The president starts spying on American citizens. Then he starts indefinitely detaining them. Then he starts exiling them. Then he starts executing them. All without due process. All without a speedy trial or a trial by jury, some without any evidence whatsoever. And all while people in the same party as the president defend his actions on the grounds of national security. Then the parties flip and the previous defenders of the administration start to show “concern” and its attackers become defenders.
It would read like a bad farce, but it’s true. And it is true not because we weren’t aware of what was happening, but because we didn’t care enough to do anything to stop it. “They’re all terrorists,” we tell ourselves. “The government wouldn’t go after them unless they had reason to believe they did something wrong.”
Something is definitely wrong when Pakistanis are rightfully protesting our government’s actions whilst we remain disturbingly silent.Never mind that the Justice Department memo “justifying” the execution of American citizens abroad came out barely three weeks after the suicide of Aaron Swartz brought national attention to prosecutorial overreach on computer crimes, going after kids with hard jail time for exploration of computer systems no more harmfully than playing ding dong ditch.
Never mind that this is the same week that the two out of three branches of government are aggressively pushing to take guns away from law abiding citizens (even though the same government has no problem sending billions of dollars in unrestricted weapons to Israel and Egypt).
Never mind that the administration, with cover from the Supreme Court, has forced people to buy health insurance from megacorporations, while those same corporations now mysteriously have more power than they had when Obamacare was passed. And, not coincidentally, health insurance premiums are rising, not that we couldn’t see it coming.
Never mind that the executive branch continues to raid marijuana dispensaries that are operating legally under state law, and the most openly drug using president in history is secretly jailing thousands of nonviolent drug users like himself.
I fear that the greatest threat to liberty is not our government, but ourselves. That we would be so complacent in this farce as one by one our rights are trampled upon. That we would continue to defend our ideas as constitutional and the others’ as unconstitutional, when in reality we seem content to pick and choose the parts of the constitution we agree with and discard the rest. “Let’s give up on the constitution,” said one prominent constitutional law professor in December. How soon before more people believe that? How soon before government’s legitimacy crisis comes to a head?
It ends now. I’ll be calling my congresspeople today on the drone strikes issue. Please join me in doing the same.
That was in 2005. It would still be three more years before Connecticut became only the third state to enact same-sex marriage legislation. Other states followed suit, but not without problems. In 2008, California’s infamous Prop 8 banned same-sex marriage in my current home state, rolling back a right that had been granted to gay couples previously, and prompting a litany of suits that have now reached the Supreme Court. But even in 2005, although it was still an uphill battle for millions of gay couples in the United States, it wasn’t unthinkable that the nation was at a tipping point. In just seven years’ time, a blink of the eye in legislative terms, nine states now allow same-sex couples to marry, with the first to allow it by popular vote in the last election. The president of the United States, for the first time, publicly acknowledged his support of the issue. Multiple Republicans and GOP insiders have acknowledged that there is little they can do about the eventual legalization of same sex marriage nationally. And in a stunning symbolic blow to the sadomasochistic social conservative movement, conservative-turned-libertarian Glen Beck is 
I could say a lot about this, particularly about South Africa which went from apartheid’s strict regulations on sex and marriage to full-blown marriage equality within 20 years, but it is amazing how steadfastly civil liberties can be protected as long as people keep speaking out for them. For there are plenty of people who would like this “sin” to be punishable by death. There are plenty of people who would like to see gays “cured” by the state, or see religion in general imposed upon children in classrooms. And, don’t get me wrong, there are plenty of our friends on the left who would like to tell people what foods they can eat, or what lightbulbs they can use, or what is appropriate to say and in which fora. There will always be people who believe they have a right not to be offended by someone else’s personal choices and beliefs, and they will work to take away our rights in turn.