The Trouble With Libertarians

There was a time when I considered myself something of a libertarian. I never liked the label "conservative." Conservatives for me were ... well ... too conservative, for lack of a better way of saying it. I actually wanted to shrink the federal government down to a size reflecting its strict constitutional limitations. Not many conservatives actually believe that. And even fewer act on those convictions when they have the chance.

So, for a while in my life, I considered myself a "Christian libertarian." But not many libertarians, I found, agreed with me about protecting our borders, a clear constitutional imperative of the federal government under the Constitution. Most of them were open-borders utopians.

Most libertarians also have utopian notions about drugs, too. I agree that the federal government's war on drugs has been a failure from the get-go. I can't even understand how a guy like Bill Bennett is taken seriously as a conservative after presiding over the failed drug war as the "drug czar" and after expanding the Department of Education when he had the chance to dismantle it. But that's another story for another time.

I wouldn't mind the drug war if it meant shooting all drug smugglers on sight if found entering our country. Instead, the Bush administration prosecuted two heroic Border Patrol agents for wounding one with a gunshot in the buttocks, for heaven's sake. But, again I digress.

What is irking me today is a press release I got from the Libertarian Party last week. The party's official position is that the most important cultural institution necessary for self-government — namely marriage between a man and a woman — is some kind of archaic anachronism, an inherently discriminatory and oppressive enterprise.

Of course, "conservatives," for the most part, are no better. They see the attacks on marriage from a tiny, extremist minority and flee in fear before them.

But that's another story for another day.

Here's what Libertarian Party Chairman Mark Hinkle has to say about marriage: "Permitting couples to marry when they are of the same gender is a step in the direction of equality before the law, but a truly free society would not have government in the business of defining relationships at all. Frankly, the idea that someone's legal rights should depend on whether they've entered a government-approved relationship ought to be repugnant to all of us."

Think about that. What this knucklehead is saying is that anything goes — same-sex marriage, polygamy, bestiality, you-name-it.

Is that freedom? No, that's licentiousness. That's not what made America the greatest experiment in liberty that the world has ever known. But that's libertarianism.

Take a 5,000-year-old institution ordained by God that has worked all over the world. Then trash it because some group of sinful, prideful people with no real interest in marriage wants to use it to demonstrate that they are "oppressed."

Keep in mind, it was the federal government that made all this inevitable with the Supreme Court case Lawrence v. Texas, in which it presumed to tell the people of that great republic they had no business enforcing laws against sodomy. Justice Antonin Scalia predicted in short order that the ruling would open the door to something unimaginable a decade ago — same-sex marriage. He was right.

That's how sodomy moved from being a sin 10 years ago to being a "right." It's not a right. It's a sin. And in a civilized, self-governing society, when the majority of people ban sinful behavior — from murder, to theft, to adultery, to child molestation — they have the right and the duty to legislate against it. Courts have no business overruling the will of the people on such matters by dreaming up "rights" that are to be found nowhere in the Constitution, the Bible or the history of mankind.

It's just that simple. And it's about time somebody said it.

To find out more about Joseph Farah and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate Web page at www.creators.com.

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