This is no less the land of the free than it was in 1798, when the
Sedition Act was passed, or in 1918, when the, um,
Sedition Act was passed.
I'm not arguing in favor of turning a blind eye to the erosion of liberties some of us may think of as fundamental; that's a clear and present danger. I just wanted to point out that the majority of people who've called themselves Americans over the roughly two and a half centuries of our formal existence lived under the kinds of constraints to liberty that the more fortunate among us are only now beginning to appreciate.
That's a cogent point. When we think about the erosion of civil liberties, I think that a lot of us do so from a white middle-class property-owning perspective, and forget that for a lot of other folks, this country started out as anything BUT the land of the free and has made sustained and significant progress in extending liberty for them.
To quote from an old TV series Slatterys People - "Democracy is a very bad form of government but all the others are so much worse"
We in the US tend to be trained to think good things about "democracy" from a very early age.
In point of fact, democracy is a TERRIBLE system of government, which is why we don't use it. We're a representative republic, not a democracy. That was an intentional choice on the part of the nation's founders; representational republics are marginally better than democracies as they are somewhat less likely to degenerate into what James Winthrop called "the usurpation and tyranny of the majority."
In some places, gay marriage is a prime example of the tyranny of the majority; gays and lesbians represent an unpopular minority, and in several states their rights have been usurped by majority vote.
