A FREE COUNTRY?

Once both liberal darlings, the fundamental right to personal freedom and the struggle for social equality are locking horns this Martin Luther King, Jr. Day.

In a Jan. 18 St. Petersburg Times column, Times media critic Eric Deggans explains that some in the African-American civil rights stronghold are becoming increasingly resentful of gay rights groups that use the blanket cause of "civil rights" to justify their push for gay marriage.

Deggans cites a case where a Tampa landlord was forced to rent to homosexual tenants against his will, due to state antidiscrimination laws. Though tangential to the point of Deggans' column, this begs the question of which is more an American right: the right to freedom of personal choice or the right to freedom from discrimination.

You can't have both. It doesn't work that way.

Forcing bigoted business owners to allow patrons belonging to an ethnic group, race or sexual orientation which they would rather deny service negates their right to run their own business in a matter of their own choosing. Though it's hard to feel sympathy for such louts and lunkheads, remember that the Founding Fathers weren't interested in foisting the morality and conventional wisdom of the times on American citizens.

True freedom of association would allow individual business owners the freedom to discriminate. As repugnant as it sounds, protecting the American freedoms that only the most repugnant of lowlifes would exercise is the reason that the Framers tacked a Bill of Rights onto the Constitution.