Something I keep coming back to is the idea that a lack of popularity is not an attack on free speech. Whatever rights promised by government-sponsored free speech, whether taken for granted or with a grain of salt or as the word of god, they guarantee no audience, no acceptance. It is a distinction which glaring few voices seem willing or able to make. Ideally, people can legally say anything, in the sense that they should be able to trust in legal protections for anything they might utter in public, but in a democratic society there can be no protections from any social ramifications, because legislating or mandating opinion is the definitive opposite of free speech.
Theoretically, anything short of lethal force is permissible opinion, pending circumstances and the gravitational draw of the moon. But that’s lethal force to body, mind or soul; entailing that I place murderers on the same level as rapists and bankers.
Responses can actually be more important than conversation starters. Effects can be more important than causes. A shameful few are truly living their time, yet everyone dies in the end. Everything’s not zen but yin and yang and all the same, or else “free” does not honestly mean free.
I can hate your beliefs as much as you love my own. I can love your beliefs as much as you hate mine. We are entitled by consciousness either which way, with neither you or I ultimately wielding final say over one another. Because we can keep at it, to our dying day. That is our true right.
In the same sense, to take this left field, I believe that addictions should be legally-protected, decriminalized, legalized and free of any punitive threat in the eyes of the law. But again, with no governmental protections guaranteed against whatever resulting unpopularity, backlash and ridicule. You can have the right to your beliefs as much as I can have the right to disregard your beliefs. You can say the most retarded things and while federal laws should never be permitted to prosecute you for those words, your neighbors have every earthly right to get in your face about it. Their opinions mean as much as yours, or else claims of free speech are illegitimate.
And where regards addiction, be it in the form of drugs or pornography, sadomasochistic violence or political reporting, you should have the right to do whatever you wish to your body, no matter if everyone else devoutly believes it to be the dumbest, most disingenuous thing since plastic surgery. Snort what thou wilt be the whole of the law, but don’t you dare insist that anybody else do it. Huff all the glue you want but don’t you dare vaccinate your kids (especially on the say-so of pharmaceutical conglomerates whose one and only behest is to make money from selling drugs). I’m talking about the opposite side of the Golden Rule and the underlying truth of freedom in general:
Do not do to others what you do not want them to do to you.
The depressing fact of such a kooky notion not being commonplace can only possibly mean that the majority of peoples are actually more concerned with controlling others than with self-control. After all, ours is a society where suicide is illegal, entailing that we do not in fact truly even own ourselves. And if we do not own ourselves, how can we possibly be so easily sold on the idea of lesser rights being authentic and real should we come to need them or not?
Maybe unrelated, but in the grand scheme of things the Freemasons were wrong because platforms concerned chiefly with degrees rather than content will invariably collapse. Life and death both are all or nothing, no matter how uncomfortable that might make anyone feel.