Right to peaceful association

The proposed right:

No government shall deprive a person from peaceful association with others. No government shall force or coerce a person to associate with another person.

Intent:

The right to peaceful association differs from the right to peaceful assembly in that assembly refers to people being in the same place at the same time, whereas people may associate with each other individually in person or by mail or any other means of communication.

The right to peaceful association protects the ability of any two consenting adults to form a peaceful relationship. However, the government may regulate certain relationships. For example, the government may enact a law that school teachers cannot have romantic relationship with students, or that therapists cannot have any other relationship with their clients.

The other part of this right prohibits the government from forcing people into associations or relationships. For example, the government may not require people to join a specific political party — that would violate the people’s right to peaceful association. Another example is the government may not enact a law that requires people to join a professional association. However, when the government requires students to attend school, or government employees to work in a particular office with other employees, this does not violate the right to association. Such situations need to be more clearly defined, possibly with a distinction between private life and professional life.

The right to peaceful association is not intended to prevent the government from organizing any group of people for any purpose as long as all employees are there voluntarily and as long as that organization’s interactions with the public are official and transactional.

Discussion:

The inclusion of the word peaceful is important, because it allows the government to prosecute criminal associations while preventing the government from prosecuting peaceful associations such as labor unions, political parties, book clubs, athletic teams, companies, non-profit groups, religious groups, and many more (assuming they are not engaged in any violation of rights or other crimes).

The right to peaceful association is an important complement to the right to honest and peaceful speech, because it protects the ability of people to communicate with each other in a peaceful way.

Teachers and therapists can have romantic relationships, they just need to do it with people who they are not serving professionally. Because the regulations focus on the conduct of professionals, and the same professionals are not deprived of having romantic relationships with other people, the professional regulations do not deprive them of having romantic relationships and therefore do not violate their right to peaceful association.

It’s important to note that the prohibition on the government from forcing or coercing people to associate with each other does NOT mean the government cannot create agencies or organizations for the purpose of achieving some goal. It only means the government cannot force a specific person to associate with a specific other person in any unofficial capacity. For example, the creation of a motor vehicle bureau with which people must register to obtain a license to operate a motor vehicle on public roads does NOT violate anyone’s right to association if all employees of such a bureau are voluntary (they chose to take a job with government and they can leave that job anytime) and all people who must interact with that bureau do so on a purely official and transactional basis (filling out a form, obtaining the rule book, taking a test, applying for a license, receiving a license) and those interactions don’t constitute an “association” between the people being served and anyone who works at the bureau, or with each other. The fact that everyone who legally operates a motor vehicle does so with a license from the government doesn’t create an association between any two drivers or between those drivers and the government employees who served them.

Similarly, when the right to equal opportunity results in a demand that a business sell the same product or service to anyone who is willing and able to buy it, without discriminating on the basis of sex or skin color, the right to peaceful association is not violated because a mere purchase of a good does not create an association between a buyer and a seller.