Daniel Payne writes in How The Left Is Weaponizing The American Legal System:
For quite some time the American Left has been busy turning American law into a partisan political weapon. Various progressive factions have undertaken a disparate and uncoordinated but still ideologically homogeneous effort to criminalize dissent using the courts and statutory law.
By most traditional metrics, these efforts have been failures: the liberals have often lost, and the conservative targets have avoided jail time or crippling criminal or civil convictions or penalties. But the weaponization of our legal system should not be judged by traditional metrics. The point is not for liberals to “win” any particular lawsuit or legal enforcement so much as it is to use lawsuits and the law as the weapons in and of themselves. The process is the punishment. And in most of these cases the punishment is very severe. That’s the idea.
In large part this reflects growing liberal opposition to a pluralistic society: not merely opposition to ideas but rather opposition toideas about ideas, a strong and deliberate enmity towards intellectual diversity and dissenting thought. Gay marriage, the “settled science” of climate change, the morality of abortion, the wisdom of allowing grown men into little girls’ restrooms—all of these things (and many other liberal ballyhoos) are assumed to be unassailable. “It’s 2016,” many on the Left will say, sneeringly. Meaning: “It is no longer appropriate or acceptable for you to say or think things with which I disagree.”
This is, of course, very ironic. Broadly speaking, in the United States there are two groups vying for ascendancy. Conservatives are largely defined by seeking to ground their ethics on objective eternal verities. Liberals largely reject that approach to ethics. This is why any poll on the matter will show the metric “regular church attendance” is overwhelmingly skewed toward the conservative party.
The group that says morality is an ontologically “real” thing favors free speech even for its opponents (actually “especially for” its opponents, because “free speech only for those who agree with me” is an empty construct). The group that denies the essential reality of morality nevertheless pushes their subjective preferences in area after area with a vicious fascism and would seek to deny even the right to question those preferences, much less transgress them.
Here’s the irony: The group with the weaker, indeed non-existent, moral ontology (i.e., no grounding at all for its ethic outside of subjective preference), seeks to impose its views on others with a vicious authoritarianism; while the group with the vastly stronger moral ontology favors a vigorous debate and freedom of dissent.
Perhaps I shouldn’t be surprised. After all, liberals claim to be the “party of science,” and Jerry Coyne assures us that under scientific determinism a kick in the groin is no different from an argument when seeking to condition behavior to conform to the good, with the word “good” standing in for Jerry Coyne’s subjective preference. Conversely, conservatives — bound as they are by that whole “do as you would be done by” ethic — grant to others the right of dissent they would have for themselves.