Freedom with a capital F

 Freedom

We keep hearing from the GOP hard right that they are protecting Freedom by waging war on all those parts of American life they do not like.

One of the most recent battles culminated in the U.S. Supreme Court decision overruling Roe v. Wade that gave women limited constitutional protection when seeking an abortion. The result of the Dobbs decision was to remove Freedom from those women who happen to live in states like Wisconsin with long dormant anti-abortion laws that suddenly came back to life. Women who live in states that have criminalized abortion are no longer Free to control their own bodies and reproductive health. Doctors who provide reproductive healthcare are no longer Free to practice their craft and provide life-saving care to women who need or want to terminate a pregnancy.

Even though the Equal Rights Amendment has been ratified by the required 38 states, right-wing challenges to some of the ratification decisions have further delayed equal standing under the law to more than one-half of Americans. Women are not yet Free to take their rightful place next to and equal to American men. Failure to pass and enforce the ERA perpetuates unequal pay of equal work and relegates women to a subservient class of our citizenry.

Renewed GOP backed laws designed to undo protections for LBGTQI Americans are being passed by right wing state legislatures at an alarming rate. Historically marginalized non-binary and gender fluid folks swept up by those laws are not Free to be who they are. People in this population have always been present on this planet. They are well known in many cultures around the globe. Passing laws outlawing their being or behavior have never worked, just driven folks underground or frightened them to stay in the closet. 

One of the most egregious recent manifestations of this right-wing hatred is taking place in Florida where presidential hopeful Gov. Ron DeSantis is hell bent on eradicating drag queens from his state. Men who dress up as women have been entertaining audiences for millennia. All the female characters in Shakespeare’s plays were played by men dressed as women because women were banned from performing on Elizabethan stages. More recently, we laughed when Bob Hope and other men dressed in drag performed in USO tours, we laughed for years when Jamie Farr appeared in drag on MASH, we enjoyed movies like Some Like It Hot, Mrs. Doubtfire, Tootsie, the Rocky Horror Picture Show, and many others that had characters and leads that were men dressed in drag. Will all those be banned in Florida and elsewhere? Are these actors less Free because of the roles they took on?

In Florida and elsewhere, hard right-wingers are erasing or sanitizing our history to protect white peoples’ guilt about our racist past and present. Banning books and whole courses in broad based curricula makes us all less Free by enabling past transgressions to be repeated today to protect white supremacy. Banning books makes kids want to read them more and handicaps teachers from teaching diverse points of view which is key for critical thinking. We can avoid repetition of past errors by learning about the past mistakes, not burying them or throwing the books that teach them into the pyre. 

Protestations of progress in race relations by the far right notwithstanding, we still treat people whose skin tones are darker that the Anglo-European norm as second or even third-class citizens. Segregated cities exist for a reason and segregated schools and charter schools exist for a reason, to keep people of color separate from the rest of us. Progress towards racial justice progress is obstructed at every level of government. Equal opportunity to succeed in the halls of commerce is still a far-off dream to far too many. People of color are not Free yet.

Environmental issues make us all much less Free. Until the water we get from the tap is clean and free from contaminants and the air we breathe is pure, none of us will be truly Free to reach our maximum potential. Climate change is real, glaciers are retreating, sea levels are rising, and winters and summers are reaching new extremes as the decades pass. Are the folks in Lake Tahoe Free having to dig out of record snow falls that overtop buildings? Are the folks living in low-lying coastal areas Free as their homes flood or get submerged by rising seas? 

Religious liberty is a hall mark of American Democracy. The concept is being highjacked by the far-right which seeks to replace it with a White Evangelical Christian theocracy that imposes its sole brand of righteousness on the rest of us. If they are successful, will non-Christian, atheist, Pastafarian Americans be Free to worship or not as they choose?

In short, true Freedom means embracing all that makes us Americans and Human no matter how different we might be in size, shape, gender, or color. After all, we are all in this together.