How To Be A Liberal: The Story of Freedom and the Fight for its Survival

by Ian Dunt

Taylor and Mill had encountered this problem in the case of Mormon polygamy. Liberals, they believed, had to allow people to live illiberal lives, anything else was a kind of tyranny. They had recommended a solution of entry and exit checks – a need for the liberal state to ensure that people entered these arrangements willingly and were able to leave when they wanted. The blossoming of cultural diversity in the 20th Century threw up many more examples. Jehovah’s Witnesses, for instance, believed it was against God’s will to receive blood and sometimes tried to exclude their children from necessary medical procedures. The Pueblo Indian community in the US denied housing benefits to Christian converts. An Old Order Amish community, which wanted to live apart from mainstream American life, won the right to take its children out of school at the age of 14 instead of 16, in order to limit their awareness of the outside world.