Theocrat Rick Santorum is the CEO of the Christian film production company EchoLight, as the Heritage Institute reports. Unsurprisingly, judging from its trailer, one of the company’s forthcoming films, “One Generation Away: The Erosion of Religious Liberty,” substantially distorts the meaning and significance of the First Amendment’s language about religion.

Although environmentalists sometimes couch their policies in terms of improving the world for human benefit, fundamentally the environmentalist movement regards humankind as a blight on the earth whose productive activities are inherently immoral. Most recently, the Guardian reports a “plan to engineer a shorter, smaller human race to cope with climate change.”

The American Enterprise Institute (AEI) claims the motto of freedom, opportunity, and enterprise. But, by “freedom,” apparently, some at AEI now mean that government should be free to forcibly take your wealth and give it to others, at least within certain (undefined and undefinable) limits.

Unfortunately, this week’s response by House Republicans—to sue Obama—demonstrates that they are more interested in poking the President than in defunding and ultimately repealing the rights-violating laws that are throttling the ability of doctors, insurers, and patients to act according to their reasoned judgment.

Paul Ryan hopes to make federal welfare more efficient by consolidating federal agencies, sending more federal welfare money to state governments as grants, and more. If Ryan’s plan reduces welfare dependency and gives taxpayers better results for their dollars, it might represent a marginal improvement over current policy. But it is still riddled with political and moral problems.

Actor Kristen Bell recently portrayed a left-wing activist version of Mary Poppins in a Funny or Die video calling for a higher federal minimum wage. But a minimum wage violates the rights of employers to operate their businesses as they see fit, including their rights to offer terms of employment that they judge best for their businesses.

That ObamaCare pervasively violates the rights of individuals to control their own wealth and to freely negotiate terms of health insurance and health care on a free market is bad enough; that ObamaCare does so via ambiguous, nonobjective statutes is even worse. ObamaCare substantially empowers the executive branch and hordes of bureaucrats to create whatever health policies they wish.

Recently Udall announced he was sponsoring the so-called “Not My Boss’s Business Act” to overturn the Supreme Court’s recent Hobby Lobby decision and again force businesses to provide employees with health insurance covering the full spectrum of birth control mandated by ObamaCare.

Although in today’s context questions regarding immigration are complex matters involving the welfare state, laws governing citizenship, threats of cross-border crime and terrorism, and various other issues, the proper principle guiding any thinking about immigration is—as with every political issue—that of individual rights.

Although history departments in liberal arts colleges certainly should teach students about America’s founding documents and principles, government has no moral right to force colleges to teach that subject or any subject—nor does it have a moral right to compel taxpayers to finance colleges.

On the issue of free speech Cruz has emerged as a champion of individual rights and the First Amendment. FreedomWorks recently released a video in which Cruz takes to task Democrats who wish to amend the First Amendment in light of the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision and to allow Congress to regulate political speech.

Hamas—which controls the “Palestinian” government—is a terrorist organization whose members have faith that they are required by “Allah” to annihilate Israel. Israel has a moral right not only to defend itself against Hamas’s aggression, but also to wipe Hamas off the face of the earth.

The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) has built a beautiful and technologically innovative house—at taxpayers’ expense. Although the technology in the house appears to work well—as NIST boasted in a recent media release—government should not have built the house, and the house is not economical to operate.

Far from showing that government should restrict immigration of rights-respecting people even more severely, today’s immigration crisis further illustrates why government should stop violating the rights of rights-respecting people to immigrate and the rights of citizens to voluntarily associate with such immigrants.

Open immigration does not mean that government must let in criminals and terrorists. And our alternatives obviously are not limited to letting in criminals and terrorists or keeping out rights-respecting people who want to move here. The alternative consistent with individual rights is a policy under which immigration is open to all and only rights-respecting, non-rights threatening individuals.