Let's look at a few examples:
During Covid, progressive liberal states were more likely to close businesses and places of worship. They judged small businesses less "essential" and places of worship not essential, but they allow big box stores to remain open. When taken to court, they could not support those decisions. Whenever, the government wants to infringe on someone's right to worship or enact a government action including vaccines, it must be able to show that 1) it will protect the lives of "other" people and there is no reasonable way to accommodate a person's individual rights to pursue happiness. Biden lost this argument at the Supreme Court with respect to vaccines. And our governor lost at the state level with respect to restaurants. But not until thousands were irreparably harmed by both actions.
What made it particularly abusive is our governor, Newsom ignored his own mandates.
Regulations have exploded under the government; this has had a chilling effect on small businesses. I know of four minority or women owned businesses that have closed recently simply because their ovens/roasters did not meet the new CO2 emission standards.
I know of several immigrant owned landscaping businesses (we manage properties in several towns, so we know the small landscaping companies) that had to close because they could not afford the new electric powered equipment as it cost much more (and they don't have the cash to switch) and the batteries barely lasted to finish a single home before needing recharging.
Again, the state has made no compelling argument that these actions will have any impact on the climate. This is very different, than some of the anti-smog legislation, which could be shown to be effective, and smog could be shown to harm others. Government has the right to protect people from harm, not to impose its ideology on them. Those lines are increasingly getting blurred.
California routinely sees its laws reversed on the basis of infringement of rights including gun rights and parental rights. The state has failed to enforce voter propositions requiring the state not to use DEI policies based on skin color to select students. This is particularly troublesome to Asian minorities whose children are routinely rejected by state schools even though their parents pay the same taxes everyone else does.
Several professors have conducted some interesting statistical analyses attempting to use a host of variables to predict acceptance rates. Skin color keeps coming up as have a high R value.
While the conservative religious right often wants our laws to reflect their values. Those attempts are routinely challenged and fail in court. Which is good. But keep in mind, our nation is not a secular nation, but a religious one, that does not embrace any one church or religion. The most overriding belief is that "a Creator" gave every human being specific unalienable rights. It goes on to say, that people can give governments "powers", but those powers are limited.
The progressive left has embraced the "religion" of secularism, which is fine, but it has no right to impose those beliefs on our country.
A football coach got fired for praying on a football field. If you read the Constitution, it does not say people have the freedom of religion, it says people have the freedom to practice their religion. The coach won his case in the Supreme Court. As an aside, when Muslim students insisted on a private place to pray to Allah at school, conservative Christian classical liberals like me supported that.
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/football-coach-fired-praying-field-backed-supreme-court-resigns-rcna103789
When progressive liberals argue about a woman's reproductive rights, they routinely dismiss the unborn baby's human rights. This is in spite of the fact, that medicine, biology, the Constitution, and our laws recognize the baby as human (hence killing a pregnant woman can produce a double murder conviction). You can't redefine unborn babies depending on the crime, so now that we agree on definition, we are dealing with a competing "rights" issue.
I support both the baby's right to life and the mother's reproductive rights. Under our form of government, when two irreconcilable rights exist, the societal contract under which we live requires the citizens through their elected representatives to decide what the resolution will be. The recent Supreme Court got it right (when it said, the decision of what would be legal or illegal had to be determined by a legislative body), not the individual beliefs of 9 appointed Justices. I am unhappy with my state's laws on abortion, but for now they are the law of the land. What bothers me is the failure to recognize the "unborn baby" as human and factor that into the calculus. As soon as society starts denying "humanity", you end up with societies like the Chinese harvesting organs for more important people than prisoners.
Progressives howled at the Supreme Court ruling, because they wanted the court to rule their way, citizens be damned. I care about outcomes, but not at the expense of "the process" designed to protect us from a society where a select group of people decide what is for the greater good, rather than one where the process is designed for the governed to decide what is for the greater good as long as those decisions do not infringe on the rights of the minority without recognition of those rights and attempt to accommodate them.
A final example relating to abortion is several hospitals and states tried to compel health care workers that had personal issues with abortions to participate in them. Eventually, the ruling which makes sense is that in event there is no one else qualified to participate, a person can be compelled to participate in an abortion procedure, but an employer must make a "best" effort to find staff that don't have a moral objection to abortions.
Then of course, there is the famous wedding cake case between a baker and a gay couple. It is shocking to me that progressives felt they had a right to compel a baker to produce gay wedding cake. The baker routinely sold to gay people. Under our law, it is clear that if the baker can be shown to practice his religion and not discriminate against gay customers, that he can choose not to make a "wedding" cake, if the gay couple have a reasonable alternative. In other words, if the gay couple can secure a cake elsewhere, there is no compelling reason to make the baker do something against his religious beliefs. That seems fair, if the baker is the only baker able to make the wedding cake, the "state" in the interest of equal rights can compel the baker to make the cake, but that was not the case, so it seemed like this was an attempt to punish the baker for having religious beliefs.
In other words, at times it seems the progressive movement attempts to force people to conform to their beliefs rather than accommodate them when possible. If you are really interested with a little research, you can find this occurs routinely.
Now listening to Harris, she is promising she will lower inflation by forcing companies to lower prices and landlords to lower rent. Huh? The President has the power to issue price controls? In our system, we promote competition and only when competition can't work, do we look at other regulatory options to protect citizens from abuse. At some level progressives don't see the marketplace comprised of individuals making individual choices regarding what they are willing to work for and what they are willing to pay. Instead, the progressives believe some elite group of people should be making those decisions. And when they can't get what they want directly, they play games with taxes and subsidies to force their ideas on people (I don't disagree with the intent of their ideas, but good intent does not translate into a right to deny personal freedom).
Harris is either lying or does not believe that people have a right to set the price for the goods and services they provide as long as a "marketplace" exists. It is a big stretch to say we don't have a competitive marketplace for food or rent. Now in California, it is true the government has so tightly regulated land use, it has contributed to a housing shortage, but the answer is not more regulation, but less. Free up land zoned for one- and two-story single-family homes to become three story multifamily homes.
With smaller families these days, many homes could be converted to duplexes, but of course progressives want to control how the housing shortage is addressed rather than create the marketplace where it would happen in response to demand if the supply side of housing were not so tightly controlled.
Finally, let's look at a hot issue this day, trans women in sports. A separate sport with mandated scholarships for women is inherently discriminatory on the basis of gender/sex. Under our system of government, such an intentional form of discrimination can only be tolerated if there a compelling interest. The compelling interest was that half of the country was precluded from having any chance of winning scholarships or to experience the benefits of participation in competitive sports. And it took an Act of a legislative body to affirm that the societal interest was so great, it would allow systemic discrimination based on gender and that argument had to be so compelling that the Supreme Court would uphold systemic discrimination.
None of that happened when transwomen started demanding inclusion in women's sports even though they did not meet the reason why women's sports were established.
Leia Thomas did compete on a men's team and clearly was competitive. She clearly should have all the human rights that other humans have. But the question becomes when society creates a systemic discriminatory "right" using a compelling public interest argument, you need to make a case other than someone identifies as a woman. Again, the original case was based around the physiological differences that testosterone produces in the body (East German women taking testosterone for example were banned even as biological females). So, tell me as a progressive, what is the compelling reason for transwomen get the favorable discriminatory treatment that biological women receive. Many professional women athletes have competed in professional sports like the PGA, the law does not divide sports between men and women, the law provides a "carve out" where only women can compete due to impact of hormones on human development.
In other words, progressives are so focused on defining gender, they are willing to trample over the public interest that created women's sports and allowed it to exist. Identity groups don't get special treatment unless there is an extremely compelling interest (one reason affirmative action is no longer legal). The compelling interest has to be confirmed by a legislative body. Not through attempts to file legal cases with specific left leaning courts.
In other words, can you explain why Leia Thomas needed to enjoy rights, other humans did not enjoy by virtue of her trans status, clearly her body benefited from testosterone.
https://www.swimmingworldmagazine.com/news/a-look-at-the-numbers-and-times-no-denying-the-advantages-of-lia-thomas/
Human rights are not what you or I think are right or wrong. Human rights provide each person the right to pursue happiness and expect the state to accommodate their beliefs within reason. Our government does exist to deal with cases of human rights conflicts, and it has an obligation to try to accommodate both, if possible, within reason (this last provision is not intended as a "loophole" through which to drive a truck. As a society we have decided that on rare occasion if the majority of Americans believe it is in the compelling interest of society (evidenced through specific legislation) to provide one group of Americans with "special rights", then those special rights should be limited as much as possible in order not to create a society of systemic discrimination.
One of the greatest problems with progressive thinking is that nearly every progressive begins with their ideas of how society should be in the future (that is where the whole label "progressive" comes from). Often with good intentions, progressives feel justified in forcing society to move towards what they believe is "the greater good". As a nation, that whole concept runs against our core value system.
Our core value system argues that a well-informed citizenry is capable of making the best decisions for society through the election of representatives to pass laws and the existing of a judiciary to protect individual rights. Rather than a "vision" of what the future should be, society will gravitate to what society should be.
Let's look at a simple illustration of how these two principles would differ. In the former, the elite of society who have much of the wealth, political power and other resources use those things to navigate society towards what they view is the best future. The epitome of this behavior is the annual gathering of the elite in Davos to determine what is best for the world. Arriving on their private jets they meet to discuss actions that need to be imposed on the people of their nations to reduce CO2 emissions.
In the latter case, in an ideal situation people elect representatives to legislatures to pass laws. As Churchill said about Americans, eventually we will get it right after we have exhausted all the other alternatives. Even "deplorables" have a say so. And while the system is far from perfect, at some level every person has input into it and so has some ownership in it. And to protect individuals from the "mob", the judiciary will be charged with protecting individual rights and human rights.
