Liberty and Conformity
  by Len Schwee

My barber pointed to a poster she had on her wall. It had a picture of an old lady dressed in the stars and stripes and holding our flag. The writing on the poster said, "Hey! It's either 'One nation under God,' or bite my a** and just leave!"

I found the poster annoying for two reasons. I don't believe that the words "under God" belong in the Pledge of Allegiance, and our flag stands for freedom, not conformity. But I didn't say anything because my barber cannot cut hair, think, and talk at the same time.

Conformity is something that religions preach. In spite of this, there are thousands of religions. Thomas Jefferson and Abe Lincoln had no religion. Would we want them to leave? Thomas Edison said religion was bunk, but we are proud he was an American. For many of us, truth is more important than conformity, and liberty includes the right to find and espouse the truth.

Thomas Jefferson said, "Of liberty I would say that, in the whole plenitude of its extent, it is unobstructed action according to our will. But rightful liberty is unobstructed action according to our will within limits drawn around us by the equal rights of others." The modern way of saying the same thing is, "Liberty is the fundamental right to live our lives as we choose so long as we do not infringe on the equal rights of others."

Liberty drives control-freaks crazy. They want you to conform so you can belong to their mob. And their mob is large enough to make laws in a democracy. H. L. Mencken, the sage of Baltimore, became infuriated by his loss of rights because of the religious majority. He described the problem in 1930 in his book, Treatise on the Gods. He wrote, "A statesman in those days (the late eighteenth century) belonged naturally to the intelligentsia; his common associates were philosophers, artists and men of science, and not infrequently he made some show of qualifying under one or another of those headings himself.

But with the spread of the democratic pestilence all this was changed. The rulers of the civilized lands now began to take their mandates from inferior groups, congenitally unintelligent and hence incapable of skepticism-first the middle class of newly rich schemers and swindlers, and then the sodden and superstition-ridden masses. The results of more than a century of that degradation are visible today in the United States, where democracy had been carried further than anywhere else-very amusingly in such phenomena as Dr. Hoover's sudden appearance as a pious Quaker when the White House came within his reach, and very unpleasantly in such obscenities as Comstockery, Prohibition, and the laws against the teaching of evolution. In brief, the mob has made its superstitions official."

Since Mencken's day, those specific laws have been overturned, but some still value conformity over freedom. When our president's father was on the campaign trail in 1987, he was asked by a reporter about the equal citizenship and patriotism of atheists. Bush said, "No, I don't know that atheists should be considered as citizens, nor should they be considered patriots. This is one nation under God."

A true patriot respects liberty. This is a concept that neither President Bush nor my barber seems to understand.

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