We explore the Supreme Court's big decision rewriting the Civil Rights Act of 1964 to endanger religious liberty.

Police continue to come under fire for doing their jobs, and Bill de Blasio will let anyone go in public, except for the Jews.

I'm Ben Shapiro. This is The Ben Shapiro Show.

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So I think that we should begin the show by discussing a very broad idea

because it's going to have a lot of specific applications.

There are two ways to think about how to unify a country

and how to keep a country unified or any group of people un unified. One way is to set very bare minimum rules and say, okay, well, if you fulfill these rules, then you can do whatever you want. And that's a really nice way of keeping people unified, because basically, as long as you check a couple of boxes, you're good to go. I'll take the Jewish community as an example. So I'll take my Orthodox community, get very parochial.

So there are a couple of different ways to view unity inside orthodoxy.

So you could say, if you keep the Sabbath and you keep kosher, then you should all be able to go over to each other's house, and you should all be able to go to the same shules, and you should all be able to marry each other's kids, and all of that sort of stuff. because as long as you're keeping the bare minimum of rules,

you're all part of the same community.

Well, in a body politic, you can have the same thing.

You could have a view of the federal government that says, all the federal government is here to do are very basic things. Protect life, liberty, and property. Fundamental rights. That's it. The federal government is here to protect you basically from the government. It's here to protect you from your fellow citizen, doing something actively to harm you. And it is here to protect you from your state government doing something actively to harm you. But it is not here to cram down a bunch of rules on you. Basically, so long as you fulfill these basic rules, the federal government isn't going to mess with you. That is way one of achieving unity. Then there is way two of achieving unity. And to go back to my Orthodox community, there are a lot of communities like this. And that is, there are a lot of onerous rules, right? And you have to keep every single aspect of them. And there's a lot of signaling as to whether you're part of the in-group or whether you're part of the out-group. There are a lot of kind of subsets of the Orthodox community where you have to wear a certain type of hat. You're a black hat or you wear a strimal. Or you keep kosher in a certain way, right? You keep a particular brand of kosher meat, but not a different type of brand of kosher meat. You go to a specific type of synagogue or you send your kids to a specific type of school. And if you don't send your kids to that type of school, then your kids can't marry your friend's kids. That is a way of achieving a very discrete unity within a subset of people, but it is very hard to broaden that out. And the reason it's hard to broaden that out is because most people aren't going to keep those rules. So take that back to the level of American government, right? American government could create unity by having a very, very heavy set of onerous rules that we all have to keep. And the culture could have a set of onerous rules that we all have to keep. And in order for you to be part of the in-group, part of the unified body of the United States, instead of agreeing on a few broad principles and then you're allowed to do whatever you want, instead of that, it is you must agree to every single checklist item on this list, and you must be hemmed in by this huge thicket of rules. And if you do all of those things, then you can be part of the country. If you do all of those things, then you can be part of the in-group, as opposed to the out-group, the people who won't keep any of those rules. Well, the founders saw the better vision for unity of a country in the first set of rules.

And the reason that they felt that way is because they felt like, okay, you can actually have

sort of the best of both worlds. You could have discrete communities inside the United States

that are locally governed, right? This is the idea of subsidiarity, the idea of federalism.

You can have local communities where the local community has a lot more

homogeneity, a lot more agreement on what exactly the policies should be. Right. So for example, you're going to set up a local public school instead of having the federal government set up your public school for you, 3,000 miles away. Instead, you and your friends get together and you decide how much you wish to be taxed and which teachers you decide to hire and how your kids ought to be taught. And that's really not the business of the federal government. And then there's the state

government. And that has a little bit less homogeneity. And that means that it has less power to deal with you. And then you get to the federal government and has very little power to deal with you unless you are violating a specific subset of rules. Right. And those subsets of rules would be you're violating somebody else's negative rights. So to get a little more specific about the philosophy of the

federal government versus of rules, right? And those subsets of rules would be you're violating somebody else's negative rights.

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