By Evelyn Pyburn

When liberties seem to be in conflict, one must check their basic premises. One must go back and determine what they know (or don’t know) about the Bill of Rights.

It should be remembered that the whole point of the Bill of Rights is to protect the individual citizen from the over reach of government. It was not intended to dictate how individuals should interact with each other. The Bill of Rights is all about restraining government, not citizens.

So when it comes to issues like discrimination, we should keep in mind that the Constitution is addressing government – government is not supposed to discriminate in how it deals with citizens. Citizens are free to discriminate!

Every citizen discriminates every day in a thousand different ways. It is the human condition that we have to make choices in order to survive and we must be free to do so. We must be free to choose– to discrrimnate.

To attempt to prevent citizens from choosing is not unlike attempting to legislate morality, which is a violation of freedom of religion — a violation of allowing each person to  choose their philosophy about life and the freedom to choose how to live one’s life. It is to attempt to use force to make individual citizens think in some approved way. It is violence against the human mind. Nothing should be considered more vile by human beings, whose very means of survival is the human mind.

To change biases requires addressing the mind. It falls to the very challenging task of persuasion and reason — reason being the hallmark of the human mind.

To coerce people to think some specific way, is an impossible quest, as history has amply demonstrated. It also requires the use of force against people who have not initiated the use of force themselves. The very essence of a free society is accepting that the only moral use of force is for self-defense or the defense of others.

Government is pure force. It is the legalized use of force. Ultimately, everything government does, it does at the point of a gun. That is the vision one should hold in mind when suggesting government should “do something.” The only legitimate use of government in a moral society is to protect its citizens from the use of force by foreign adversaries and to stand as defender and arbitrator when citizens use force, one against another.

Hence, the only legitimate purpose of government in a free society, is the moral use of force. In a moral society government is established in recognition of that fact.  Government should exist to defend the country, the citizens, from outside forces, and to restrain how citizens use force against each other. Such is the purpose of law enforcement and courts, to protect citizens from murder, theft, fraud, government, etc.

Almost all other issues that a society sees as legitimate concerns — such as philanthropy in regard to human kindness, welfare and charity, most issues of health and safety, all of education, research, innovation and community benefits or enhancements — could and would be provided for by the private sector. Many are already provided for in creative ways, and they would be to an even greater extent if not for the competitive interferences of government force. There would be voluntary systems and processes and alternatives that ingenuous citizens would quickly devise should they see a need for them– innovations that would amaze us all.

So in trying to decide when government is right or wrong the conclusion should fall to the issue of force and how much emphasis was put on restraining government in the use of force. Anything that requires the use of force against citizens who have initiated no use of force themselves teeters at the brink of being a crime in and of itself.

For government— or to use government as a surrogate, to force someone — which essentially means using the point of a gun – to do something against their will, has to be seen for what it is – wrong. So when we are told the Constitution says it is illegal to discriminate, or to adhere to one religion over another, or over no religion at all, or that we have to wear a mask, or drive a certain kind of car, or use one cooking stove over another — it is all untrue. It is all a crime against humanity. What the Constitution and the Bill of Rights say is that none of those things should be dictated to any citizen in a free country – most especially since it is an abhorrent violation to choose – a human being’s very means of survival.