FREEDOM TO DEFEND ONES SELF IS A FREEDOM TOO

I made a mistake, which is usual for me. Now it is time to try to learn from that mistake. A friend, I hope a friend and not ex friend, used Facebook to call my attention to a debate over a Mayor’s action in Texas. News media reported that the Mayor of a large city issued subpoenas to area ministers to force them to send their church sermons to her mayor’s office with the opinion that what she did was unconstitutional. This was intriguing news; thus, I spent about an hour on the internet searching and reading the results of that search. The news media seemed unanimous in agreeing with my friend’s assessment of the situation; the mayor had committed an unconstitutional act because her order violated freedom of speech. What the Mayor was doing was fighting back against people in general and especially churches for condemning her life style. We are all free to defend ourselves. She had recently married—a women—in a Methodist church in Californian; the point being it happened out side of Texas for a reason. The discussion on Facebook degenerated into a thing about religion and overwhelming opposition to homosexuality. Further digging into the media stories revealed the mayor was also a Democrat, which was the basis for having a clarion call in every single article to remove her from office

My friend, although a Texan by birth, has been a long time resident of Belize, is a fellow conservationist, successful hospitality industry businessperson, and like me has a large but family including children and grand children. Nothing this person had ever said or done or nothing about her family suggested to me that she would associate herself with this assault on a gay Democratic mayor in a Texas. I was surprised. My mistake; I put “two and two together” and came up with at lot more than four. I assumed she endorsed the entire Republican agenda and used the old “it’s in the constitution” ploy to attack the Mayors sexuality, her liberalism, and her recent same sex marriage; hence, I made a sweeping comment around this belief on your post with satire;

You should marry the person you love. NO! You cannot; the person you love is black and you are white that makes it unnatural and there should be a law against it. Yah, black is one thing but the person I love is Mayan so is that right? Absolutely not; she is Catholic and you are Baptist. OMG; we all know race and religion are not the issues; its sex. Obviously, sex and children are the only reasons people get and stay married. Yah, I guess if you believe that way, you should only have sex with someone to get pregnant and if some judge says OK. Bye the way, a Methodist minster recently married Mayor Parker and her significant other; we Catholics know all about Methodists—did I mention she is also a Democrat.

The white elements in the Texas population, as part of the old plantation south, has a miserable, but staunchly conservative record of voters’ rights abuses, abortion prohibition, birth control prohibition, anti homosexuality laws, death penalty use, and many other beliefs counter to my far left liberal leanings. In addition, they seem to have strong pro-religious feelings but anti Catholic sentiment, which fits a general propensity toward xenophobia; hate for Muslims, hate for black people, hate for Latinos, or anything different. They firmly hold these feelings in a framework of “law and order” guided by the Bible first followed by the Constitution but only so far as they chose to interpret those documents. They proudly claim to be fundamentalists but ignore anything that smacks of altruism; hence, disagrees with their political philosophy. For example, they only see the first part and ignore the second part of the Second Amendment where the Constitution states, 1) “You can own a gun” if 2). “You are part of a well regulated militia”. Another clear example is the separation of church and state; you are free to worship, as long as you worship a Christian God.

The issue at hand in the above debate was a persons’ freedom of speech”. I assumed my friend endorses all of this but as it turns out, she doesn’t. In fact, very few people adhere to the entire agenda of one political party or another—you only find them at political party conventions. What my friend was doing was attacking the Mayor for trying to control her critics, which is clearly a matter of “freedom of speech”. She, like the media, is correct in doing that from the freedom of speech point of view. However, comments are missing in her critic and in the media on the inappropriateness of what the mayors critics were saying. Some of us feel for a person to marry the persons they love is an inalienable right thus constitutional while “fundamentalists” obviously deny that is the case. We could mention the right of a woman to chose, the right of a person to own a gun, to worship any God or not to worship a God at all. Fundamentalists will always be right, obviously, because the constitution can never contain all contingencies any more than the Library of Congress, as extensive as it is, can never have specific references for all contingencies. The magic of the constitution is that we must interpret word and phrase such as “inalienably rights” especially in the context of, “all men are created equal”. That is what made America what it is today; however, Texans, at least some Texans, seem to have serious problems with that concept. I hope my Belizean friend is not one of them.        

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