My friend D. Michael Martindale posted a photo saying that if we don't like gay marriage, abortion, alcohol, marijuana, or various other vices or crimes, we are free to abstain, followed with the line, "Don't want your rights taken away? Don't take away someone else's."

I do believe in individual inalienable rights, and among those are rights spelled out very clearly and specifically in the Bill of Rights. Beyond that, there are lots of ideas about what constitute rights, but they are not spelled out in the Constitution.

I believe in your right to be free of unlawful search and seizure; to protect your life by your own efforts and means; to be secure in your property; to worship as you see fit; to share or advocate any idea; to the equal protection of the law. And maybe a couple I missed.

But when we start identifying access to specific substances as rights, that's not anything spelled out in, or even upheld by, the Constitution. When we identify specific activities that are not covered by those spelled-out rights, and which do affect others and even ourselves, and even in non-physical ways, and which are not part of the above-mentioned rights, then those things are not spelled out in or upheld by the Constitution.

It is a modern, and incorrect, notion that everything we hold dear is protected by the Constitution. Certain very fundamental things that we SHOULD hold dear, and upon which liberty and representative government depend, ARE protected by the Constitution.

There are many things we may hold dear, such as porn and pretty whores and the right to have the public applaud and pay us for pairing off with our gay lovers, but those are not requirements for being a free or Constitution-based society. There is incredible leeway under the Constitution to restrict things that are not actual rights, but individual preferences which are not central to our equal status as citizens.

Liberals invented the idea of making long lists of very specific rights. Libertarians usually reject such claimed rights that are really demands to transfer stuff and opportunity from others, though in Michael's case he says they have the right to demand approval for their perversity, not just to be left alone. But since both libertarians and liberals find themselves reeling out these massive lists of detailed rights, they both find themselves forced into opposing the right for everyone to vote their conscience.

Michael keeps saying, "No, I let you vote it, you just have to understand that your vote won't count if it reflects your religious belief in contradiction to my beliefs, because your vote is considered illegitimate until an enlightened court gives its secular stamp of permission." It's not enough to demonstrate that a law was passed through the Constitutional process, or that it doesn't violate any of the rights spelled out in the Constitution. Unless justices who embrace militant secularism are convinced that the law is also secular in its purpose, it must be annulled--not because it violates a specific Constitutional right, but on grounds that it is not secular, and that it will therefore tread on some right invented by a libertarian or a liberal.

This is the quick road to tyranny. We're already there in many places around the country, the most egregious example being the recent California law banning psychotherapists from helping a person overcome homosexuality.

If that's not a state-imposed ideology, and a criminalization of the exercise of belief, I don't know what is.