There is a trade off, or a balancing act, that goes on in every society between personal liberty and order. Certainly a there is a necessary amount of control and restraint that must be placed upon every population ... a family, a village, a city, a state, a nation ... and then the question comes, what price do we pay for order?
In the catholic neighborhoods of Northern Ireland during the "troubles" (war for self determination) there were no drugs ... NO drugs. This was the 1960's and 1970's while the rest of the world was high as a kite and beginning to understand the violent, criminal baggage that comes with permissive attitudes towards drug use, there were no drugs, no drug dealers ... none. The reason? If you were found out to have drugs or to be selling drugs the first time you would be not-so-gently warned to stop, the second time you would be shot in the knee and the third time (if you happened to be dumb enough to make it necessary) you would be killed.
In NAZI Germany there were no petty thieves ... if you were caught stealing or burglarizing some one's home you would be put on a train and shipped off to a work camp where you would be beaten, or shot, or worked to death.
I, more than anyone, do not want drugs in my neighborhood, nor do i want thieves in my home ... but at what price. These activities can be eradicated with violent-iron-fisted ease. So we can probably all agree that we do not want a crack dealer in front of our children's elementary school, and at the same time agree that we do not necessarily want any aging hippies shot to death for partaking in a joint.
In the same vein, i do not want to see anyone steal the Mona Lisa from the wall of a museum, but i do not think that a 10 year old who steals a pack of Wrigley's Spearmint gum from the grocery store should be publicly executed.
So here it is quite easy to see the grey area and understand that order can be maintained (to some extent) without extreme reactions to bad behavior. A father can explain to his child why we do not run after a ball in the road without knocking out any teeth. A person speeding in their car can be given a ticket to pay a fine and not sent to prision.
But what when the order that is desired to be kept is not that of civilized society but order in the realm of thoughts and ideas? What happens when a government, or an outspoken minority seek to use any means at their disposal to distroy dissenting views, thoughts and facts.
"That would never happen!" you say.
Don't be too sure. In 1798 the congress of the United States passed the "Alien and Sedition Acts" and then president John Adams signed them into law. The purpose of the law was to protect the U.S. from "alien agents of hostile foreign powers" and it was in fact used by the party in power to round up rivals and imprision them. In 1802 Thomas Jefferson became president, declared the laws unconstitutional, pardoned the offenders convicted under the acts and had them released from prision. That's right, four years later thay were still in prision.
Too old an example? Ok, fast forward 117 years to Schenck v. United States. In 1919 the U.S. army was full on recruiting volenteers to fight in WWI. Schenck was the secretary of the Socialist Party and had the audacity to encourage young men to think (with letters and pamphlets and newspapers) about what the purpose of the war was. Who's war was it, and was it worth dying and killing for? In this Supreme Court case the sainted Oliver Wendall Holmes ruled that this speech was not first amendment protected because "...the most stringent protection of free speech would not protect a man in falsely shouting fire in a theatre and causing a panic." (that's where the " you can't shout fire in a crowded theater" from). No one actually shouted anything. A man wrote a letter envouraging young men to think unpopular thoughts.
So that brings us to today ... war in general is unpopular now, political opposition to the status quo power structure is welcomed and in some cases put on a pedestal ... so we don't have any issues with that right?
Are people allowed to point out the lack of evidence that exists for the idea of one species evolving to another? Are school children? Are people allowed to express the belief that marrige is a covenant from God for a man and a woman to share in? Are beauty pagent contestants? So there is no gun barrel, there are no interment camps for those who violate the unwritten ... yet. But children are being suspended from school for expressing beliefs that have 10 times more scientific merit than the idea that we evolved from salamanders to iguanas to i don't know what to monkeys to cave men to people. The military industrial complex has given way to the media industrial complex. All the necessary facts can be found in popular opinion ... not majority opinion, but the opinion of a few "news" people in NYC. I think that cars are making the polar bears starve, i think that hairspray is causing the deserts of the world to grow (oh wait, desertification has been reversing for almost a decade ... bust out the "hair net").
The foundaion of our society is that of unconventional thought, and the scars upon our nation come in silencing of the small voices, small voices who, more often than not, are right in hindsight.