[pdonis]

> It’s closer to “freedom to make the right choices.”

Not quite. It means, individuals have to have the freedom to make their own choices, because nobody can be trusted to know what the "right" choices are and dictate them to others.

By "a moral and religious People", John Adams did not mean that every one of those people must agree on exactly what the right thing to do is. He meant that the people have to have the concept of right and wrong as things they are supposed to discern, things outside themselves that aren't dictated by any other authority (or at least not any human one), and to understand that they have a duty to do their best to make the right choices. The problem with our society today is that that concept of "right" has been discarded; instead there is a different concept of "right" that revolves around adherence to whatever political ideology is favored by those in power.

> more government coercion becomes necessary to suppress anti-social behavior

The problem is that the government can't be trusted to do that job. That's what "freedom" means in the American context. That's why the US Constitution doesn't give the Federal government the power to do it. The fact that our government does it anyway is a bug, not a feature.