Mary Rezac reports for the Catholic News Agency (CNA) that California is considering legislation that would make it a crime for “nursing home and long-term care workers” to refuse to use the preferred pronouns of people under their care.  Employees could face up to $1,000 in fines and a year in jail.

Fortunately, those who disagree with progressives have (relatively) solid protection of their rights through the Constitution and its amendments, but we should certainly be concerned that politicians are disinclined to allow us to work out our own relationships.

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Organizations have incentive to please their customers, and there’s space for them to serve different markets.  They also have incentive to keep their employees happy.  The instances in which a long-term care patient would have no other options and the organization would be unable to provide some distance between a customer and an employee who have an irreconcilable difference would seem to be vanishingly small.

California State Senator Scott Weiner (a freshman Democrat), in other words, considers First Amendment rights so lightly that he is willing to trample them even in the absence of a substantial social conflict.  The rarity of this conflict raises a critical point:

“In many ways it seems to be a solution looking for a major problem,” [Ned Dolejsi, executive director of the California Catholic Conference,] said.

“That’s certainly one of our concerns – is this just part of a larger ideological drill? Do we have examples of people being mistreated around the state because of their gender experience? It seems that this is more like – let’s fix something that we don’t even know needs fixing.”

Exactly. This movement isn’t a push to solve actual problems.  It’s a strategy to imagine problems that will create justification for ideological loyalty oaths or professions of faith.  Citizens whose conscience prevent them from making such professions will find government excluding them from public life, including the professions of their choosing.

These people are tyrants.