Posted on 03/22/2015 7:55:18 AM PDT by CHRISTIAN DIARIST
A friend sent me a link to a newspaper column celebrating the supposed ascendance of libertarianism among the hoi polloi.
“It is clear,” the author wrote, “that there are certain areas where an increasing portion of Americans are adapting more libertarian views and simply want the government to leave them alone and allow them to freely live their lives.”
He cited as examples same-sex marriage and drug legalization. “People have generally come to the conclusion,” he asserted, “that they don’t really care to whom one is attracted or what consenting adults do behind closed doors.” He also predicted that “the next libertarian wave to wash across the national consciousness will be drug legalization.”
Where “the prohibitionist” errs, he asserted, is in “the failure to recognize that since one owns the right to his own life, his body is as much his property, if not more so, than the clothes he wears or the change in his pocket, and he is free to utilize it as he sees fit.”
Well, I do no dispute that support has increased in recent years for both homosexual marriage and decriminalization of drug use. The polls suggests as much. But that doesn’t make it right.
For the Word of God declares: “Woe unto them that call evil good, and good evil; that put darkness for light, and light for darkness.”
Indeed, there is a libertarian argument to be made for seemingly every evil under the sun.
Take pedophilia: The North American Man/Boy Love Association (NAMBLA) group thinks there nothing wrong with a grown man being sexual attracted to a pre-pubescent boy.
In fact, the main goal of the pedophile rights group, which was headed for years by libertarian Joe Powers, is to “repeal age of consent laws that make it a crime for adults to have sex with minors.”
We see a similar move to “normalize” polygamy; to confer upon such multi-spouse unions the same right to marry as homosexual couples. The movement was given a huge boost last year by a federal district court judge in Utah who ruled that the state’s law banning polygamous households violated the First and Fourteenth Amendments.
The legal challenge was brought by the polygamous “family” featured on the TLC reality show “Sister Wives.” Parents magazine, which should not be mistaken as pro-family, finds the show “very redeeming.” Perhaps the best part of the show, according to Parents, is “its subtle Libertarian message.”
Not even incest is out of bounds for libertarians. Just last year, in fact, the German Ethics Council, a government body, recommended that the country’s laws banning incest between adult brothers and sisters should be abolished.
“The fundamental right of adult siblings to sexual self-determination,” trumps “the abstract idea of protection of the family,” the council declared. That line of reasoning expressed “a libertarian ideal of sexual autonomy,” noted The Week magazine.
The same kind of unGodly reasoning informs prevailing libertarian views on such issues as abortion, euthanasia, drugs and prostitution – that our bodies are our property and we can do with them what we will.
Indeed, Murray Rothbard, who according to the Blackwell Encyclopaedia of Political Thought played a leading intellectual role in the development of modern libertarianism, said that if a mother-to-be decides she doesn’t want the human life growing in her womb, “then the fetus becomes a parasitic ‘invader’ of her person, and the mother has the perfect right to expel this invader from her domain.”
Jack Kevorkian, the proponent of physician-assisted suicide who sent more than 100 souls to an early grave, never pronounced himself a “libertarian,” but he certainly was embraced by the libertarian community. That included Mary J. Ruwart, a leading candidate for the 2008 Libertarian Party presidential nomination, who actually contacted Kevorkian in 1993 to assist her sister Martie to take her life. “Martie was a person for whom Dr. Kevorkian really was the only option,” said sister Mary.
The libertarian Cato Institute is one of the foremost advocates of drug legalization, not just for marijuana, but any every and every drug.
Indeed, in 1999 testimony to Congress, Cato’s David Boaz argued that “(t)he long federal experiment in prohibition of marijuana, cocaine, heroin and other drugs has given us unprecedented crime and corruption combined with a manifest failure to stop the use of drugs or reduce their availability to crime.”
But libertarian Boaz and other drug-legalization advocates don’t get it. “Drugs like marijuana and cocaine are not dangerous because they are illegal,” as Joe Califano, the one time chairman of the National Center on Addiction and Substance Abuse at Columbia University, explained. “They are illegal because they are dangerous.”
That is borne out by data from the Centers for Disease Control, which indicates that deaths from drug overdoses have risen steadily over the past two decades. Among people 25 to 64 years old, drug overdoses actually cause more deaths than motor vehicle crashes.
The libertarian case for legal prostitution also is morally bankrupt. It is based on the notion that sex for money is a “victimless crime;” that a woman should be free to sell her body without government meddling.
Never mind a study from the Netherlands, where prostitution is legal, which reported that 60 percent of women in legal prostitution had been physically assaulted and 40 percent had been coerced into legal prostitution. Kill our unborn babies. Take our own lives. Enslave ourselves to drugs. Sell and buy sex. All that is okay under tenets of libertarianism.
But the Word of God says different.
“Do you not know,” the Apostle Paul wrote to the Christian faithful in Corinth, “that your body is the temple of the Holy Spirit who is in you, whom you have from God, and you are not your own?”
Indeed, we were all, everyone, bought at a price. And, therefore, we are to glorify God in body and spirit.
Ditto. Not to mention that Scripture also commands generosity toward the poor - the Christian Diarist will doubtless want government to also enforce that aspect of Biblical morality.
Only to the degree that Christians have been imbued with libertarian principles as exampled in our founding documents, and as demonstrated by our founding fathers (whether those Christians know it or not). Religion (in contrast to faith) is at it's core a form of control, which, at the core, makes every religion a form of government. No government wants to be limited and decentralized, because it necessarily thwarts the very thing it's made to do. The efficiency of control IS centralized and IS coercive.
So it is not natural for religion to adhere to the limits of libertarian thought, any more than any other governmental system. And IMHO, it is that libertarian strain in this country's founding that limits religion's coercive effect, and that I think, is of great merit.
In fact, I believe that traditional conservatives should like to see a country where states take a different approach to moral issues. This exercise in free will among individuals that could move from state to state would be the best way to demonstrate the benefits and advantages of a morally upright state/community.
That is perfectly said, and is in line with the precepts that founded this nation.
We would no doubt be surprised how many conservatives would be libertarians if it were not for the gay marriage and abortion issues.
Even though I have never met a gay libertarian it makes the party look bad because they do not believe it is an issue that should be decided by Government.
On the Christian issue any one who know the liberals know that a conservative is much more liberal in the biblical sense of the word than a liberal.
Liberalism has nothing to do with being a liberal giver.
Pope John Paul II said that “Freedom consists not in doing what we like, but in having the right to do what we ought.”
How does a Libertarian form of government conflict with that? Morality cannot be legislated, it must come from within the individual.
Libertarians are useful idiots. They have the advantage of knowing their ideas have never been used and probably never will.
Libertarian ideas are in use in many lawless societies that are run by gangs, warlords, private armies etc, such as Liberia and Sierra Leone. Though perhaps Liberians would be surprised to discover that libertarians are striving to build the same kind of society in America.
Christians vote, and they cannot vote for gay marriage and abortion and all the Sodom and Gomorrah morality of the libertarians.
Christians must vote as Christian.
True Christians are social conservatives, and they vote as such, they do not support electing representatives that will give us Sodom and Gomorrah.
Libertarians are no different from the Dems on matters that mean the most to conservative Christians. Dems, remember, the ones who tried to vote God out in their convention.
Short answer NO!
Is libertarianism compatible with what the Bible teaches about a hedonist life style, sodomy, and atheism? Yes.
To hedonists, Sodomites, and atheists, the Dems, of course, come first, but with the Libertarian party a close second.
Liberaltarians routinely patrol FR, never revealing that’s what they are, subversively putting in their licks for the most anti-social conservative candidates possible in every election.
Things are going good. My excitement about Ted Cruz has brought me back. How have things been since I’ve been gone?
How Libertarianism and Christianity intersect
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If the government and its anti-family legislation were out of the way, people would naturally form associations and many of them will be religious in nature. Pretty soon abortion and public display of sodomy will be punished by customary laws in nearly every legislation. This is how libertarianism and conservatism ARE compatible.
When propagandists of either description use selective libertarian doctrines in the environment where he government is telling people how to live their lives from womb to tomb, the outcomes are grotesque, but that is not strictly libertarianism’s fault.
That and Drug legalization.
There is no such thing as little l big l libertarians, there are only libertarians.
No Christian should support a libertarian, at any level of government.
Using the political system to destroy conservatism by electing social liberals/libertarians, is wrong, whether you are voting for a mayor, or state legislator, or governor, or President.
The constitution was not written to give us abortion and gay marriage and porn, and child molesting, 1780 Americans would be lynching libertarians, not voting for their leftist agenda.
like to stay and chat but i gotta go back to work...
here is what i have to say..
i more than likely believe in the same things you do, down to the issue...
i just do not believe, under penalty of law, that the government should FORCE me into acting the way you want me to act..under threat of imprisonment...
and it is nothing more than that
A Christian or American that votes for a politician who believes that abortion and gay marriage are rights, is deeply confused.
To walk out of church and then vote against the conservative to represent you in government, and instead vote for the pro-abortion/proporn/progay marriage/etc libertarian to represent you and decide American law and culture and society, is absurd.
I would rather be religious in traditional America, under a social conservative government, pre-1960s, before we became so libertarian.
It worked pretty well before the 1960s.
We did fine without abortion and gay marriage, for instance.
No kidding, some of them will carry on a flame war for hundreds of posts, all the time denying that they are arguing for what they are arguing for.
It is like trying to pin down mercury with your thumb.
True libertarians do support abortion.
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