THE WASHINGTON UNION PAPERS: NO. 42

LIBERTY FOR ALL: PROTECTING INDIVIDUAL FREEDOMS IN THE 21ST CENTURY

To the People of the United States,

Liberty has always been the rallying cry of the American experiment, but too often it has been a promise unfulfilled, a dream deferred, an inheritance given only to those whom history has deemed worthy. The revolutionaries who defied the British Crown did not spill their blood so that future generations could watch their freedoms bartered away for political expedience. The Constitution was not written so that its words could be twisted to justify the subjugation of the very people it was meant to protect. And yet, from the very moment of its founding, America has had to be dragged, kicking and screaming, toward the ideals it professes.

The men who signed the Declaration of Independence proclaimed that "all men are created equal," yet they built a government that excluded the majority of its people from that promise. Slavery persisted, women were silenced, Indigenous peoples were slaughtered or driven from their lands, and the working poor were treated as disposable cogs in the machinery of industry. This is not to say that America was doomed from its inception, but rather that its greatness has always been measured by those who fought to expand liberty beyond the limits imposed by the powerful. Every right that we cherish today was won through struggle, through protest, through defiance against those who insisted that justice had already been served.

Liberty cannot be an inheritance for the privileged and a mirage for the marginalized. Yet we live in an era where corporations dictate speech, where lawmakers write religious dogma into law, where voting rights are chipped away under the pretense of security, and where people are told that their right to exist is up for debate. This is not liberty. This is the calculated erosion of democracy by those who understand that real freedom is a threat to their control. The enemies of liberty do not storm the gates with weapons drawn; they work from within, passing laws that strangle dissent, manipulating courts to uphold oppression, redrawing districts to ensure that the will of the people is never truly heard.

If freedom belongs only to those whom power favors, then it is no freedom at all—it is tyranny in disguise. It is the same tyranny that justified Jim Crow, that criminalized love between two men or two women, that declared women too fragile to vote, too emotional to lead, too subservient to own property in their own name.

It is the same tyranny that turned voting into an obstacle course for Black Americans, that turned labor organizing into a criminal act, that labeled every fight for justice as an act of radicalism. It is the same tyranny that today wears the face of "religious freedom" while seeking to deny rights to LGBTQ+ people, that claims to protect "election integrity" while making it harder for the poor, the young, and people of color to vote. Tyranny does not always come with a crown or a dictator—it often comes draped in the flag, speaking the language of patriotism while it hollows out the very democracy it claims to defend.

A nation that proclaims itself the land of the free must answer for every moment it has denied liberty to its own people. It must answer for the laws that criminalized interracial marriage until the Supreme Court was forced to strike them down in Loving v. Virginia. It must answer for the decades of oppression endured by LGBTQ+ Americans, from the police raids on Stonewall to the "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" policies that treated their very existence as a threat. It must answer for the voting restrictions that have reappeared in new forms, for the Supreme Court's gutting of the Voting Rights Act, for the deliberate effort to make democracy a game rigged in favor of those already in power.

And today, in the 21st century, we find ourselves once again in a battle to reclaim what should never have been in question: the right to love, to speak, to worship, and to vote without fear or oppression. This is not a theoretical battle; it is happening now, in courtrooms, in legislatures, in city streets. State governments have passed laws banning drag performances under the false pretense of protecting children, while actual gun violence—an epidemic that kills thousands of children every year—goes unaddressed. School districts have banned books that acknowledge the existence of LGBTQ+ people, of Black history, of uncomfortable truths, while celebrating the sanitized myths of American exceptionalism. Elected officials openly declare their intent to make it harder for people to vote, to strip away protections for transgender Americans, to impose their personal religious beliefs on a nation founded on the separation of church and state.

If America is to be renewed, then every person must stand equal under the law, their freedoms not subject to the whims of those who seek to control them. This is not a radical idea. It is the bare minimum for a functioning democracy. It is the principle that sent soldiers to die on battlefields from Gettysburg to Normandy to Selma. It is the reason why Martin Luther King Jr. marched, why Harvey Milk ran for office, why John Lewis bled on the Edmund Pettus Bridge.

It is the reason why protesters filled the streets after George Floyd’s murder, why students walked out in protest of anti-LGBTQ+ policies, why voters stood in line for hours just to make their voices heard.

The enemies of liberty want the people to be tired, to be hopeless, to believe that their voices do not matter. But history is clear: change does not come from the halls of power. It comes from the people who refuse to accept oppression as the cost of stability. It comes from those who fight back, who organize, who understand that liberty is not a gift from the powerful but a birthright that must be defended at all costs.

There was a time when it was considered radical to speak of freedom in absolute terms, when those in power declared that liberty could only extend so far before it threatened their rule. It was radical to declare that no king had the right to govern without the consent of the governed. It was radical to proclaim that all men are created equal, though that promise would be betrayed for generations. It was radical to demand that women have the right to vote, that Black Americans be granted full citizenship, that workers be protected from exploitation. And today, there are those who call it radical to say that LGBTQ+ Americans deserve the same dignity, the same protections, the same rights as anyone else. But radical or not, the truth remains: liberty cannot be selective. If the rights of one group can be stripped away, then the rights of all are at risk. History makes this clear.

The freedom to live and love openly is not a privilege to be granted—it is a right that has been too long denied. The struggle for LGBTQ+ rights is not a new battle, nor is it separate from the greater fight for American justice. From the Stonewall Riots to the legalization of same-sex marriage, every victory has been hard-fought, not freely given. And yet, even now, lawmakers seek to reverse progress, to ban books that speak of LGBTQ+ identities, to strip away healthcare access, to erase trans people from public life through legislation cloaked in the language of morality. But there is no morality in oppression. There is no virtue in discrimination. A government that dictates who can love, who can marry, and who can exist freely is a government that has abandoned its purpose. The arc of history may bend toward justice, but it does not bend on its own. It bends only when the people refuse to be silent, when they push, when they fight, when they demand that liberty be more than a hollow slogan.

The right to speak freely is not a favor granted by the state—it is the fundamental check against tyranny. And yet, the powerful have always feared the voices of the people. They have censored, silenced, and punished those who dare to challenge their rule.

Freedom of speech is the barricade against authoritarianism, the weapon of the oppressed, the force that brings injustice into the light. But it has been twisted, manipulated, and selectively applied to serve those already in power. Corporations and media conglomerates flood the airwaves with propaganda, drowning out dissent while claiming the mantle of free expression. State governments ban discussions of history that make them uncomfortable, censoring classrooms while claiming to defend liberty. Protesters are branded as agitators, jailed for demanding change, punished for daring to raise their voices against injustice. This is not freedom—it is the slow suffocation of democracy. If speech is not free for all, then it is free for none. If speech is only protected when it serves the interests of the powerful, then it is not protection at all—it is a muzzle on the people.

Religious liberty, once the bedrock of the American experiment, has been twisted into a tool of oppression, wielded by those who seek power rather than those who seek God. It was never intended to be a weapon, never meant to be a bludgeon used to impose the faith of some onto the lives of all. And yet, this sacred right—the very first enshrined in the Bill of Rights—has been hijacked, manipulated, and distorted to justify discrimination, exclusion, and theocratic ambitions that would make the very founders of this republic recoil in horror.

The right to worship freely, to believe or not believe, was never meant to be the right to impose one’s faith upon others. This is not a difficult concept. It is, in fact, the entire reason the First Amendment exists. The very men who wrote it had witnessed firsthand the consequences of state-enforced religion—how kings ruled with divine authority, how dissenters were persecuted, how the church became a mechanism of control rather than a sanctuary of faith. They understood that when religion and government intertwine, neither is made stronger; both are corrupted. James Madison, the chief architect of the Constitution, made this plain when he warned that "ecclesiastical establishments, instead of maintaining the purity and efficacy of religion, have had a contrary operation." Thomas Jefferson went further, declaring in his now-famous letter to the Danbury Baptists that there must be "a wall of separation between church and state."

And yet, centuries later, we find ourselves in a nation where that wall is being torn down brick by brick. Politicians wrap themselves in the language of religious liberty while using it as an excuse to deny service, deny healthcare, deny rights. They claim persecution because they are no longer allowed to force their beliefs onto others. They pretend to be martyrs because they can no longer dictate who can marry whom or who can make decisions about their own bodies.

But faith is not weakened by equality. A church is not endangered because it does not have the power to govern those who do not belong to it. The cries of oppression from those who wield the most power are not calls for justice; they are demands for dominance.

There are those who claim that granting equal rights to LGBTQ+ Americans, to women, to religious minorities somehow infringes upon their faith. But let us be clear: religious liberty is not the liberty to oppress. It is not the right to discriminate under the guise of doctrine. It is not the authority to dictate the lives of others while shielding oneself from consequence. The true test of religious freedom is whether it can coexist with the freedoms of those who believe differently. And those who cry foul at this notion—those who claim their rights are under attack because they can no longer impose their faith through force of law—are not champions of liberty. They are tyrants in clerical garb.

History has shown what happens when religious extremism is allowed to take root in governance. The Salem Witch Trials were not merely an episode of mass hysteria; they were a brutal reminder of what happens when religious zeal overtakes reason, when theological interpretation becomes law, when the pious believe they have the divine right to determine who deserves to live freely and who must suffer for their supposed sins. In the modern age, we have seen echoes of this tyranny in nations where religious rule is absolute, where women are forced into subjugation, where blasphemy is a crime punishable by death, where the state acts as the enforcer of doctrine rather than the protector of all people. The United States was founded in defiance of such theocracy, yet there are those who would drag us backward, who would turn the land of the free into a place where religious law supersedes constitutional rights.

We see it today in the relentless attacks on reproductive rights, where lawmakers emboldened by religious fundamentalism have stripped away the bodily autonomy of millions. We see it in efforts to ban books that acknowledge LGBTQ+ existence, in policies that allow discrimination against same-sex couples under the banner of "religious conscience." We see it in the deliberate erosion of the rights of non-Christians, where politicians claim America is a "Christian nation" while working to undermine the very pluralism upon which it was built. This is not religious liberty—it is religious supremacy. And it is an affront to everything this nation was meant to stand for.

The Constitution protects the freedom of religion, but it does not grant the power to govern by it.

There is a profound difference between the right to practice one’s faith and the demand that others conform to it. A baker who refuses to serve a gay couple is not practicing religious freedom; he is engaging in discrimination. A pharmacist who refuses to provide contraception is not exercising religious liberty; he is imposing his beliefs onto another person’s body. A lawmaker who invokes scripture to justify the stripping away of rights is not defending faith; he is weaponizing it. And those who defend such actions under the banner of "freedom" have fundamentally misunderstood the very principle they claim to uphold.

The founders knew well the dangers of religious tyranny, having fled the oppressive rule of church-backed monarchs. And yet, we see the same attempts to legislate faith into law today, to use religious doctrine as a justification for denying the basic freedoms of others. This is not an accident; it is a calculated effort by those who understand that faith can be a powerful tool of control. But faith is not meant to be a weapon. It is meant to be a source of strength, of conviction, of solace. And any faith that requires the suppression of others in order to sustain itself is not faith at all—it is domination masquerading as devotion.

If religious liberty is to mean anything, it must mean that all are free to believe as they choose, free from coercion, free from fear, free from the imposition of another’s faith upon their lives. A free nation does not demand theological purity from its citizens. A just nation does not grant religious exemptions for bigotry. And a strong nation does not allow the voices of a few to dictate the freedoms of all.

The right to vote is the most sacred tool of democracy, and yet it has been under assault since the moment it was granted. From literacy tests and poll taxes to gerrymandering and voter ID laws, every generation has witnessed new attempts to suppress the voices of the people. Those in power do not fear fraud; they fear participation. They fear an electorate that is too large, too diverse, too engaged to be controlled. They fear a democracy that is truly representative. And so they purge voter rolls, they close polling places, they draw districts that make a mockery of fair representation. They pass laws designed not to protect elections but to limit who may participate in them. They claim to defend democracy while working tirelessly to subvert it. The right to vote is not a partisan issue; it is a national imperative. If it is not protected, then democracy is a farce. If every American is not guaranteed an equal voice at the ballot box, then liberty itself is in jeopardy.

America must decide what it will be. History will not wait for us to make up our minds. The forces of regression have already chosen their path, and it leads toward the slow, systematic unraveling of everything this nation was meant to stand for.

The enemies of liberty are not content to chip away at rights one by one—they are digging at the very foundation, intent on replacing a republic of laws with a system of privilege, where freedom belongs not to all but to those whom power deems worthy. If we do not fight back, if we do not refuse to yield, if we do not declare—loudly, unmistakably, and with unbreakable resolve—that liberty is the birthright of every person, then we will awaken one day to find that it has disappeared, not in a single stroke, but in a thousand small betrayals that we failed to resist.

Will we stand for a future in which LGBTQ+ Americans can live without fear, in which every person can speak freely, in which religion is a source of faith rather than a weapon of division, in which every citizen has an equal vote? Or will we slide further into an era of manufactured freedoms, where rights exist only for those whom the powerful deem worthy? The answer is not a question of ideology—it is a question of national character. Because the fight for LGBTQ+ rights is only the beginning. It is but one front in a broader war for the soul of this nation, a war in which every marginalized group, every working-class family, every person who has been told that their voice does not matter, has a stake.

Liberty is not a single-issue battle. It is not confined to one community, one struggle, or one moment in time. It is the fight for workers who have seen their wages stagnate while corporations hoard unimaginable wealth. It is the fight for immigrants who came seeking the American dream only to be met with cages, cruelty, and bureaucratic indifference. It is the fight for women who are watching as their bodily autonomy is legislated away by men who will never know what it means to be stripped of control over their own futures. It is the fight for Black and brown Americans who still battle the ghosts of segregation, not in the past but in their neighborhoods, their schools, their encounters with law enforcement. It is the fight for the voiceless, the overlooked, the people whom history has too often treated as collateral damage in the march of progress.

If liberty is to mean anything, it must mean everything. It must mean the right to love, the right to speak, the right to believe, the right to vote. And it must be protected not only when it is easy, not only when it is popular, but when it is most at risk. It is easy to defend free speech when it aligns with your own views; the test of principle is whether you will defend it when it does not. It is easy to support voting rights when your party is in power; the test of democracy is whether you will uphold them when it threatens your hold on control. It is easy to declare that you believe in religious liberty when it applies to your faith; the test of fairness is whether you will defend it for those whose beliefs contradict your own.

True liberty requires courage—the courage to recognize that a nation cannot be free if its people are shackled by fear, by repression, by the tyranny of the majority.

The enemies of freedom will not relent. They never have. They were there when slavery was defended as an economic necessity. They were there when women were denied the vote because they were deemed too emotional to govern themselves. They were there when segregation was justified as a matter of "state’s rights." They were there when LGBTQ+ Americans were forced into the shadows, treated as criminals simply for existing. And they are here now, rewriting history, distorting reality, convincing people that rights are a finite resource, that progress for one group must come at the expense of another. But history has another lesson to offer: every time the forces of oppression have tried to halt the tide of justice, they have failed. And they will fail again.

Liberty cannot be a passive ideal. It must be an active, living force, defended every day by those who refuse to accept injustice as the cost of stability. It is not enough to hope for change. It is not enough to be outraged in private. It is not enough to post your support on social media while remaining silent in the face of real oppression. Liberty demands more. It demands organizing, marching, speaking, voting. It demands that we be ungovernable in the face of tyranny. That we refuse to be polite in the presence of injustice. That we call out hypocrisy when we see it, that we refuse to allow the powerful to rewrite history to their own advantage.

If America is to mean anything, it must mean freedom. And not just the freedom of those in power, not just the freedom of the privileged, but the freedom of every person who calls this land home. It must mean freedom from oppression, freedom from discrimination, freedom from the quiet suffocation of a system designed to silence the many for the benefit of the few.

The fight for liberty is the fight for America itself. And we shall not rest until victory is won. Let the enemies of freedom tremble, for the people are awake. And when they rise, there will be no stopping them.