When Will the “Freedumb” Party Start Believing in Freedom?

So there was a bit of a hubbub over Rick Sanchez’ remarks on April 28th when interviewing Senator Jim DeMint R-S.C. There was a clip on the Daily Show and it was chatted up on both sides of the blogosphere. The exchange goes like this:
   
Rick Sanchez: He (Sen. Arlen Spector) seems to be saying that Republicans are making it very difficult for other Republicans to win because – and he said this several times, you tell me what you think of it – you’re shrinking the electorate to an extreme where a regular republican can’t win.

Sen Jim DeMint: That’s quite the opposite. We’re seeing across the country right now that the biggest tent of all is the tent of freedom, and what we need to do as republicans is convince Americans that freedom can work in all areas of their life for every American whether its education or health care or creating jobs.

Rick Sanchez: What the hell does that mean, I mean the biggest tent is freedom? Freedom? You gotta do better than that.

So Sanchez criticizes DeMint for using freedom as an abstract adjective or maybe one of those hybrid brand-verbs, like xeroxing, or “Sham-wow-ing”, and generally not making any sense. DeMint goes on to elaborate, continuing to not make sense. I will leave the line-by-line rebuttal of those comments for another day. What I want to talk about right now is this never-ending Freedom Talk and the complete hypocrisy on the Right when it comes to the conservative stance on abortion, gay marriage, the War on Drugs and the Guantanamo legal-no-man’s-land obsession.

    There was a time when African Americans in this country could not marry Americans of European descent. Throughout history there have been countless times when one group was forbidden from marrying another. There has always been resistance to this kind of change, to mixing. And it has always been, categorically and without exception, an oppressive force which undermined personal freedom. Marriage is a sacred rite and keeping it from anyone, is a form of oppression. People have the right to marry, and any policy that denies that right is an oppressive one – in other words, one in which basic human freedoms are being trampled upon. Yet the “Freedumb” party continues to oppose gay marriage; they continue to literally oppress an entire swath of their fellow citizens all the while chanting “Freedom! Freedom!” like it was some kind of religious mantra, overused to a degree where the actual definition of the word is no longer the meaning.

    When it comes to abortion we are talking about a right to choose. Plain and simple. People have the right to choose what happens in their own body and any policy that takes that away is oppressive. The obvious and constant response here is that the fetus has a right to life. Clearly that’s true after a certain point, hence, Roe V. Wade. It’s that simple, problem solved. Everyone on our side agrees that it’s a grey area, but again the “Freedumb” party goes on the march of absolutism, trying to ban any abortion in any circumstance, taking and maintaining the one position that directly contradicts personal freedom the essence of the choice movement.

    Next there is the ridiculously named, War on Drugs. A quick aside: since its inception, drugs have become more powerful, cheaper, and readily available while drug related violence has also continued to increase – and that is not to mention how drugs continue to be one of the primary sources of revenue for organized crime. The WoD, tells Americans that they cannot make their own decisions, that they cannot choose what to consume and how to consume it. It does not regulate our consumption, it prohibits it. It is a prohibition. And that is how well is working, as well as Prohibition did.

    Practical arguments for the dismantling the WoD aside, making the possession and consumption of drugs illegal is categorically a reduction of freedom. It is oppressive. We have the capacity to choose what we do with our bodies and so, again I point out, to disallow us from doing so, is to take away our rights – to deny us that freedom. This is not an argument for immediately legalizing all drugs and “seeing what happens.” It is to simply point out the fact that denying us access is denying a basic freedom. On top of that there are all of the unintended consequences of the WoD, like increased gang violence and continued and rampant use.

    Libertarians, as crazy as they may be some times, have got this one totally right. Prohibition is a denial of freedoms, and a bad idea practically if we actually examine the way making these substances illegal has played out. Sadly, however, regular conservatives, continue to miss the boat, trying to block medical marijuana and backing stiffer penalties for individuals convicted of drug-related crimes.

    Finally, Guantanamo and the military tribunal love-fest. What is with these guys? For them everything is “freedom, freedom, freedom” and then they decide that the President, while it was G. W. Bush, of course, has complete discretion on deciding who is an enemy combatant and at the same time, that the classification as such is a means to deny anyone and everyone the basic right to habeas corpus allowing indefinite detention – the literal and exact opposite of freedom. It is an amazing feat to run ones mouth ad infinitum repeating the word “freedom” over and over, and at the same time manage to squeeze out verbal support for indefinite detention.

    The argument in favor? “These guys are really bad, too bad for the regular justice system.” The truth of the matter is, our justice system has dealt with Timothy McVeigh, Richard Allen Davis and Charles Manson, and just recently a group of individuals who were trying to contact al Qaeda and destroy the Sears Tower. If we know these men have committed crimes and we can prove it, to such an extent that could arguably merit indefinite detention, then why can we not simply try them and give them life in prison? We tried Nazi War criminals during the Nuremberg Trials and they honestly hold the position that they are too bad for the justice system. It is an amazing position to maintain, one that requires mental gymnastics of an olympic caliber.

    The more the de-facto Republican leadership (those who keep talking, and those whom everyone else in the party continue to cower before) open their collective mouth the more they expose themselves as people who have no understanding of what freedom means. They invoke it over and over again talking about it as if it were some baseless abstraction, rarely connected to anything except deregulation and lowering taxes. They refer to liberty as if it were a deity and use it as you would the word “Tao” and yet manage to be its enemy, almost without exception. It is because what they actually believe generally has nothing to do with protecting peoples’ freedoms.

    Let me be utterly frank, even belligerent in making this point:

    If the freedom to marry is only a concern of yours because you wish to repress it, you are no friend of freedom. If the freedom to manage ones own body and make owns own choices is abhorrent to you, you do not care about personal freedom. If the embodiment of freedom it self, in its most basic and literal definition – the opposite of imprisonment – is something you eagerly throw out the window, then you, my fellow American, are an enemy of freedom.