Are We Truly Free?

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe once said that “None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free.” I have been wondering lately if Americans could be classified as “those who falsely believe that they are free”. The more I ponder this question, the more I recognize the massive amounts of rhetoric we have been spoon fed over the years to make us believe that we are free. While I still believe that we live in the greatest country in the world, I see increasing signs of our enslavement to federal and local governments every day. I recently realized that there is hardly anything of true significance in my life that I am allowed to do without notifying some level of government – I can’t get married, open a business, build on my private property, drive a car, hire employees, burn my trash, or even home school my kids without obtaining permission from the state or federal government.

As if it wasn’t enough to have to obtain permission from the government to operate a business, now the government is even dictating to privately owned businesses the type of services they must offer to their customers. A New Jersey judge recently ordered eHarmony.com to pay $5000 in damages to a gay man, $50,000 to the New Jersey Attorney General’s office and to begin providing dating services to homosexual men and women, even though the founder of eHarmony is an Evangelical Christian. http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,454904,00.html Does this mean that a male cross-dresser can now sue a women’s shoe store for not offering pumps in a size 14, a pediatrician could be sued for refusing to provide medical care to individuals over the age of 18 or that a carnivore can sue a vegetarian restaurant for not providing beef ribs and chicken on their menu? The eHarmony lawsuit, which I believe amounts to nothing more than a civil rights shake down, will open the flood gates for individuals seeking to make a quick buck off the backs of honest and hardworking private business owners and ultimately will discourage even more entrepreneurs from risking their life savings to exploitation by opportunistic moochers. Lawsuits such as this should outrage every American, for once they set a precedent, and it becomes acceptable for any level of government to dictate to private companies how to run their businesses, it is extremely difficult to gain those freedoms once again after they have been taken away.