of their peers. It’s the same with forcing Christian bakers to bake cakes for gay weddings. Don’t Christian bakers have a choice, the same way gay couples have a choice to be together and even marry if they choose? Why a choice for one side, but not for the other?
Increasingly, the right is fighting back against the left. In a way that’s good, and it’s justified. But fighting for more force won’t lead to anything. Forcing people with opposing views to shut up or to go against their judgment on their private property is a lose-lose proposition. It’s a “lose” for the person being forced, and it’s a “lose” — in the long-run — for the person doing the forcing.
Look how enraged conservatives are over the choices they have been forced to make, against their wishes and judgment on their own private property, and often with their own tax dollars — as in the case of public schools, for which they are often forced to pay. Leftists are bewildered and frightened to death (deep down) by all the anger they see coming from the right. But can’t the leftists see how they brought this all on themselves? Particularly during the Obama years, they shoved all kinds of additional government controls and attitudes not subject to debate on the entire population, never expecting the inevitable rebellion they found in red states and red state districts throughout the country.
And conservatives, if they go the same route of force as the leftists did to them, now risk the very same counter-counter-reaction. When both sides are this way, I hate to say it, but it’s called … civil war. We’re already in the psychological and political equivalent of civil war right now. We really are. On our present course it’s not going to end well!
There’s a way to avoid civil war. It’s called reason, individual rights and private property. Ultimately, it means (for both “liberals” and conservatives) choosing reason over force. It will mean neither side gets to use the government to force others to do what they want. And it will drastically reduce government spending as well as taxation. Get over it, Democrats! Your only choice is more of what you’re getting now. Trump will eventually go away, but the anger and rage brought about by government coercion will not quiet down.
Properly conceived, government is a way to stop people from imposing force on one another. We desperately need a good government to protect us from force and fraud. But when government becomes the means — via lawsuits, taxes and other forms of coercion — of imposing force on people who did not initiate its use, you’ve got a hell of a mess on your hands. And that’s the reason civilization as we knew it is starting to fall apart.
Whether the issue is gay wedding cakes vs. Christian bakers or government funding of abortion: Force, compulsion, coercion and politics lead to resentment, failure and despair. Individual rights, including private property rights and freedom from government coercion most of all, will be the only way out of this. Such political principles presuppose reason. Reason is our only way to freedom.
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