I was giving this a lot of thought and I wonder if taking away the freedom to discriminate against people of different races actually takes away our ability to make moral choices for ourselves.
Yes. Of course it does. You are seriously wondering this? It's insanely obvious that it takes away your [legal] ability to make moral choices for yourself.
I believe that what you are
really wondering, is whether such restriction is
itself good or bad. You are experiencing a conflict of morality versus ethics. The problem before you is this: Is an ethical value (a view of right and wrong from an external system) superior to a moral value (a view of right and wrong from an internal/personal system)? Is there a universal rule as to whether ethics or morality is superior? And if not, by what methods are individual cases deemed superior in either the ethical or moral perspective?
I know it is wrong to discriminate on this basis but taking away that choice from others might take away the right to make moral choices for themselves.
There are all kinds of laws and social conventions that deprive an individual of the right to make moral choices for their own selves. If I make a moral choice for myself that murdering my former lover is the proper course of action, the law forbids me from making that choice. In this case, the ethical determination of good vs bad is [allegedly] superior to any moral valuations.
The freedom of religion implies that we have the right to pursue what we think is right since two different religions might have opposite moral codes example: satanism vs Christianity.
Actually, you perceive far too much in the freedom of religion. Freedom of religion is a general right to worship, or not worship, in accordance with your own choice and/or conviction. This freedom is not unlimited and certain constraints exist. Part of your religion might be human sacrifice, but that does not mean you have a 1st amendment right to actually practice human sacrifice.
Now, here's a dilemma for you: What if your religious belief was that religious freedom is not allowed? If you were a judge, would that give you the right to ignore the 1st amendment rights of parties bringing 1st amendment cases before you? If you and 500 like minded individuals were elected to Congress, would your religious belief make acceptable and constitutional a law that mandated universal adherence to your own religion?
Obviously the answer is "no." The freedom of religion, as a limited right, continues to maintain a fundamental element of ethical value being superior to moral value.
On a tangent: Satanism is not really an opposite morality from Christianity. The idea of Satanism being opposite to Christianity is most prevalent in Laveyan Satanism, and not really applicable to other forms. But, to be blunt, La Vey was a joke and an idiot. His work was an ill advised juvenile attempt to expand on the work of Nietzsche, and was overall a spectacular failure. He stole Nietzsche's duality as personified in the concept of Dionysus vs. the Crucified, and failing to truly understand it, he warped it into precisely what it was not. Nietzsche's work was a transformational evolution
beyond good and evil, with the goal (at the very least) to move humanity forward and into a more profound morality, but more substantially to eventually take us to the complete dissolution of dualistic morality in favor of a singular affirmation of life. This put's La Vey's "Satanism" somewhere between ironic and pathetic. Instead of expanding Nietzsche's work to move further beyond good and evil, La Vey doubles down on the concept of good vs evil, and simply provides his own list. La Vey's adoption of the moniker "Satanism" as a polar opposition to Christianity was merely an attempt to breath new life into Nietzsche's duality, based on a substantial failure to comprehend the original work. Nietzsche revered Christ as one of the greatest figures in history, as he also revered the conceptual Dionysus. Nietzsche's objections to the philosophy of Christ was that it has lost its usefulness to humanity and now served to hold us back and to hold us to valuing death over life. Thus, Dionysus vs the Crucified is an inherent conflict within the soul of humanity between two aspects of humanity that are both majestic and divine; a conflict where each side represents our best qualities. The waging of that conflict would take place through the willful destruction of man to make way for the
ubermensch. In other words, the conflict will bring humanity to a more profound wisdom and enlightenment. This is drastically different from La Vey's duality of Satan vs God, where Satan is posited as "all things good" and God is posited as "all things evil," immediately followed by La Vey's unsophisticated dictations about what is good (essentially being the giving into every lower urge and transient desire as it may come to pass) and what is evil (essentially being any aspiration to be more than your own base animal instincts). La Vey would have been dismissed by Nietzsche as an example of rabble, as described in
Thus Spoke Zarathustra.
Clearly we can choose either religion (or none at all) which means we can decide what we think is right based on our freedom to associate with our church. What if someone really doesn't think there is nothing wrong with discriminating based on race? Does the first amendment mean that anti discrimination laws are unconstitutional.?
No more than it means that anti-murder laws are unconstitutional where a person has a religious belief in human sacrifice.
