Practical Politics

Conservatives are rightly concerned that governments are punishing  religious people for declining  to sell their goods or services for use in weddings between homosexuals, in clear violation of those religious people’s rights. However, not too long ago governments in many states - often at the insistence of religious conservatives - had laws forbidding homosexual activity, in a clear violation of homosexuals’ rights. Someone defending individual rights consistently would have spoken up against both sets of violations. There are people who did, but they usually are not people of power and influence in society. The more common response was to decry one and accept or even approve of the other, depending on how one  felt about the opinions and actions of those affected, under the assumption that it is all right to use the power of the state to force one’s notions about propriety onto others.

I and many people of liberal opinions believe that assumption is wrong. What I want to show now is that, its wrongness aside, it is also dangerous and often counterproductive. It is natural and unavoidable that people will have widely differing notions about what are the proper ways to live and behave, and that the practices and opinions of some people will be repugnant to others. This produces discord in society, but as long as people respect others’ rights to their lives, lifestyles, and opinions, it does not have to produce strife. (For example, while there is a variety of strongly held opinions on religion in this country, the principle and practice of full freedom of religious opinion for all within a secular republic has led to almost no serious religious conflicts in our history  and avoided the large religious wars, pogroms, and massacres so common in the history of Europe, Asia, and Africa.) Strife does come when people decide to use the power of the state to force others to conform to their desires. Each group of partisans  then likely will feel that if someone’s notions of  proper thought and behavior are going to be forced on society, it surely had better be theirs, and act accordingly.

When this happens, some people will win and get the power of the state  behind them for a while. They will have the satisfaction not only of being able to behave the way they want but also of forbidding others from doing things they disapprove of. The risk is that if the political mechanism exists for them to dictate to others, it exists for others to take control of and use to dictate to them. Political pendulums do swing, and the excesses of one group can increase the resentment and, once control of the government changes, the excesses of the opponents. Assuming that most people are more strongly interesting in being able to do what they want than in being able to dictate what their neighbors do, we have an almost game theoretic solution that  the safe policy is one of mutual tolerance where no group tries  to use the power of the state to force its opinions onto others, and indeed, there is no mechanism within the state for doing so.  Of course there are people more interested in causing others trouble than in seeing to their own business and interests, but these people are, to one degree or another, sociopaths, irrespective of what title or political office they hold.