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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: ansel12

Abortion is WRONG. But again, “YOU REAP WHAT YOU SOW”. This idea that these LIBERALS, SOCIALISTS, COMMUNISTS pander: “JUDGE NOT, LEST YE BE JUDGE” is a straw man. “OF COURSE YOU CAN JUDGE. YOU DO IT EVERY DAY OF YOUR LIFE”. As for “HOMOSEXUALITY”. Not my bag. As long as he or she is a law abiding citizen, I really don’t care. They don’t deserve any “EXTRA” rights, that every body has. Governments shouldn’t have anything to do with it. You don’t have to associate yourself with them, and you have the right to do business or not do business with them. Government doesn’t have the right to tell you what you should or shouldn’t do.


141 posted on 03/24/2015 4:10:27 AM PDT by gingerbread
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To: Ethan Clive Osgoode

Not only are you a liar, you are a fatuous idiot.


142 posted on 03/24/2015 4:19:05 AM PDT by GilesB
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To: CHRISTIAN DIARIST

You mean “Liberaltarians”.


143 posted on 03/24/2015 4:54:20 AM PDT by bmwcyle (People who do not study history are destine to believe really ignorant statements.)
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To: Ethan Clive Osgoode

They also are just plain nuts, their social liberalism makes small government and limited government that conservatives desire, impossible.

Social liberalism in a nation where everyone votes for what they want, leads to more socialism and more liberalism, more me,me,me voting, and larger government.


144 posted on 03/24/2015 7:27:00 AM 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: muir_redwoods

Because I oppose it, you don’t realize that social liberalism leads to bloated tyrannical government, in your fantasy you ignore that broken, Sodom and Gomorrah societies, don’t vote for small limited government, they do not vote as noble traditional social conservative Americans.


145 posted on 03/24/2015 7:30:20 AM 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: gingerbread

Fantasy, in reality the farther we go down the satanic hole of libertarian social liberalism, the farther the electorate moves left in their voting.

The libertarian fantasies don’t work in real life, they are childish, look at the libertarian take on immigration, it is totally absurd and suicidal, it absolutely destroys any chance of small/limited government.


146 posted on 03/24/2015 7:34:11 AM 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

Sodom and Gomorrah had the vote? Who knew? All your nanny state solution has led to in the last forty years is a bloated government. You have had no success in stemming the tide of moral decay and you blame libertarians who have never held national office. I give you a quote from Reagan and you tell me he didn’t mean it. I ask you to cite constitution authority for moral legislation and you ignore my question.

Disgustingly you raise the sham issue of child porn. No libertarian would support child porn for the simple fact that a child is too young to contract. Can you find someone who calls himself a libertarian in favor of such things? Sure and McCain calls himself a conservative. So what?

What you have done is push for more government to control others with the net result that we have a bigger, bloated, intrusive, tyrannical government and nothing but taxes to show for it. It is the definition of insanity.


147 posted on 03/24/2015 9:12:05 AM PDT by muir_redwoods ("He is a very shallow critic who cannot see an eternal rebel in the heart of a conservative." G.K .C)
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To: muir_redwoods

Interesting that you so despise America before the 1960s and call it a “nanny state”.

I preferred it personally, and consider your more libertarian, social liberal, post 60s America, the “nanny state”, and things are only going to get worse, much worse.

Reagan was a conservative, not a libertarian, even in that 1975 interview with libertarians, he rejects your social liberalism.

As far as child porn, indications so far is that it wins libertarian support, it is just an issue that they want to keep on the back burner for right now, while they work more on drugs.

I push for social conservatism, have you ever looked at who actually votes for smaller, limited government? It is social conservatives, social liberals overwhelmingly vote for bigger government, and you want to keep creating more of those voters.


148 posted on 03/24/2015 9:19:28 AM 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: muir_redwoods
No libertarian would support child porn for the simple fact that a child is too young to contract.

You'd think that they wouldn't support it because it's evil and morally wrong. But alas, that would be presupposing that libertarians had functioning consciences and a feeling for natural law, like normal people...

149 posted on 03/24/2015 9:40:17 AM PDT by Ethan Clive Osgoode (<<== Click here to learn about Evolution!)
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To: Ethan Clive Osgoode

So, still no answer as to why you like big intrusive government. If the question is too difficult, ask a grown up.


150 posted on 03/24/2015 9:51:18 AM PDT by muir_redwoods ("He is a very shallow critic who cannot see an eternal rebel in the heart of a conservative." G.K .C)
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