Are our civil liberties routinely violated? Do civil liberties exist the way they used to? Are they restricted to suit the governments needs? In this essay, I hope to address and answer these questions. Hopefully, I can help people see how civil liberties are shrinking every day.
Civil liberties are applied to every aspect of our daily lives, from the freedom to speak our minds, to the freedom to go to the church of our choice. A brief description of a civil liberty is can be defined as the Bill of Rights, and peoples freedoms from having these rights taken away.
The first major area of civil liberties is the freedom of privacy. One of the major fundamentals of a Democratic society is the right to have a private life, free from people and governments prying into our daily lives. The argument for being free to lead a private life is important, because it prevents us from having to show publicly some private aspects of our daily lives. For example, school grades, personal interests, and to an extent, sexual preference. .
Although this seems like a logical thing, this "right to be left alone", many people argue that this is not always something that should be allowed. Opponents say that people having a private life could allow them to perform illegal activities away from prying eyes. These include drug abuse, and to a lesser extent, planning conspiracies and other crimes. People also argue that some things that are private should be known publicly, such as a persons sexual orientation. Although personally I believe that this is a ridiculous idea, because people would just use this information to ostracize and judge these people who are seen as "deviant". I feel this has no bearing on a persons character, and private lives should be just that, private.