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Is Libertarianism Compatible With Christianity?
The Christian Diarist ^ | March 22, 2015 | JP

Posted on 03/22/2015 7:55:18 AM PDT by CHRISTIAN DIARIST

A friend sent me a link to a newspaper column celebrating the supposed ascendance of libertarianism among the hoi polloi.

“It is clear,” the author wrote, “that there are certain areas where an increasing portion of Americans are adapting more libertarian views and simply want the government to leave them alone and allow them to freely live their lives.”

He cited as examples same-sex marriage and drug legalization. “People have generally come to the conclusion,” he asserted, “that they don’t really care to whom one is attracted or what consenting adults do behind closed doors.” He also predicted that “the next libertarian wave to wash across the national consciousness will be drug legalization.”

Where “the prohibitionist” errs, he asserted, is in “the failure to recognize that since one owns the right to his own life, his body is as much his property, if not more so, than the clothes he wears or the change in his pocket, and he is free to utilize it as he sees fit.”

Well, I do no dispute that support has increased in recent years for both homosexual marriage and decriminalization of drug use. The polls suggests as much. But that doesn’t make it right.

For the Word of God declares: “Woe unto them that call evil good, and good evil; that put darkness for light, and light for darkness.”

Indeed, there is a libertarian argument to be made for seemingly every evil under the sun.

Take pedophilia: The North American Man/Boy Love Association (NAMBLA) group thinks there nothing wrong with a grown man being sexual attracted to a pre-pubescent boy.

In fact, the main goal of the pedophile rights group, which was headed for years by libertarian Joe Powers, is to “repeal age of consent laws that make it a crime for adults to have sex with minors.”

We see a similar move to “normalize” polygamy; to confer upon such multi-spouse unions the same right to marry as homosexual couples. The movement was given a huge boost last year by a federal district court judge in Utah who ruled that the state’s law banning polygamous households violated the First and Fourteenth Amendments.

The legal challenge was brought by the polygamous “family” featured on the TLC reality show “Sister Wives.” Parents magazine, which should not be mistaken as pro-family, finds the show “very redeeming.” Perhaps the best part of the show, according to Parents, is “its subtle Libertarian message.”

Not even incest is out of bounds for libertarians. Just last year, in fact, the German Ethics Council, a government body, recommended that the country’s laws banning incest between adult brothers and sisters should be abolished.

“The fundamental right of adult siblings to sexual self-determination,” trumps “the abstract idea of protection of the family,” the council declared. That line of reasoning expressed “a libertarian ideal of sexual autonomy,” noted The Week magazine.

The same kind of unGodly reasoning informs prevailing libertarian views on such issues as abortion, euthanasia, drugs and prostitution – that our bodies are our property and we can do with them what we will.

Indeed, Murray Rothbard, who according to the Blackwell Encyclopaedia of Political Thought played a leading intellectual role in the development of modern libertarianism, said that if a mother-to-be decides she doesn’t want the human life growing in her womb, “then the fetus becomes a parasitic ‘invader’ of her person, and the mother has the perfect right to expel this invader from her domain.”

Jack Kevorkian, the proponent of physician-assisted suicide who sent more than 100 souls to an early grave, never pronounced himself a “libertarian,” but he certainly was embraced by the libertarian community. That included Mary J. Ruwart, a leading candidate for the 2008 Libertarian Party presidential nomination, who actually contacted Kevorkian in 1993 to assist her sister Martie to take her life. “Martie was a person for whom Dr. Kevorkian really was the only option,” said sister Mary.

The libertarian Cato Institute is one of the foremost advocates of drug legalization, not just for marijuana, but any every and every drug.

Indeed, in 1999 testimony to Congress, Cato’s David Boaz argued that “(t)he long federal experiment in prohibition of marijuana, cocaine, heroin and other drugs has given us unprecedented crime and corruption combined with a manifest failure to stop the use of drugs or reduce their availability to crime.”

But libertarian Boaz and other drug-legalization advocates don’t get it. “Drugs like marijuana and cocaine are not dangerous because they are illegal,” as Joe Califano, the one time chairman of the National Center on Addiction and Substance Abuse at Columbia University, explained. “They are illegal because they are dangerous.”

That is borne out by data from the Centers for Disease Control, which indicates that deaths from drug overdoses have risen steadily over the past two decades. Among people 25 to 64 years old, drug overdoses actually cause more deaths than motor vehicle crashes.

The libertarian case for legal prostitution also is morally bankrupt. It is based on the notion that sex for money is a “victimless crime;” that a woman should be free to sell her body without government meddling.

Never mind a study from the Netherlands, where prostitution is legal, which reported that 60 percent of women in legal prostitution had been physically assaulted and 40 percent had been coerced into legal prostitution. Kill our unborn babies. Take our own lives. Enslave ourselves to drugs. Sell and buy sex. All that is okay under tenets of libertarianism.

But the Word of God says different.

“Do you not know,” the Apostle Paul wrote to the Christian faithful in Corinth, “that your body is the temple of the Holy Spirit who is in you, whom you have from God, and you are not your own?”

Indeed, we were all, everyone, bought at a price. And, therefore, we are to glorify God in body and spirit.


TOPICS: Current Events; Moral Issues; Religion & Culture; Religion & Politics
KEYWORDS: christians; ideology; libertarian; moralabsolutes; morality
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To: GilesB

Don’t play that sleazy game of big l little libertarian, they are one and the same, it’s just that you guys don’t like your cult beliefs put into plain, political language, you know that it condemns you to sane people.

Real Christians are social conservatives, not social liberals, and there is no denying that social liberalism is what libertarianism is about, or else they would merely be conservatives, and vice versa.


101 posted on 03/23/2015 4:50:51 PM PDT by ansel12 (Palin--Mr President, the only thing that stops a bad guy with a nuke is a good guy with a nuke.)
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To: GilesB
I might be somewhat of a libertarian/conservative hybrid. I’m not quite willing to go very far down the legalizing drugs road,

Not socially liberal enough to be a real libertarian eh?

102 posted on 03/23/2015 4:55:10 PM PDT by ansel12 (Palin--Mr President, the only thing that stops a bad guy with a nuke is a good guy with a nuke.)
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To: ansel12

Why don’t you just give your libertarian defense for child porn?


Because I will beat the fu**ing crap out of someone that expresses this notion.

That’s why.

On principle alone.

And I don’t need or want any Government to TELL me otherwise.


103 posted on 03/23/2015 4:59:53 PM PDT by Zeneta (Thoughts in time and out of season.)
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To: Zeneta

Why didn’t you post that unlibertarian sentiment to the guy demanding that I show how the constitution makes it illegal?


104 posted on 03/23/2015 5:03:06 PM PDT by ansel12 (Palin--Mr President, the only thing that stops a bad guy with a nuke is a good guy with a nuke.)
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To: ansel12

Why didn’t you post that unlibertarian sentiment to the guy demanding that I show how the constitution makes it illegal?


Because this is about YOU.


105 posted on 03/23/2015 5:05:10 PM PDT by Zeneta (Thoughts in time and out of season.)
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To: Zeneta
On principle alone. And I don’t need or want any Government to TELL me otherwise.

Oops, I just caught that libertarian slight of hand, so you do not "want any Government to TELL me otherwise." in regards to child porn.

106 posted on 03/23/2015 5:05:50 PM PDT by ansel12 (Palin--Mr President, the only thing that stops a bad guy with a nuke is a good guy with a nuke.)
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To: ansel12

You’re funny.

Granted, as opposed to granite.

People are messed up.

But it’s their own business to be messed up.

There are actually constitutional protections, Government protections for the right to be left alone and that includes the right to be free from being violated.

The right to Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of happiness.

The “pursuit of happiness” doesn’t include the violation on the former.

Child porn is a blatant violation in the first order.

The rights of the child are already established.

Slight of hand?

We can play this all night, or at least until I run out of beer.

BTW, bite me.


107 posted on 03/23/2015 5:23:43 PM PDT by Zeneta (Thoughts in time and out of season.)
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To: Zeneta

You did that typical libber thing that they do here at this conservative site, you raged enough at child porn that I almost didn’t notice that you quietly said that you don’t want laws against it.


108 posted on 03/23/2015 5:29:32 PM PDT by ansel12 (Palin--Mr President, the only thing that stops a bad guy with a nuke is a good guy with a nuke.)
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To: ansel12

You are insane.

Best of luck.


109 posted on 03/23/2015 5:38:03 PM PDT by Zeneta (Thoughts in time and out of season.)
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To: ansel12

You just refuse to get it. Have you even read what people are writing here?

Your view on what libertarian is, is distorted and wrong!

Just because some supporters of the Libertarian party want gay marriage doesn’t make that a libertarian principle. There are Republicans who support gay marriage, that doesn’t make gay marriage a conservative principle....wake up buddy!


110 posted on 03/23/2015 5:38:55 PM PDT by free_life (If you ask Jesus to forgive you and to save you, He will.)
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To: ansel12

We can have a boat load of more fun if you are up for it.


111 posted on 03/23/2015 5:39:45 PM PDT by Zeneta (Thoughts in time and out of season.)
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To: Zeneta

LOL, I’m not the member of the libertarian cult fighting conservatism.


112 posted on 03/23/2015 5:40:00 PM PDT by ansel12 (Palin--Mr President, the only thing that stops a bad guy with a nuke is a good guy with a nuke.)
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To: free_life

This contradicts libertarianism?

“”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.””


113 posted on 03/23/2015 5:44:19 PM PDT by ansel12 (Palin--Mr President, the only thing that stops a bad guy with a nuke is a good guy with a nuke.)
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To: ansel12

“I alone love you..

I alone tempt you.

Fear is not the end of this”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FNrQOUtXYOo


114 posted on 03/23/2015 5:47:08 PM PDT by Zeneta (Thoughts in time and out of season.)
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To: ansel12

You have no idea what you’re talking about, so it’s time for you to just stop. It is becoming increasingly obvious that, in this particular battle of knowledge and wits, you are completely unarmed.

“Real Christians are...” That beginning is almost always farcical - as it is in this case.

There in nothing in Christian teaching that demands we insist the government make laws to do anything...the entire Christian teaching is about PERSONAL behavior, brought forth from the conviction of the Spirit - NOT FORCED BY THE LAWS OF MAN. Your attitude is closer to modern liberalism than mine. The modern liberal thinks the admonition to feed the poor means, pass laws to tax people so government can redistribute it, and force everyone to follow Christian teaching. Your attitude is to pass laws against adultery and divorce, thereby forcing everyone to follow Christian teaching. The concept of forcing Christian behavior is so far from what Christ taught that I have to question your understanding of Christianity.

Now, there are very good arguments to be made for laws against adultery and divorce, but being a Christian is not one of them. Being a Christian is a GREAT argument for not being an adulterer or for not divorcing (personal behavior, get it?) Remember - his eye, mote - your eye, beam. When you find a passage where Christ, or one of the apostles, said or wrote something to the effect of: “Demand that government...” or “Insist that your rulers...” or “Make laws that...”, I will reconsider my position. Until then, you should be VERY cautious about making bold, ignorant statements about what “Real Christians” do, are, or believe politically.

Actually, you have it completely backwards - social liberalism is about NO personal responsibility. Libertarianism is ALL about personal responsibility.

“Social liberalism is what libertarianism is about...” You should REALLY stop talking about things of which you are demonstrably ignorant - you have already made yourself look unbelievably foolish on the topic of what libertarians are and aren’t.


115 posted on 03/23/2015 5:48:22 PM PDT by GilesB
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To: ansel12

I have entertained your 2nd grade posts about topics beyond your grasp long enough. “He who has an ear...” and so forth.

Please do not address me again on any subject so far beyond your knowledge and experience.

I will refrain from knowingly responding to any post of yours that appears to be founded on such flimsy material as the ones you attempted here.


116 posted on 03/23/2015 5:56:15 PM PDT by GilesB
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To: GilesB

Libertarianism is about social liberalism and Sodom and Gomorrah, where everything goes, and the Christians are not supposed to vote like Christians according to you, instead they are supposed to choose representation that will support and implement the very things that they oppose, for some bizarre cult reason.

You guys have done wonders getting everything legal during the last 50 years, but a Christian must vote as a conservative, for moral laws and a moral society, for instance against abortion and against the homosexual agenda, and against drugs and porn and prostitution.

Sodom and Gomorrah would have had plenty of liberals and libertarians fighting about taxes, but they sure lacked social conservatives.


117 posted on 03/23/2015 5:58:48 PM PDT by ansel12 (Palin--Mr President, the only thing that stops a bad guy with a nuke is a good guy with a nuke.)
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To: GilesB

Post 102 caught you out, you know very well that libertarian social liberalism, wants you to overcome your resistance to supporting the drug agenda.


118 posted on 03/23/2015 6:00:58 PM PDT by ansel12 (Palin--Mr President, the only thing that stops a bad guy with a nuke is a good guy with a nuke.)
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To: ansel12

LOL - don’t put words in my mouth. You’re not smart enough to do a decent impersonation.

You are simply foolish.


119 posted on 03/23/2015 6:09:09 PM PDT by GilesB
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To: ansel12

Blah, blah, blah - your argument was already pooped and scooped. (Careful, you’ll run out of brains)

You don’t even approximate the horsepower to assert what I know.

Keep running on your ignoramus gerbil-wheel.


120 posted on 03/23/2015 6:16:03 PM PDT by GilesB
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