Everyone wants freedom, but what is the proper meaning of freedom? Does it consist in being able to do anything we want? Or, as some believe, is it doing whatever we want, as long as no one else is harmed?

In its broadest possible sense, the word “freedom” denotes an action or state free from external restraint or compulsion. In this sense alone is there any similarity between liberty and libertinism, between ambition and lust. The fact that we associate these two very different types of behavior is mostly by linguistic accident — but it is an accident that has been the source of many grievous misunderstandings; a lot of conduct that we carelessly call “freedom” is in fact nothing of the kind.

In fairly recent history, America was convulsed by a social, political, and moral revolution that, during the ’60s and ’70s, managed to overthrow most of the long-established norms of a moral code rooted in Judeo-Christian religion. During that time period, pre-marital and extra-marital sexual activity became widely accepted, along with the recreational use of drugs and the production and consumption of pornographic magazines and movies. Abortion on demand was decreed by an activist Supreme Court. In our own time, that same counterculture now seeks to normalize and validate sexual perversion, including same-sex “marriage” and transgender “rights.” And all of these products of the counterculture, then and now, have been promoted as “freedoms” and “individual rights.”

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