Why are liberals being so cavalier about stripping away basic rights, without due process, from a group of people where Muslims are overrepresented? Probably because they don’t consider gun ownership a basic right. “The whole idea that bearing arms is a ‘civil liberty’ is demented,” one liberal writer told me last year. This is a theme.
If you wonder why some cultural liberals — both among Democrats and libertarians — wave off concerns about religious liberty, it’s because they see opponents of gay marriage as, per se, bad people. That’s the same reason some Trump supporters don’t value the civil liberties of many Muslims, or at least of Muslims not yet in this country.
Some of us think it’s important for all groups, not just media outlets, to be free to criticize the powerful. Hillary Clinton and other opponents of the Citizens United ruling don’t like that freedom.
So when Trump goes after the Washington Post, it’s correct for the Post, Norm Ornstein and all good people to oppose Trump. But those freedoms less popular among the elite — gun ownership, grassroots criticism of politicians, free exercise of both Christianity and Islam — need defense as well.
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