Posted on 05/11/2003 7:04:33 AM PDT by RJCogburn
IN AN April 30 essay titled "The Libertarian Question," my fellow National Review Online contributing editor Stanley Kurtz argues that laws against sodomy, adultery and incest should remain on the books largely to protect the institution of heterosexual marriage.
By stigmatizing sexual relations outside that institution, Kurtz believes "the taboo on non-marital and non-reproductive sexuality helps to cement marital unions, and helps prevent acts of adultery that would tear those unions apart."
Kurtz also states that keeping adult incest illegal will reduce the odds of sex between adults and their minor relatives. Anti-pedophilia laws, virtually everyone agrees, should be energetically enforced, whether or not the child molesters and their victims are family members.
But Kurtz overlooks the fact that anti-sodomy laws can throw adults in jail for having consensual sex. Approval or disapproval of homosexual, adulterous or incestuous behavior among those over 18 is not the issue. Americans should remain free to applaud such acts or, conversely, denounce them as mortal sins. The public policy question at hand is whether American adults should or should not be handcuffed and thrown behind bars for copulating with people of the same sex, beyond their own marriages or within their bloodlines.
If this sounds like hyperbole, consider the case of Lawrence and Garner v. Texas, currently before the Supreme Court.
On Sept. 17, 1998, Harris County sheriffs deputies responded to a phony complaint from Roger Nance, a disgruntled neighbor of John Geddes Lawrence, then 55. They entered an unlocked door to Lawrence's eighth-floor Houston apartment looking for an armed gunman. While no such intruder existed, they did discover Lawrence having sex with another man named Tyron Garner, then 31.
"The police dragged them from Mr. Lawrence's home in their underwear," says Brian Chase, a staff attorney with the Dallas office of the Lambda Legal Defense Fund (www.lambdalegal.org) which argued on the gentlemen's behalf before the Supreme Court. "They were put in jail for 24 hours. As a result of their conviction, they would have to register as sex offenders in Idaho, Louisiana, Mississippi and South Carolina. If this arrest had taken place in Oklahoma, they could have faced 10 years in prison. It's kind of frightening." Lawrence and Garner were fined $200 each plus $141.25 in court costs.
Ironically, Chase adds by phone, "At the time the Texas penal code was revised in 1972, heterosexual sodomy was removed as a criminal offense, as was bestiality."
Even though some conservatives want government to discourage non-procreative sex, those Houston sheriff's deputies could not have apprehended a husband and wife engaged in non-reproductive oral or anal sex (although married, heterosexual couples still can be prosecuted for the same acts in Alabama, Florida, Idaho, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina, Utah and Virginia). And were Lawrence caught naked in bed with a Rottweiler, consenting or otherwise, the sheriffs could not have done more than suggest he pick on someone his own species. However, because Lawrence preferred the company of a willing, adult human being of his same sex, both were shuttled to the hoosegow.
"The point is, this could happen to anyone," Chase says. "This was the result of a malicious prank call made by a neighbor who was later arrested and jailed for 15 days for filing a false report."
As for grownups who lure children into acts of homosexuality, adultery and incest, the perpetrators cannot be imprisoned quickly enough. The moment members of the North American Man-Boy Love Association go beyond discussion of pedophilia to actions in pursuit thereof, someone should call 911 and throw into squad cars the men who seek intimate contact with males under 18. Period.
The libertarian question remains before Stanley Kurtz and the Supreme Court. Should laws against adult homosexuality, adultery and incest potentially place taxpaying Americans over 18 behind bars for such behavior? Priests, ministers, rabbis and other moral leaders may decry these activities. But no matter how much people may frown upon these sexual appetites, consenting American adults should not face incarceration for yielding to such temptations.
Here is the libertarian answer to this burning question: Things deemed distasteful should not always be illegal. This response is one that every freedom-loving American should embrace.
"...restrictions should be based on the specific activity rather than the sex of the participants."
Exactly.
By enacting laws that are obviously targeted at a specific segment of the population, a situation is created where the argument can be made that laws impacting this specific segment of the population need to receive high scrutiny in the Courts.
While we argue that homosexuals are not to be considered a "protected classification" under current anti-discrimination laws, we continue to support actions that actually HELP them achieve that status.
I must have missed that commandment... I don't claim to be a bible expert, but if the Bible says gambling is a sin against G-d, I've never seen or heard of it. If it is a sin, then there are an awful lot of churches that are encouraging sin with Bingo!
Mark
Boy do you have a warped imagination. Anarchists believe that there should be no rules. Libertarians believe that the rules (i.e. the Constitution) should be STRICTLY followed, so that if it's NOT in the Constitution, the Government shouldn't be doing it! In fact, liberals and conservative are simply two sides to the same coin. Both want absolute control over peoples' lives. Just in different areas. For conservatives, it's peoples' personal lives. For liberals, it's peoples' economic lives. In both cases, they want the government to control peoples' lives. Not the Libertarians.
Mark
While that may well be true, that does not imply that every homosexual couple is more promiscuous than every heterosexual couple.
I guess what bothers me most about statutes like the one in Texas, though, is that there has (AFAIK) been no significant effort to enforce the statute against people committing sodomy in property they control (either through ownership or rental) and were only detected because police happened to enter their property without a warrant for stated reasons which had nothing to do with these people's conduct.
Methinks thou doth protesteth too much
Is this the pot calling the kettle black?
Mark
Right. Further, I think that when writing laws such as these the legislatures need to make clear the extent to which such laws are to be enforced. If they intend to have them enforced strictly, they should make it abundantly clear and say so, including justifying surveillance to catch the lawbreakers. If the laws are not intended to be enforced against people who are attempting to be discrete and who are on property they control (through ownership or rental), the laws should say that.
Otherwise, the result will be situations like the Texas case where a law which is generally not applied to people who are attempting to act discretely in their own residence can nonetheless get randomly applied against unlucky people.
Interesting that you didn't compare unmarried (single) male homosexuals to unmarried (single) male heterosexual males. Instead you compared them to couples. I would be willing to bet that unmarried homosexual couples are no more promiscuous than unmarried heterosexual couples. I know how promiscuous unmarried heterosexuals can be... I went to college, and saw it first hand!
Mark
Oh, some of them surely have morals. They just work very hard to keep them buried and hidden out of sight. They mortally fear being thought of as narrow-minded. They desperately want to be considered trendy and progressive. Because of the libertarians' desperate need to be thought of as noble by the crass, self-indulgent, and perverted classes, Bill Clinton understands and relates to libertarians far, far better than he does social conservatives.
Such libertarians are worse than useless in the culture wars; they are absolute dead weight because they lack the courage of their convictions. Because they will not take a principled stand on moral issues ("consent" is the flabby substitute catch-all word for "morals" in their limited lexicon), they get increasingly large and more frequent truckloads of moral sewage dumped in their communities, sewage that they mewlingly and passively profess to hate.
Or LIR at the slot machines then, because I have been there too. Not quite the same thing I would think, but then, what do I know, I have gambled! :-)
I think there are wide variations in what libertarians believe; some of them believe that morals are important, but that government is the wrong entity to enforce them.
If the people of a town happen to believe that someone is a bad moral influence, libertarians would not object if people and businesses in the town refused to deal with that person. I suspect some libertarians would be much more willing than others to shun people they saw as being immoral, but one of the tenets of libertarianism is that the right of free association includes the right to shun others.
To be sure, society is much more mobile today than 100 years ago, so the effect of shunning is considerably reduced. Nonetheless, I suspect that if the government didn't in many cases forbid it, shunning could in many cases be as effective as legislation.
Yeah, that's the ticket. < /sarcasm>
You're right, I compared apples to oranges. Didn't mean to.
What I was trying to say is that the unmarried male homosexual community is far more promiscuous than the unmarried heterosexual community. I believe this is actually documented. Perhaps the reason for it is that in the homo community both partners are horny males.
I don't disagree with most of your positions, it's just that I do see some danger from the gay community.
Shades of big brother, for sure.
What portion of the acts of homosexual sodomy that were committed in private domiciles in Texas last year were prosecuted? 0.1%? 0.01%? 0.001%? How much effort was made to catch and arrest people committing such acts?
Not every sin should be a crime and not every crime is a sin.
God has a way of enforcing his own laws. We don't need the cops to enforce anti idolotry laws or the laws of gravity.
If the government has no business enforcing Sabbath laws (one of the Big Ten) then why should it have business enforcing sodomy laws?
As much as homos repulse me and I believe what God says about the topic, I see no reason that free people cannot willing choose to sin. Let God sort it out.
. . . I will do everything in my power to make sure they become larger, more visible, and powerful in my community as well as in government and the governmental decisions of this nation. It's the least I can do to show them how tolerant and broad-minded I am. I will do that by defending their taxpayer-costly perversion from governmental sanction with the same zeal I show for protecting the Second Amendment."
Isn't that what you are really saying?
Exactly. The existence of laws which proscribe a cruel behavior means it will be a lot harder for them to get together, and there would be a lot less cruelty going on. Now, since the Democratic moral-liberals passed all this garbage legislation (which the libertarians are praising) it doesn't stay hidden in the bedroom but is shoved into everyone's faces, including children's.
Try to find a newspaper in any large town, with so-called 'consenting adults' state laws, which doesn't feature a 'Gay Scene' section, filled with want ads. Try to walk down the street, or see Disneyland, without perversion being paraded in front of families. Laws against perversion would again force it into the closet where it rightfully belongs.
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