Could it be time for the US to look towards European declaration of human rights and define political views, or any world views for that matter, to be equally worth defining as a protected class as for people who visit a holy place regularly. None should be looking at people's social media for undesirable political views, no more than they should dig into peoples life to determine if they are a devout something.
"Hard way", sure; just don't count on the "learning" part.
I'm a British national. When I left the UK in 2018, people were still talking about Dunkirk like it was a British victory rather than a rolling defeat whose only (even then partially) successful component was the final evacuation; about WW2 like it was a simple victory rather than a Pyrrhic victory; and about the Empire like the end of it was the UK's choice.
US has had periods of wild spread moral panic around satanic worshipping, including murder trials where such ideas became central to the cases.
Scrutinizing belifs generally don't lead to anything but misery for everyone involved. This is very different from scrutinize crime that has happened.
The only grey area is the role of secret police. Some people, possible a majority, do want the government to scrutinize belifs and political views in order to determen risk. I am less sure, but I also know that human rights and protected classes has less protection against risk assessments conducted by the secret police.
Maybe a nitpick, but there is no European Declaration of Human Rights. To unweave the web of confusingly similarly named documents:
1) The 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights [0] which was written by the United Nations (with Eleanor Roosevelt as the committee chair). As a Declaration, the document itself has no legal weight, and the US has only ratified three out of nine core treaties that are based on it. One of them is the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights [1], which does seem applicable here. Before rejoicing however, consider that the other two treaties that the US has ratified are the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination [2] and the United Nations Convention Against Torture [3] -- so don't expect any miracles here.
2) The European Convention on Human Rights [4], which is both a document and a court where human rights violations can be tried. Its jurisdiction is all members of the Council of Europe [5], which is broader than just the European Union (even Russia used to be a member, but was kicked out after the invasion of Ukraine). The EU requires all members to ratify the ECHR as one of the conditions of membership.
3) The EU itself has a Charter of Fundamental Rights [6] which covers the same topics. From what I could find, the main reason for the name change is that the EU fundamental rights are broader than the international human rights, so this avoids confusion when discussing either in international contexts.
