[theBuckwheat]

While I am sympathetic to what you have posted, the problem lies in the society itself. As John Adams famously said, â€Å“Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.â€�

How does one construct a government for a society when every citizen has rights, including the right to vote, and then we face a segment of the population whose values we realize are hostile to our own? Well, I don't know, nor do I care what my neighbor does in private. I only care when his values animate behavior that seeks to destroy my own rights and liberty.

The problem is that we have allowed government to intrude into so many areas of our lives that we cannot live our lives outside of its approval or compliance with its tens of thousands of rules and regulations. It has come to the point that various groups seek to protect and advance their agendas, not by association or persuasion, but by seizing and manipulating government policy. This is very true in setting lesson plans for public schools. It is very true in health policy.

Your solution implies that social conservatives attempt to regain control over government and (re)impose their values via government policy. The day when this could succeed is now mostly in our rear view mirror. The day when, for example, government could force retail stores to close on Sunday (which was the case until about 20 years ago), is long gone. How many of us want to live where government imposes a day of rest? (I for one do not, for I observe the Sabbath, and I could not be in the retail business if I could not open my shop on Sunday.) In the state I live in, this law persists to this very moment. Automobile dealerships must be closed on Sunday.

No, the solution is to realize that was an improper use of the armed agents of coercive government policy. In order to prevent leftists, homosexuals, pagans and other people that social conservatives disagree with on a policy and values basis, from seizing government and doing to us what we did to them, we must scale back government to such an extent that it becomes impossible for anyone to do that.

This is not a "libertarian dream". We only have to reflect on how the Nazis, who were really National *Socialists*, used the progressive values of eugenics to justify sterilization and murder of many people they considered to be defective. Well, excuse me, we don't have to go all the way back to Nazi Germany, for our own *progressives* in our own states used state power to force defective people to be sterilized.

It was not that many years ago that progressives seized state power to destroy the unalienable rights of some citizens. Knowing what policy chaos that progressives can wreak in society makes it an urgent matter to roll back government to its rightful place in society- to protect every citizen, and make the country work, but very little else!

Either we will see the various states legally enshrine the rights of homosexuals to "marry", and thus use the State to take the next obvious step: to insist that public schools and public policy recognize those "unions", or else we get government out of the marriage business. For when homosexuals are "equal" in this respect, it is easier for their status to justify "hate crimes" when anyone speaks the moral truth about sodomy.

Even so, how does one deny a homosexual single woman the ability to adopt a child, a right that a heterosexual single woman? Upon what basis shall we discriminate one from the other based, not upon Christian values which carry no weight in court, but upon the equality implied and stated in the Constitution?

We cannot unring the bell. We must adopt policy that moves us towards being able to fully enjoy our rights irrespective of what other people may think of them. That gives us the ability to advocate for those rights, to tell others why morality is important, even as too many voices today think morality is old fashioned.

[steve-b]

Indeed. Social “conservatives” who fed the beast of government so that it would do work that they ought to have done themselves now find the beast loose and snarling at their throats. I had hoped that my facetious comments on an imagined case of the poster’s particular ox (Asian Cinema) being gored would have made that clear.

[puroresu]

You're probably correct that it's too late. I think the West is probably finished. The future lies with Asia and the Islamic world.

A society of unlimited freedom does not exist and cannot exist. There has to be some accommodation of culture. This is where the libertarians always fail. They can't understand that people aren't individual autonomy units totally divorced from any societal influence. Thus, when leftists demand the "liberation" of homosexuals (as one example) they jump on the bandwagon, not realizing that liberated homosexuals will demand a government far bigger than the relatively mild laws and social restrictions placed on homosexuals historically.

When that happens, the only defense the libertarian has is to demand that government get out of the marriage business, or out of the education business, as if that would even be considered in a world in which homosexuals have political clout. You can't scale back government in a socially liberal society for any number of reasons.

First, the people empowered in such a society are homosexuals, feminists, Third World oriented racial minorities, and other groups which are non-competitive in our culture. In a true free market, based on competition, they'd fail. Second, the behavior of many of these groups creates a plethora of social problems which lead to more government (disease, illegitimacy, crime....).

This is why the left has spent so much time promoting social liberalism. Once they get that, all other areas of society will become liberal by default. Chuck Schumer isn't promoting the homosexual agenda because he believes in freedom, but because he doesn't.

I see us becoming more like Europe, which in turn is becoming more like the old USSR. Conservatives in Europe now refer to the EU as the EUSSR. Out of the ashes of the West's decline, something new will arise but without Christendom it won't be anything like our founding fathers created. It'll be an authoritarian Asian model, or a totalitarian Islamic model. The left imagines a secular totalitarian leftist EU and a similar regime here, but the very diversity the left has promoted in these regions will kill that as the parasites feed off the hosts.

I'm afraid that libertarians who imagine a "live and let live" world in which homosexuals respect and tolerate Christians, in which Muslims respect and tolerate Christians & Jews, in which racial minorities agree to compete on an equal basis without government preferences, in which the schools and other things are privatized to allow the above to flourish, is a wild fantasy that can never be. As just one example, homosexuals have more political clout in California and in the New England states than elsewhere in America. Those areas are also more secular. Does anyone imagine a legislature in any of those states abolishing public education? If anything, they'll be the first to outlaw home schooling.

Your post is very good, by the way. Well-written and well-argued. I hope we can agree to disagree, if indeed we do!