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 THE LIBERTARIAN ENTERPRISE Number 826, June 21, 2015 When you need help in seconds the cops are minutes away
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Re: "The Secularists Miss the Point... Again" by Sean Gangol Good article. For what it's worth, I doubt my comments apply to you, but rather to some readers who might misconstrue your point. For most of the way through, I had only one quibble:
Embracing the lifestyle is not the issue. I doubt most people would embrace the lifestyle. I can't see myself doing so. If that's what you are waiting for, you have a long wait ahead of you. What's causing the problem is the tactics themselves. It's the bullying that's setting them back. It's kind of like wondering when the good Muslims are going to denounce terrorism, or good cops going to denounce the thugs they know exist in the police force. When are the good gays going to say, "Enough! This is wrong!"? People resent bullies. That's what's causing the setback. But then I got to the end of the article:
Now wait a sec. When, exactly, is freedom painful? So long as a person is exercising his legitimate rights, which necessarily imposes no obligation on you, why should that be painful? "I don't like what he's saying!" Yeah, so what? How is that any different from, "I don't like his lifestyle choice"? Draw a Venn diagram. His rights. Your rights. They do not intersect. So long as he is staying in his circle, and you are staying in yours, what difference does it make? The pain only comes when one or both of you go outside your rightful boundaries. If you don't like something he does within his circle, you are free to respond any way you like in your circle. I'd suggest the libertarian response is to rejoice in the freedom within your circle, rather than getting angry or offended by how the other guy used his freedom in his. I could be wrong, and would welcome correction. I just don't see how someone who is staying within his rights should present any pain to a libertarian's conscience. Stephan Jerde
Just click the red box (it's a button!) to pay the author Religious Exemptions Re: "The Secularists Miss the Point... Again" by Sean Gangol Personally, I have no sympathy for the people who want to force Hobby Lobby to provide "abortifacent" birth control, or to force florists, bakers and photographers to participate in "gay" "weddings." In the first place, we already do allow a good few exemptions from general rules on religious grounds—many pacifist churches' members are exempt from the draft because of their church membership (while this is not now a live issue, I can remember when it was). And the Amish get cut a great deal of slack on things like driving their stupid buggies on the public roads and not sending their kids to the public schools, although a lot of this may well be because many non-Amish see them as a living link to a simpler, more virtuous past; they look at the Amish and are reminded of pioneer days and Little House On The Prairie. In the second place, refusing service on those grounds has been known to happen to others. Jim Goad (in his piece "One Nazi Wedding Cake to Go, Please," over at Takimag) tells about a neo-Nazi who had endless trouble getting a bakery to make a birthday cake for his son, whose given names were "Adolf Hitler." And devil an anti-discrimination paladin rode to his rescue. And, finally, as my learned friend Mr. Gagnol pointed out, the tactics used by these people show their utter hypocrisy. They cry and cry about being victimized by bullies, the gays in particular---but when they have or seem to have the upper hand, they show that they're pretty good at bullying themselves. Whipping up nation-wide mobs against small business owners who just said that they didn't want to do something they should have every right not to do is bullying, plain and simple. It would serve them right if they tried this stunt on a business that was mobbed-up. Let them get a taste of their own tactics. Eric Oppen
Just click the red box (it's a button!) to pay the author Re: "A Use for the Constitution" by Paul Bonneau I believe Mr. Bonneau is stating re: the Constitution: "when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government," and pointing to the delight our current ruling class take in acting in violation of that piece of parchment. Evidence available supports his case. A.X. Perez
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