There’s two distinct ends to the dining spectrum when it comes to choosing what’s for dinner. There’s cafeteria style, where you pick and choose what you want. And then there’s homestyle. And by homestyle, I mean real homestyle; where Mom puts something on your plate and that’s what’s for dinner. There’s no picking and choosing with Mom.
When it comes to protecting civil rights, deciding which rights to protect is supposed to be a homestyle affair; no picking and choosing. And yet, California politicians seem to think that our rights ought to be served up a la carte, but with them picking and choosing which rights are important and which are not. As Dan Walters points out, this becomes a grave threat to civil liberties…
Those who, by word and deed, are out of sync with California’s deeply blue political ethos risk social ostracism.
Increasingly, however, the state’s dominant politicians want to subject dissenters to discrimination and legal harassment – even infringement of constitutional rights.
Smoke a cigarette, own a gun, cut a tree, pan for gold, question the “inconvenient truth” of human-caused global warming, utter an impolite joke or even drive a gasoline-powered car and you may run afoul of an ever-tightening web of laws and rules that punish your heresy – promulgated by political figures who talk constantly about their respect for civil rights.
What happened Thursday in the state Senate typifies the newfangled intolerance. It passed, largely along party lines, 11 new gun control bills whose sponsors, including Senate President Pro Tem Kevin de León, promised they would reduce “gun violence.
Walters, who’s largely supported California’s gun control laws in the past, could not help but notice that Senate Democrats could not offer up “a scintilla of objective evidence” that their newest gun laws would do anything to make Californians safer. In fact, these laws are little more than attempts by a few puffed up politicians to position themselves for higher political office.
But it isn’t just the civil liberties of gun owners being threatened by the CA Senate. The Judiciary Committee approved SB 1161, the “California Climate Science Truth and Accountability Act of 2016”. This would give California prosecutors the authority to bring heresy charges sue corporations who deny the Gospel of St. Algore question anthropogenic global warming. Whether these corporations are right or wrong to do so is beside the point. A corporation is a collective formed by its shareholders. This collective has as much of a right to free speech as any of the individuals do. Burning them at the stake Suing them for unpopular views is a violation of the 1st Amendment. Prosecutors are supposed to be protectors of civil liberties. The last thing the Legislature should be doing is to remold them into a new Spanish Inquisition to hunt down Jews AGW heretics.
The NRA calls the 2nd Amendment “America’s 1st Freedom” for a reason. Our ability to, if necessary, violently put down tyranny is what protects our other liberties. Without the 2nd Amendment, without the threat of armed resistance, the rest of the Bill of Rights is nothing more than a piece of sheepskin with some words on it. It’s been over 200 years since the American People put this 1st Freedom to its intended use and thus it’s become somewhat abstract to most Americans. The CA Senate’s actions this past week are a reminder to us that Freedom’s enemies never sleep and neither can we.
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