Keith Burgess-Jackson, J.D., Ph.D.

To the Editor:

David Brooks would have us believe that inherent in the Republican philosophy is a belief in individual freedom. This is certainly so, if the freedom in question is to own any type of gun without restriction or to run a business without any regulations that protect the environment and the consumer.

But what if one is a man or woman who wants to marry a person of the same sex, or a woman who wants to choose whether to bring a child into the world? Not so much.

James Spada
Boston, May 5, 2009

Note from KBJ: The letter writer is confused. Liberty, or freedom, is the absence of constraint. A law that prohibits and punishes homosexual sodomy infringes individual liberty (which is not to say that it is unjustified; all criminal laws infringe individual liberty, and some of them are justified). The debate about homosexual "marriage" is not about liberty. It is about power—the power to participate in a legal institution that has heretofore been limited to heterosexual couples. As for the woman "who wants to choose whether to bring a child into the world," why should she be at liberty to destroy another human life? Your liberty ends at the tip of my nose. The letter writer assumes that fetuses have no legal status. If they do, then one is not at liberty to do as one pleases with them. After all, we don't allow women to kill their infants. What is the difference between a (late-stage) fetus and an infant? Why may liberty be restricted in the latter case but not in the former?