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.
No. The First Amendment precludes that. No wonder you come across like you have no clue what you are talking about...
Marriage exists, obviously. I married my Wife and would have done so regardless of what the government wanted. In fact, not having to get a Marriage License would have made it easier for a young couple starting out.
That you appear to WANT government involved in your marriage says a lot about you, again... None of it good.
No, America is trending on libertine and freedom without responsibility.
There has never been a time in American history when the federal government was not having to decide the validity of marriage for it’s purposes, for instance in 1780 the Continental congress legislated on widow benefits for the military, and it continued to update those laws without interruption, 1794, 1798, 1802, and on and on.
So atheists are out of luck, and gay churches and Islam gets gay marriage and polygamy according to you.
Something that you repeatedly promote, yet ignore when confronted on it.
Paying out disbursements of earned pay from deceased military members is not legislating marriage.
You fail in the most epic ways possible.
Earned pay? One man single, one married, both die, only one has a legally defined widow, and she receives consideration, that still applies in 2013, who gets the widow pension, the gay partner, all 4 wives?
He’s gone on like this for days. Read some of the other posts. He doesn’t like being reminded that the constitution hadn’t been ratified in 1780. Seriously...he will troll the hell out of you if you let him.
I know. This is an old dance... He never comes up with anything new.
There is only so much room on the one page of that MS Word doc that he cuts and pastes most of his crap from.
LOL...
Come to think of it, there are a couple of trolls here that bear all the markings of badly written quasi-heuristic shell scripts. ;-)
You should read the post "for instance in 1780 the Continental congress legislated on widow benefits for the military, and it continued to update those laws without interruption, 1794, 1798, 1802, and on and on."
You may be winning the gay marriage war, but you sure aren't very convincing here, among conservatives.
Post 85 was new, I notice that you avoided it, just as you avoid every substantive flaw pointed out in your agenda.
That's contract law though. Has nothing to do with marriage I could have just as easily signed it over to the NRA.
Still doesn't make it relevant.
Why do you do that, you are talking about life insurance, not a widow’s pension, or on base housing or medical or all the other categories of ‘married’ and the military or federal employment.
You do that kind of thing over and over, you just make up something else and pretend that is the question, nobody is more evasive and secretive than libertarians.
“”There has never been a time in American history when the federal government was not having to decide the validity of marriage for it’s purposes, for instance in 1780 the Continental congress legislated on widow benefits for the military, and it continued to update those laws without interruption, 1794, 1798, 1802, and on and on.””
“”Earned pay? One man single, one married, both die, only one has a legally defined widow, and she receives consideration, that still applies in 2013, who gets the widow pension, the gay partner, all 4 wives?””
That is nothing more than contract law. You and your employer could agree that all of your benefits go to your cat.
Has very little to do with marriage.
You are fighting awfully hard to keep the legal framework that is currently allowing gays to re-write a religious institution.
Why is that?
The military does not give benefits to your cat, only your married spouse, earlier you wanted that defined only by religion, now you want it to be anybody and everything, just write up a piece of paper and now the government has to give widow benefits to your cat, or gay lover, or your multiple wives.
You are fighting awfully hard to prevent conservatives from stopping this march of gay marriage and the polygamy to follow.
You incredibly dishonest arguments of ending marriage to save it, by just letting each individual define it for themselves, are childish.
Do something that you have never done, tell us how you disagree with this (below) as things stand today, not in some theoretical future.
1.3 Personal Relationships
Sexual orientation, preference, gender, or gender identity should have no impact on the government’s treatment of individuals, such as in current marriage, child custody, adoption, immigration or military service laws. Government does not have the authority to define, license or restrict personal relationships. Consenting adults should be free to choose their own sexual practices and personal relationships.
“Come to think of it, there are a couple of trolls here that bear all the markings of badly written quasi-heuristic shell scripts. ;-)”
There are organizations that pay people all day to troll and disrupt grassroot conservative message boards and also to shape political discourse.
Romney’s people had them in droves for two primaries.
I wouldn’t doubt there is a word doc for them to cut-and-paste from.
Captain Cut-n-Paste just won’t give up. And I’m still hedging my bets that there is more poorly coded script to him than actual living troll.
LOL, you are one cowardly troll, you have nothing to say, but you will hide out and make insults against people, classic libertarianism, a childish, contradictory fantasy.
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