Louisiana Voice

Freedom.

It’s an abstract concept to some, absolute to others.

To the absolutist, it means we are free to go where we want, when we want, associate with whomever we want, say what we want, and to be free to live life the way we choose. We enjoy the liberty to choose our religion – or to choose no religion at all.

The only constraints the absolutist places on freedom is when our freedom infringes on the rights of others.

And then there are those who define freedom in the narrowest of terms.

Take, for example, the Louisiana legislator who gave her unqualified support a few years ago to the allocation of state taxpayer dollars to church-affiliated schools. Public funding of religious schools was just dandy until an Islamic school in New Orleans applied for funding. It was at that point that she went into orbit, proclaiming the bill was intended for “Christian” schools, certainly not those based in the Islamic faith.

The same legislator made immigration a major issue, too, fretting publicly about the “invasion” of our southern border, as a former president put it. But when that legislator’s husband purchased two rent houses, who do you suppose he hired to perform the renovation work on the structures?

That same legislator, Valerie Hodges of Livingston Parish, recently raffled off an AR-15 as part of her ongoing fundraising efforts, prompting one of her constituents to tweet, “This the same person raging against the library. Tell me again…how many books have killed children?”

That constituent, you see, is school librarian Amanda Jones, who has been under relentless attack by those who view freedom in somewhat conflicting terms: they want “absolute” freedom of the Second Amendment but are determined to restrict freedoms for anyone with whom they have a philosophical or moral disagreement.

This, then, is the mindset of the American equivalent of the Islamic morality police who killed Mahsa Amini after her arrest over Iran’s hijab law: confirm to our puritanic standards or face the consequences.

There are those, I am certain, who feel I am being unfair to compare the so-called Christians to Islamic radicals, but is it really an unfair comparison? After all, no one has been killed over a library book.

But let us look at the larger picture. Women’s right to choose has already been placed on the chopping block over the so-called right to life argument. But is it right to life or right to birth? After all, the pro-lifers have stripped away or are in the process of doing so to social programs to help the vulnerable and have voiced their intentions to going further in abolishing programs for hungry children born into poverty and abuse. They want the children to be born but quickly turn their backs on them after that.

On another front in the ongoing culture war, we are seeing voting rights being taken away from minorities on a scale not witnessed since the dark days of the KKK and the Citizens Council 70 years ago.

We’re in a period of runaway inflation, but precious little is being said about raising the minimum wage so that a person can make a decent living. And the income disparity continues to grow as the middle class disappears.

There is ample finger-pointing between Democrats and Republicans over high energy prices. Republicans scream (correctly) about President Biden’s restriction on domestic production while Democrats point out (correctly) that before leaving office, Trump prevailed upon OPEC to cut production in order to jack up oil prices.

Meanwhile, flying below everyone’s radar were reports that EXXON had record profits of $20 billion (with a B) for the third quarter, SHELL nearly doubled its profits during the same quarter, and UTILITY COMPANIES are lavishing bonuses and salary increases on their top executives even as consumer suffer.

But no one talks much about a windfall profits tax even as big oil SELLS OFF its wells in an effort to pass along environmental cleanup to taxpayers.

Meanwhile, the culture war continues to expand. There is a concerted campaign to curtail or even eliminate the teaching of certain elements of history that Some would rather be forgotten – subjects like slavery, the Civil War, civil rights, women’s suffrage, and of course, the “don’t say gay” agenda. We’re written extensively about efforts to suppress and censor libraries (and make no mistake, it’s all about censorship, no matter what the morality police try to tell us) in Livingston, Lafayette, and Bossier parishes. Now the fight has been taken into St. Tammany and the battle is becoming more and more contentious.

People are so damned afraid of what the kiddies might see on the library shelves that they are predicting infantile debauchery perpetrated by evil, pedophilic librarians even as they overlook the ease with which Porn-R-Us is available to young prying eyes on the Internet.

I can’t help but wonder how many of these “concerned parents” have enjoyed extra-marital trysts in the past or continue to do so.

I also have to wonder just how many children (or adults, for that matter), have turned gay by reading about it. Probably the same number who became werewolves or zombies or witches by going trick-or-treating or the same number who grew up to be cowboys and war heroes by watching a John Wayne movie (it’s got to be both or it doesn’t count).

But having said that, I will concede that there is a certain book that is chock-full of murder, corruption, homophobia, bestiality, incest, and cruelty – which is often read to little children, particularly on Sundays.

This book:

• Advocates limiting women’s rights;
• Advocates control of people’s sexuality;
• Wants to force prayers in schools;
• Wants to control government policy;
• Wants to influence the judiciary system;
• Promotes hatred;
• Is judgmental;
• Promotes violence and perpetuates conflict;
• Populates the world through incest (twice);
• Promotes killing at least two dozen times and then orders the killing of anyone who kills.

This book advocates the killing of every opponent in battle, including infants (even ripping them from mothers’ wombs) but gives the victors permission to take young virgins for themselves.

It is graphic in describing how one man, a king at that, was guilty of voyeurism and lust to the point of ordering the object of his desire’s husband to the front lines in battle so the poor sap would be killed and the king could have the widow, whom he’d impregnated, to himself.

It tells of the killing of the first-born of an entire country and it even describes how a father first offers his daughters to his neighbors for their pleasure and later impregnates them himself.

Yet, no one has advocated that this book be relocated out of the reach of little impressionable children.

We must ask ourselves — and answer honestly: are our morality police really any different than their Islamic counterparts?