My comment n Victor Reppert’s blog is this --Gentle Reader, until you are willing to defend the legal right of the “bigot” (whether real or so-called) to *be* a bigot, then you are not willing to defend your own legal and moral right to the liberty known as “freedom of association”, which just happens to be one of the fundamental liberties upon which all other liberties, and civil rights, depends. If you are not willing to demand that The State leave the “bigot” the hell alone, then you are not willing to assert your own liberty. Nor deserving of it.
ozzielionel: "… everything that is legal is not necessarily moral."
And likewise, not everything that is immoral can reasonably-and-practically be made illegal.
And further, since all human laws – all of them that command “Do this” or “Do not do that” – are *always* backed up by the threat of state violence and state-sanctioned violent death, it is incumbent upon a sane, rational, and moral people, who cherish liberty, to keep laws to a minimum.
The root-cause of the problem here -- and most of you reading this will *refuse* to understand this … which is to say, you will *refuse* to move to the intellectual ground from which you can defend your own liberty – is that when the Republicans finally overturned the Democrats’ Jim Crow laws, they didn’t *merely* end the state demand-under-threat-of-violence that some citizens behave toward other citizens as though they were bigots, whether or not they would have behaved that way absent the state threat. Oh, no, not they! Not being content simply to end an injustice, the self-congratulatory civil-rights politicians had to go on and create a new injustice: using the threat of state-violence-unto-death to compel bigots to treat those against whom their bigotry ran as though they loved them.
The *reason* that the leftists are now so easily able to label simple people who simply wish to be left alone (*) as “bigots” who must be persecuted with all the resources of The State is because you, Mr and Mrs America, have already surrendered. You already subscribe to the twisted presuppositions from which they reason – no matter how much you whine about “political correctness gone wild”, all this is just the out-working of the twisted logic to which you already have surrendered.
(*) that would be *you*, Mr and Mrs America
Now, as a moral being, and as a member of society, it is certainly within your sphere-of-concern whether this person or that is a “bigot”. And if you think he is, then don’t deal with him. That’s all you need do … and that’s all you have the moral right to do.
But, as a citizen, it is generally not your business (*) whether someone is a “bigot”. What you do not have the moral right to do is to use the violent power of The State to crush the “bigot”.
(*) One of the few exceptions would be the allocation/spending of tax monies.
