Posted on 06/17/2013 7:18:47 AM PDT by SeekAndFind
More people value individual liberty, but we might be losing the moral guardrails.
Are Americans becoming more libertarian on cultural issues? I see evidence that they are, in poll findings and election results on three unrelated issues: marijuana legalization, same-sex marriage, and gun rights.
Start with pot. Last November voters in the states of Colorado and Washington voted to legalize marijuana, by a margin of 55 to 45 percent in Colorado (more than Barack Obama’s margin in the state) and by 56 to 44 percent in Washington. In contrast, in 2010, California voters rejected legalization 53 to 47 percent. These results and poll data suggest a general movement toward legal marijuana.
State legislatures in Denver and Olympia have been grappling with regulatory legislation amid uncertainty over whether federal laws — and federal-law enforcers — override their state laws. But marijuana has already become effectively legal in many of the states that have reduced penalties for possession of small amounts or have legalized medical marijuana. You can easily find addresses and phone numbers of dispensaries on the Web.
Same-sex marriage, rejected in statewide votes between 1998 and 2008 and most recently in North Carolina in May 2012, was approved by voters in Maine and Maryland in November 2012, and voters then rejected a ban on it in Minnesota. Since then, legislators in Delaware, Minnesota, and Rhode Island have voted to legalize same-sex marriage. A dozen states and the District of Columbia now have similar laws that would have been unthinkable two decades ago. I have yet to see signs of political backlash. Polls show that support for same-sex marriage is well nigh universal among young Americans, but it has also been rising among their elders.
To some it may seem odd to yoke marijuana and gay rights, generally thought of as causes of the Left, with gun rights, supported more by the political Right. Yet in all three cases, Americans have been moving toward greater liberty for the individual.
One landmark was the first law, passed in Florida in 1987, allowing ordinary citizens to carry concealed weapons. Many, including me, thought that the result would be frequent shootouts in the streets. That hasn’t happened. Almost all ordinary citizens, we’ve learned, handle guns with appropriate restraint, as they do with the other potentially deadly weapon that people encounter every day, the automobile. Concealed-carry laws have spread to 40 states, with few ill effects. Politicians who opposed them initially, such as former Michigan governor Jennifer Granholm, have not sought their repeal.
In contrast, voters have reacted negatively to gun-control proposals, even after horrific events like the Newtown massacre. That was apparent in the Senate’s rejection of the Toomey-Manchin gun-registration bill.
What about the cultural issue that most pundits mention first, abortion? Attitudes have remained roughly the same: Most Americans think abortion should be, in Bill Clinton’s phrase, safe, legal, and rare. Young Americans, despite their libertarian leanings on same-sex marriage, are slightly less in favor of abortion rights than their elders are. They’ve seen sonograms, and all of them by definition owe their existence to a decision not to abort. And from the point of view of the unborn child, abortion is the opposite of liberating.
Back in the conformist America of the 1950s — a nation of greater income equality and stronger labor unions, as liberals like to point out — marijuana, homosexual acts, and abortion weren’t political issues. They were crimes. And opposition to gun-control measures in the 1950s and 1960s was much less widespread and vigorous than it is today.
Is this libertarian trend a good thing for the nation? Your answer will depend on your values.
I’m inclined to look favorably on it. I think the large majority of Americans can use marijuana and guns responsibly. Same-sex marriage can be seen as liberating, but it also includes an element of restraint. Abortions in fact have become more rare over a generation.
But I do see something to worry about. In his bestseller Coming Apart, my American Enterprise Institute colleague Charles Murray shows that college-educated Americans have handled no-fault divorce and other liberating trends of the 1970s with self-restraint.
But at the bottom of the social scale, we have seen an unraveling, with out-of-wedlock births, continuing joblessness, lack of social connectedness, and less civic involvement.
In conformist America, the old prohibitions provided these people with guardrails, as the Wall Street Journal’s Daniel Henninger has written. In today’s more libertarian America, the guardrails may be gone.
— Michael Barone, senior political analyst for the Washington Examiner, is a resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, a Fox News Channel contributor, and a co-author of The Almanac of American Politics.
Interestingly we evidently don't have any libertarians here at freerepublic, everyone here wants to stop gay marriage.
You are familiar with “Statement by the founder of Free Republic”?
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1103363/posts
Hooray! The windmill is dead!
I guess you are agreeing with post 101, we are all united in stopping “gay marriage”, and disagree with the libertarian position on it.
I don’t agree all FReepers are united in wishing to stop gay marriage.
I agree with the FR ownership that those promoting gay marriage should STFU about it here.
You finally offered a relevant statement, you don’t believe that anyone on this thread is a libertarian.
That is what libertarianism is all about, and the topic of the thread article, America is becoming more libertarian because they are becoming more supportive of drugs and gay marriage.
Libertarianism=gay marriage.
When did what anyone else believes become important? I missed that.
This not a libertarian site, and I don’t want it to become one.
Americans are becoming more supportive of drugs and gay marriage out of confusion and ignorance, not out of some high philosophical commitment to libertarianism.
Actually libertarianism is playing a huge role, it is a part of the national political argument, that is why they formed a party, to promote their philosophy and interject it into the national political mind.
Rinos love being able to explain that they are conservative on economics but “libertarian on some issues”, or “more libertarian on social issues”.
Read this thread and you can see how the gay marriage and drug agenda are promoted and protected here by libertarians, hidden behind the argument that they are merely being “libertarian”, they themselves aren’t fighting conservatives on gay marriage of course, is their claim, yet look at how angry and persistent they are.
Libertarianism is anti-conservative.
I notice that the “libertarians” are strangely silent on the daily intrusion of the government mandating seat belts in cars, something that affects almost 100% of the population.
Instead, we have endless railing about issues that affect only a few.
A RINO is someone who calls himself a "Republican", but doesn't give a rat's ass about the republic. To quote Rush "Words mean things."
Libertarians know what they want and why they exist, issues related to cars and speed limits, seat belts, nationalizing education, tobacco, alcohol, even gun issues don’t interest them much.
For 50 years the issues that they are obsessed with are the issues of the left, drugs, pornography, homosexuality, abortion, opening the borders completely and firing the Border Patrol and the INS, the libertarians have even dabbled in child sex, but they are trying to put that off for now.
Man, i need to find a group like that. I have to do all my forum crawling the old fashioned, non-paid way...
You may be right.
Hhhmmm... Could be a Stephen Hawking type thing. Some debilitating neurological disorder that has him typing off a pre-set menu controlled by his tongue and eye-blinks.
This could be their only form of human interaction.
Make you almost feel sorry for them...
Alomost.
What were they doing before that?
I watched MSNBC (about Russel Brand mocking the blond) for 10 minutes on youtube.
Aside from the blond being all a-flutter and being mocked by brand, they openly stated they had an entire room of people (looked like old NASA photos) whose job it was to use Facebook and other interactive media to promote whatever MSNBC wanted them to promote. (Brand asked what all those people were doing.)
In short, it’s liberal astroturf.
No doubt they do this the opposite way -— insert disruptive people like dumbass here to make absurd comments and try to paint conservatives as stupid.
It wouldn’t take 20 or so people working all day to do this across all the major conservative boards.
Cheap, easy, effective.
Agreed.
Then again...
If I could have had just one dollar for each of my posts here on FR, I’d be driving a Corvette instead of an old Dodge Dakota.
What we seem to have is trolls promoting the left’s agenda at freerepublic, under the idea that promoting the homosexual agenda, open borders, abortion, and drugs is totally different when someone calls it libertarianism.
Notice that marriage only had a few of us defending it, and the libertarians were fighting conservatives on the issue.
Read this article as it talks about America becoming more libertarian by becoming accepting of gay marriage.
You guys are trolls to support and encourage that transformation.
I’d rather drive the Dodge than a Corvette.
I’ve never liked them, except for the original 50s models.
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