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.
No.
Now you answer mine. Have you ever feared that Texas bedroom police would peek in on you as you engaged in it with your girl friend, boy friend, or pet schnauzer?
Such a gestapo mindset you exhibit, Luis. I hope it's a passing fad of yours, since you are usually a level-headed individual in many other areas of thought. Anything is morally-licit within a heterosexual marriage provided it is consensual and in no way degrading to either partner.
#218.
I've made the point on other threads that God condemns homosexuallity 'probably' more than any other act, except idolotry. Yet, it did not make the Big Ten that God gave to moses written in stone.
It just seems to me that laws written in stone are more than customs to be observed.
My point is that our government does not make or enforce religous laws that do not tresspass onto another person, like they do murder and theft.
The government isn't supposed to be enforcing religion, even if it is 'good for the community'.
Mideast, midwest, mountain states, Pacific states, or eastern seaboard. They all had such laws and enforced them before the destruction of traditional morals and the meltdown of the American family began in earnest in the 1960s. That was America before the perverts got firm hold of it.
Your America is the America of Larry Flynt; mine is the America of John Adams.
I'll choose Adams any day.
I disagree.
Where in this living constitution of yours does it say that.
Please provide a link to it.
Surely you jest?
"Anything is morally-licit within a heterosexual marriage, provided it is consensual and in no way degrading to either partner."
Not at all CJ, and that's my point. How can a partner be degraded if they consent to it? Do you then support swinging?
The anal cavity is as dirty in married women as it is in unmarried men. The Bible does not draw a distinction between heterosexual sodomy and homosexual sodomy, married or unmarried, and neither did the men who authored the Constitution. Thomas Jefferson said that sodomites "should be punished, if a man, by castration, if a woman by cutting through the cartilage of her nose of one-half inch in diameter at least." Do you see a distinction between married sodomites and ummarried sodomites there?
We have tempered with all the very same concepts that we stand on to condemn homosexuals, in order to justify our own participation in the very same activity we describe as deviant.
Here is the libertarian paradox:
Societies are necessary to protect liberties. Laws define a society. If the laws that define a society are destroyed to protect liberties, then the society those laws define will eventually be destroyed and be unable to protect liberties.
The answer is not libertarianism but conservatism balanced by (classic) liberalism. Conservatism protects the institutions of a society. Left unchecked, the society crushes the individual (the valid libertarian fear). (Classic) Liberalism protects the individual. Left unchecked, individual license destroys a society.
In balance, the two have done a pretty good job of keeping the US Strong and Free. Leaning too heavily toward one or the other will leave the US either strong, or free, but not both.
As always, it is a question of balance. Libertarianism, at least as posted on this board, is unbalanced.
Looking at the question of permitting homosexual behavior we should ask ourselves several hard questions, and look for evidentiary rather than anecdotal evidence. A small subset of those questions are (I picked a short list for brevity's sake because I believe they make the strongest point. Feel free to discuss the questions I did not include):
The conservative position is that we can not allow liberty to become license to the destruction of the Republic. Based on those three questions I have chosen to present this particular moral wrong can not be declared a civil right.
Shalom.
Here is an important question. Is morality an opinion or a reality?
That is, do we establish "good" and "evil" by popular vote, or do "good" and "evil" exist for us to discover?
Shalom.
Are you then arguing that people who enjoy that kind of sexual activity are not individuals?
Shalom.
If your answer to this question is also "yes", are you then in favor of criminalizing pre-marital sex, extra-marital sex, group sex, bondage, or anything above and beyond sex for the strict purpose of reproduction?
Who gest to define "sexual license", and last but not least, how will offending sexual activity be policed?
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