Is there a right to be wrong?

This question is often posed by philosophers, some of whom maintain that there is no such right, usually because of the duty to the good to which all men must aspire. Certainly, there is no moral right to be wrong, particularly if such a state of wrongness is grounded in a deliberately sophistic mindset. An example of this would be a deliberate insistence (by a person who obviously knew better) that the earth is flat, or that the Holocaust never occurred.

But is there a legal right to insist -- quite deliberately wrongly -- that the earth is flat? Of course there is! That is the essence of freedom, notwithstanding the protestations of some moralists. It might be absurdly wrongheaded, but there is still a legal right to be deliberately wrong.

It follows necessarily that there is also a right to be mistakenly wrong, whether one knows one is mistaken or not.

In a piece titled "Hey, It Was Consensual Adult Sex--What's the Big Deal?"Clayton Cramer argues that homosexual sex followed by murder followed by cannibalism is analogous to consensual sex without the ghoulish sequelae. To me, that's a little like saying that permitting the elderly to drive countenances this, which it doesn't.

(Not to blame conservatives any more than liberals for it, but quite frankly, I am sick of the growing national trend of punishing the good for the actions of the bad. I can't have a gun or a pit bull or a cell phone in my car because bad people shoot people and sic their pit bulls on people and run over them while they talk on cell phones? Our supposedly free country is being transformed into a vast national kindergarten.)

Consent, by the way, should never be allowed as a defense to a charge of murder, for solid public policy reasons. The victim is by definition dead, and is unable to be a witness, and even if one had his signed agreement and a video of him agreeing to be murdered, there is no way to know that this was not coerced.

Mr. Cramer has as much right legally to his opinion as I do, though. This is not moral relativism, because the moral value of his argument is not a legal matter, nor should it be.

Plenty of immoral behavior is legal, though, and being wrong in one's opinions, thoughts, or conclusions is only one example. Were society to make it illegal to be wrong, we would have no freedom. That is because there is no universally agreed upon standard of what is wrong. There never has been and there never will be. I tend to agree with the ancients, who believed that good men want to do good, but that does not settle the argument, because it is perfectly possible for two men of good will to disagree completely. What is tyrannical is when one man demands obedience to his opinion. The number makes no difference; 100 million people demanding obedience to their opinions is equally tyrannical.

The right to be wrong is a cornerstone of freedom. Without it, we would all be at the mercy of those who have enough power to declare themselves "right" and criminalize disagreement. I say this as I freely admit that having the wrong opinions can be a form of immorality. Thus, in this instance I think immorality should be legal.

To say otherwise would, in my view, be immoral.

But legal.

(Why is it that I don't think those who disagree would allow me the same latitude I allow them? If only the Golden Rule worked both ways!)