(First of all, no, this is not a post about abortion.)
I’ve written again and again that the fundamental principle of Mormonism is the freedom to choose, or as we call it in the Church, free agency. Establishing freedom of choice was the purpose of the pre-Earth “War in Heaven.” Without agency, Adam and Eve could not have made the choice to leave the Garden of Eden. (In fact, in my mind, agency was necessary in order to bring about the creation, the fall, and the atonement. Shouldn’t we hold it in higher esteem than we do? Think about it!)
The freedom to choose is necessary; without the option of choosing Good over Bad, one would never understand Good or Bad! Therefore all choices would yield the same meaningless consequences.
Indeed, Lehi expounded on this idea eloquently and succinctly in the second book of Nephi, chapter 2:
For it must needs be, that there is an opposition in all things. If not so… righteousness could not be brought to pass, neither wickedness, neither holiness nor misery, neither good nor bad.
Many liberals today will argue that taxes are voluntary, while conservatives claim that laws prohibiting gay marriage are not exhibiting any coercive power. And the argument is virtually the same: you have the choice to pay your taxes or to be gay, so, while you may break a law, you have the choice to do so. But this is incredibly poor reasoning. People often miss their faulty reasoning because they have been indoctrinated into a society where paying taxes is part of being a good citizen and gay people are just weird. But if tomorrow a law were passed banning the driving of automobiles by all people, liberals and conservatives alike would decry this action as a patent derision of individual rights to property, liberty, travel, etc. Yet by the prior logic, you would still have the “choice” whether to obey the new law or not; however, you would be arrested, fined, and imprisoned for disobeying the law. Thus, the laws of a nation or state are set up in such a way as to be synonymous with force and coercion, even if on the surface they appear to allow for choice.
This is perhaps one of the most irritating topics I find myself writing about, both because it is so easy to reasonably understand, and because despite its simplicity, no one seems to understand it. When I wrote about gay marriage a few months back, I think everyone but a small handful of people totally missed the point. And especially for members of the LDS Church, where the ideal and idea of freedom of choice is so fundamental, I am baffled that my repeated attempts have gotten me nowhere.
And then I read in For a New Liberty recently a short passage that struck home and gave me some hope regarding my previously unconvincing narratives. Perhaps Mr. Rothbard can tell a more cogent tale:
Sometimes it seems that the beau ideal of many conservatives, as well as of many liberals, is to put everyone into a cage and coerce him into doing what the conservatives or liberals believe to be the moral thing. They would of course be differently styled cages, but they would be cages just the same. The conservative would ban illicit sex, drugs, gambling, and impiety, and coerce everyone to act according to his version of moral and religious behavior. The liberal would ban films of violence, unesthetic advertising, football, and racial discrimination, and, at the extreme, place everyone in a “Skinner box” to be run by a supposedly benevolent liberal dictator. But the effect would be the same: to reduce everyone to a subhuman level and to deprive everyone of the most precious part of his or her humanity — the freedom to choose.
The irony, of course, is that by forcing men to be “moral” — i.e., to act morally — the conservative or liberal jailkeepers would in reality deprive men of the very possibility of being moral. The concept of “morality” makes no sense unless the moral act is freely chosen. Suppose, for example, that someone is a devout Muslim who is anxious to have as many people as possible bow to Mecca three times a day; to him let us suppose this is the highest moral act. But if he wields coercion to force everyone to bow to Mecca, he is thereby depriving everyone of the opportunity to be moral — to choose freely to bow to Mecca. Coercion deprives a man of the freedom to choose and, therefore, of the possibility of choosing morally.
