the problem as I see it is this: while I absolutely agree with the words you wrote here...that is, the government has the right to keep religions from messing with the rights of other people, i know that this isn't what most people who spout this stuff MEAN when they say it.
What they mean is this: the government has the right to see to it that politically incorrect beliefs cannot practice their beliefs, and that the politically correct have the right to enforce THEIR ideologies and agendas upon the politically incorrect. That seems to be true no matter what is considered to be 'politically correct' at any specific moment.
Humans are biased, flawed, and far from perfect. We are able to recognize wisdom that we are unable or unwilling to aspire to. Which is exactly why we need to establish systems of self-governance based on ideals that transcend our own limited ability and willingness to achieve and embody them, and why we need to trust and abide by the government's enforcement of those ideals even when we don't agree with them, and don't 'like' them. Otherwise, government is pointless, and useless, as we will simply do as we please whenever our personal ideals and desires contradict those of our greater collective wisdom.
The founders of the U.S. proposed ideals for the establishment of a nation based on the equal rights of every citizen, and yet nearly all of them owned slaves and held black men and women to be fundamentally
unequal in value and purpose to white men, and held wealthy educated white men as being fundamentally more righteous and valuable than the others. The ideals they set forth transcended their own willingness and ability to embody them. Yet eventually, the system they set up worked as it was intended, and such inequality was finally rooted out, exposed for what it was, and eliminate by the systems of governance that they'd initiated.
This is why it's so fundamentally important that be willing to accept the government's intervention in our personal desires.
That's what it's there for. And especially so when it comes to issues of freedom, equality, and opportunity. And why it's crucial that we do not allow the forces of greed and ignorance and our own individual desire to corrupt the system of governance that we have set up for ourselves.
Sadly, this is where we have failed, utterly, and where we are continue to fail. To the point of near total collapse. Too many of us have decided that we know better how everyone else should be governed, and by what principals; to the point that many of us are now willing to ignore and even to sabotage our systems of governance to get our own way. "Political correctness" is being used as a dirty word because our selfishness now trumps, in our minds, those higher ideals that our government was originally intended to represent, establish, and protect.
