When did voting your values become a thing?
I’m sure it has always been a thing that people do. No doubt the history of the US could be observed to consist of many instances of people voting their values on others where no freedom of their own is actually infringed, where they agitate to be protected from the adversity of things culturally that it is not actually a right of theirs to be protected from — because no true rights of a person to do for themself as they see fit are being violated, but where contrarily it is actually their own responsibility to live their life as they see fit against these perceived adversities.
But the irony of this practice of “voting your values” should be noted nonetheless. And there’s never a better time than now to struggle to reform the hypocritical practices of the petty masses than now, in the name of fighting to preserve valid rights while they still exist.
If you proclaim love of the United States and its constitutional government with its separation of church and state and freedom of speech, then the appropriate “values” to orient around first and foremost when it comes to voting are those of principles similar to the Bill of Rights. Not your “religious” values. Your religious and cultural values are for you to practice on your own time. When you vote you are voting in the realm of state, not church or religion. The framers of the United States government were so clear on this notion, in fact, that they couldn’t just leave the statement of explicit government grants and implied rights of the people alone. They had to come back, write a separate, additional Bill of Rights, explicitly stating as its very first entry that the principles of this government are a separation of church and state, along with freedoms of speech and assembly. The very first, explicit entry of the Bill of Rights! Before any other explicitly spelled out rights, including even the right to weaponize to defend yourself against the tyrannies of government and petty majorities or overreaching elites! Therefore, the appropriate set of values to orient around when you go to vote are the preservation of the protections of each person’s ability to live their own life as they see fit, and of your responsibility to live your life as you see fit.
To be clear, if you hold an opinion of how you want to live your life and view the world, it is not your right to be shielded from opinions or lifestyles adverse to yours. It is your responsibility to deal with the world and maintain your own integrity against the things you choose to view as undesirable. It is not anybody else’s responsibility to protect your “innocence” or the “innocence” of your children, from a difficult, contrary, or adverse world. It is your responsibility to do so for yourself, within the bounds of law and outside of the practice of manipulating the laws to your own ends, and without violently imposing your will on others to achieve your desired cultural homogeneity. It is your responsibility to convince others through dialogue, conversation, or sermons, if you like, and, most importantly of all, living by example.
Lastly, it is your duty, in the realm of state, to vote for those who uphold the integrity of a freedom-oriented government , even if those agents of the government at times uphold the integrity of that government against your own inappropriate tendencies of enforcing your values on others. It is not your right or duty to vote for those who carry your “political agenda” into government with the aim of enforcing that agenda on others (unless that agenda is to maintain the boundaries and distinctions of a free government, such that each individual may be protected from the impositions of others — whether that entails boundaries of rich vs poor, “religious” vs “secular”, warhawk vs “hippy”, etc.).
This is so, regardless of whether you have or represent a majority somehow. It is not the principle of United States government to allow and enable petty majorities to simply vote their will and values on everyone else. Especially all the moreso the petty will and values of a people who whine and cry about excessive government. This is exactly why we don’t get nice things like true democracies, and instead get elitist representative governments.
The United States government is oriented around a presumption that anything not explicitly defined as a government responsibility in its constitutional definition are rights implicitly granted the people. It is therefore the responsibility of the United States government and its representatives and agents to protect the rights of minorities against petty majorities. To think it is any other way renders the utility of a constitutional, implied-freedoms government void. Therefore, it is in no way appropriate to think that voting your values on election day is somehow appropriate. And it is utterly the duty of those elites chosen as representatives to at least be educated enough and have integrity enough themselves to protect the integrity of the government against petty majorities whose rights are not being denied but who are instead trying to deny the proper rights of others who differ from them but do not in any actual way interfere with the ability of the majority to practice their own values on themselves, by themselves, for themselves.
It is not your duty or right in the United States of America, as its government and principles and philosophies of state have been structured, to vote your church into state. It is your duty and right to live your values as you see fit upon yourself, for yourself, by yourself, and to use your freedoms of speech and religion to attempt to convince others of the value of your values.