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.
The problem as I see it is that neither a Republic nor a Libertarian form of government is compatible with an amoral society such as we have today.
Now tell us how you would also have us outlaw alcohol and tobacco which both fit your analysis of what is evil and dangerous and we need a state to prevent us from harming ourselves.
As for drug overdoses, prescription drugs are the main problem there and so we can assume you want to outlaw them too.
Now as for punishment, what prison for all those who don’t do as you want. Their bodies belong to the state your way.
Christianity can get along with most forms of governing pragmatism because it is not a form of government. Libertarianism is not practical unless you are a lawyer who profits on endless relitigation and it is therefore a belief system, not a way to govern. Furthermore Randian libertarianism (which seems to be the primary variety to be found on the right) was the basis for LaVey Satanism, making it an even stranger bedfellow for Christianity.
Conservatism OTOH is a governing principle which is a pragmatic amalgam of things that have been found to work in the past. There is a little of this, a little of that, and both Christians and Libertarians can find something to be happy about. Nobody gets everything they want, remember this is about governing.
Is libertarianism compatible with the constitution. Yes.
Is Christianity compatible with the constitution. Yes.
Is libertarianism compatible with Christianity. Yes.
Is modern so-called liberalism compatible with libertarianism, the constitution, or Christianity. No.
Very stupid question. Ask yourself, “WHAT DOES CHRISTIANITY, “REAL CHRISTIANITY” STAND FOR”? I’m not talking about Christians that “SOW” their wild oats all week, and then go to church on Sunday, to pray for a crop failure. I’m talking about “TRUE CHRISTIANS”. These “TRUE CHRISTIANS” want, most of all, FREEDOM. They don’t want government interferance on what they do. They want every one to be treated the same way, without government interferance. They expect the government to protect them from “BAD PEOPLE”, and when the government fails to do so, they have the right to protect themselves.
As we believe each domain has a different master.
And, we don't want the government to be the master of our spiritual or moral lives since government is not spiritual or moral...and cannot be.
That is not to say that people (cough *libertarians*) won’t try to make conservatism out to be what they want instead of listening to previous generations advice about best practices.
Is liberalism political or religious ?
If it’s religious ( or takes the place of religion) then it’s incompatible with the constitution. And might explain why liberals admit they are liberals in about one percent of cases
I think liberalism has been appropriated by something else that is a religion in all but name. Liberalism the governing principal is the counterweight to conservatism.
A key to understanding which you are dealing with is to consider how proponents deal with people who don’t agree with them. Do they try to find a way forward via negotiation and compromise, or do they insist that they alone possess the truth and try to destroy anyone who disagrees?
True that! Have you perchance read the book I mentioned in the thread by M. Stanton Evans?
And what a staggering refutation of what I said.
Thanks....:)
I’ve yet to meet a libertarian who isn’t a moral anarchist.
The libertarian position is "they are not Caesar's". They are on your side.
No.
Long time no see.
How are things?
The libertarian position would ALSO be against government involvement in "anti discrimination", where individuals and businesses would be free to choose not to do business (and other interactions) with any one for any reason. This is something not often mentioned in anti-libertarian diatribes.
ok... i’ll bite..
define morality...
There is far more noise being made to advance same sex marriage as a ‘thing’ than there is being made to protect the right of refusal for a photographer. Lawyers enjoy ‘right to refuse service’ on ideological grounds. Would that everyone could do so.
Bkmk
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