B.2(ae). Freedom of Association

Every Person has the Right to freely associate with others. No Person may face legal or civil penalties solely because of their associations.

When the average American reads a passage like this, their reaction may be, “Well, of course not. Who would do that?”

The fact is, there are plenty of examples from the last century. We’ve already discussed Japanese internment at length earlier in this commentary. What was that if not rounding people up simply because of their ancestral association with the nation we were at war with?

During the McCarthy Era, creatives, professors, government workers, and union members were blacklisted for membership or even mere attendance at the meetings of communist or left-wing organizations, often twenty years before. McCarthy’s witch hunts found remarkably few spies and subversives, but it ruined many careers.

Since 9/11, Muslims have been viewed with suspicion simply because they attend certain mosques (or simply for being Muslim in the first place). In the 1980s and 1990s, some Irish-Americans were viewed with suspicion because of their sympathy with Sinn Féin.

There are bad actors in the world. There is no doubt about that fact. But assigning guilt to someone, or implying that guilt, simply because of their associations, is not only sloppy, it is wrong. These people are overwhelmingly innocent of wrongdoing. They were in the internment camps. They were in the McCarthy Era. They were in the Troubles. They were and are in the mosques. And they will be in the future. There is no place for assigning guilt to any person simply based on their associations.