Conservatives have always threatened freedom

Today I expressed my concern that the SCOTUS is on its way to over riding Presser V Illinois. From a strictly constitutional perspective I believe the over ride is correct and certainly a logical extension of the ruling that guns are an individual and not a corporate right. For those unfamiliar Presser was a ruling regarding private militias. According to the ruling 1)gun ownership is a corporate right which is allotted so that individuals can serve their role as militias to defend the nation against enemies foreign and domestic. 2)Militias are thus not the right of a private citizen but are to be regulated by the States. It seems to me that McDonald V Chicago has struck down the reasoning behind Presser.

While I think the ruling was flawed I also think Presser preserved the Union. It was only twenty years after the Civil War and the arms escalation and violence of Management versus Labor was on its way to becoming nearly as dangerous. In today's environment I fear that overturning Presser may bring us back to the brink of war again. Specifically I fear armed conservative militias seeking out liberals, LGBT's, Union members, providers of health care to women and scientist.

The Conservative I was conversing with told me that only Conservatives had protected our freedom to date and I could not let that one go by. So here is a quick run down on how conservatives have been the enemy of America's freedom since the beginning:


As to your assertion that conservatives do not violently seek out liberals. That is a lie. Ask Dr. Tiller, ask the numerous other victims of the pro life movement, ask current providers what it feels like to know that Fox News encourages murder, ask gay men and woman who are beaten and killed, ask scientist if they feel safe. Ask yourself how many times on a chat line have you seen a conservative tell a liberal that they are well armed and prepared to kill.

As for protecting freedom; Libertarians yes, conservatives less often. What was the first act by conservatives suspending the Constitution? Alien and Sedition Acts in 1798.

Certainly the conservatives were represented by the Confederacy who declared war on the United States in their effort to deny freedom.

Lets not forget the conservative mayhem unleashed after the end of Reconstruction. Five million blacks driven from the South, how many lynchings?

The first Red Scare."Historian Murray B. Levin wrote that the “Red Scare” was “a nation-wide anti-radical hysteria provoked by a mounting fear and anxiety that a Bolshevik revolution in America was imminent — a revolution that would change Church, home, marriage, civility, and the American way of Life.” [1] Newspapers exacerbated those political fears into xenophobia — because varieties of radical anarchism were perceived as answers to popular poverty; the advocates often were recent European immigrants exercising freedom of speech protected under U.S. law, (cf. hyphenated-Americans). Moreover, the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) effected several labor strikes in 1916 and 1917 that the press portrayed as radical threats to American society inspired by left-wing, foreign agents provocateur; thus, the press misrepresented legitimate labour strikes as “Crimes against society”, “Conspiracies against the government”, and “Plots to establish Communism”.[2]--sounds like the rhetoric of the Tea Party to me.

Second anti Sedition Act
Sedition Act of 1918 to protect wartime morale by deporting putatively undesirable political people. Law professor David D. Cole reports that President Wilson’s “. . . federal government consistently targeted alien radicals, deporting them . . . for their speech or associations, making little effort to distinguish true threats from ideological dissidents."

The Palmer Raids (1919–21) – executed by J. Edgar Hoover, who instructed that said political prisoners be forcefully interrogated without legal counsel, and that they remain imprisoned via prohibitively high bail.

Conservatives just protecting our freedom

http://www.infoplease.com/ce6/history/A0824313.html

House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), a committee (1938–75) of the U.S. House of Representatives, created to investigate disloyalty and subversive organizations. Its first chairman, Martin Dies, set the pattern for its anti-Communist investigations. The committee's methods included pressure on witnesses to name former associates, vague and sweeping accusations against individuals, and the assumption of an individual's guilt because of association with a suspect organization. Witnesses who refused to answer were cited for contempt of Congress. A highly publicized 1947 investigation of the entertainment industry led to prison sentences for contempt for a group of recalcitrant witnesses who became known as the Hollywood Ten. In 1948, Whittaker Chambers made sensational accusations of Soviet espionage against former State Dept. official Alger Hiss; those hearings kept the committee in the headlines and provided the first national exposure for committee member Richard Nixon. Critics of the committee contended that it disregarded the civil liberties of its witnesses and that it consistently failed to fulfill its primary purpose of recommending new legislation. After 1950, Sen. Joseph McCarthy borrowed many of the committee's tactics for his own Senate investigations
Wow as a conservative I bet you are proud of your man Joe.

War on drugs? Two million Americans currently imprisoned.

Murder and force is the conservative way only Libertarians and Liberals protect the Constitution from conservative zealots.