Republicans love to talk about freedom. They love to fly their “Don’t tread on me” flags, to decry government overreach, to accuse liberals of trying to force everyone to live by their values, while they fight for liberty for all. Republicans even have a caucus in the House of Representatives called the Freedom Caucus.
But words mean things, and it has become increasingly clear that whatever definition Republicans have for the word freedom, it bears little to no resemblance to the actual word. This tweet by Dan Patrick perfectly encapsulates the discrepancy.
Somehow posting the commandments of a specific religion is the only way to defend religious liberty. Dan Patrick, the lieutenant governor of Texas, has no thought for the students attending public school who are not Christian, who deserve a public education that values them and their backgrounds and experiences as much as any other student. Nor does he appreciate the chilling effect the Ten Commandments might have on students who believe in other gods and other religious tenets, or no gods and no religious tenets for that matter.
Posting the Ten Commandments in schools will encourage only Christian students to “freely express sincerely held religious beliefs” and ostracize the students who refuse. No, for Dan Patrick, it is clear that freedom of religion means the freedom to practice his religion.
This discrepancy underscores not just our debates about religion in schools, but is a part of almost every current political issue. In some cases, the discrepancy is more a question of priorities than definitions. For Republicans, economic freedom is the freedom from regulation for major corporations, the freedom to pay their employees the lowest wage they can manage, the freedom to use corporate funds as protected political speech. Democrats, however, fight for the freedom that comes from a living wage and the freedom of employees to come together for collective bargaining.
But in so many cases this discrepancy is much more insidious. The actual name of the Don’t Say Gay law in Florida is The Parental Rights in Education Act. It claims to protect the rights of parents to make sure that what their kids learn in school accords with their values. But it really protects the rights of some parents to determine what values guide the education of all children. The rights of queer parents are not protected by this bill. The rights of parents who want their kids to learn about many different perspectives and experiences are not protected by this bill. The rights of parents who have queer kids are not protected by this bill.
Similarly, Moms for Liberty is a conservative advocacy organization that primarily fights to ban things - books from schools and libraries, race and queer history from school curriculums, masks from schools. The liberty they are for is the liberty to determine what everyone’s kids learn, what everyone’s kids read, what everyone’s kids use to protect themselves from COVID, no matter what those kids or their parents think.
This isn’t just semantics. Claiming the value of freedom while using it to assert your power over others doesn’t just muddy the waters and allow harmful legislation to pass under the cover of confusion, though it would be bad enough if that were it. But claiming to protect freedom while you are really protecting the freedom of the dominant group to force everyone else to live by their standards reinforces that domination, and empowers those who use violence to enforce it while creating a permission structure for those who wish to ignore it.
The party of freedom will expel you from the state legislature for the flimsiest fictions of decorum. The part of freedom will decide who can get married, and who has to stay married. The party of freedom will decide what you can do with your body, from your clothes, to your hair, to your internal organs. The party of freedom enforces one religion but not your right to worship (or school or the movies or the supermarket or, or, or, or) without being murdered by someone with an AR-15. The party of freedom will force you to have kids, but it won’t help you take care of them.
Freedom has always been the value that Americans claim most loudly and the one we have the most trouble with. To be known as the nation of freedom when we were built on the backs of slaves is a masterclass in cognitive dissonance. Every civil right in this country has been a bloody and violent fight to wrest power from a dominant majority celebrating the freedom they hoard for themselves.
While Republicans fight for their right to enforce their lifestyle on everyone else, Democrats must fight for everyone to be able to live and thrive on their own terms. Which is why I was pleasantly surprised to see reclaiming freedom take center stage in Biden’s reelection announcement. We must not cede this ground to a faction in our country so determined to proclaim freedom while empowering fascism. With one side trying to hide their regressive bigotry in the shadows of more commonly held values, it is up to the rest of us to call it out, to name the truth that the right will not.
The American legacy is prying the promise of freedom open with a crowbar and democracy is an ever expanding project, fighting constantly with power and privilege and complacency. We do not win this fight by pretending it’s not happening, or that our values are variable concepts and not inviolable truths. This has never truly been a country of freedom, but every time we show up to fight we can make it more so.