I think where we are divided is the "live and let live" attitude of the Libertarians,
We need to be careful here.
First of all, there are Libertarians and then there are libertarians. You may or may not have noticed that I virtually always use "libertarian", lowercase, even when I gramatically should capitalize for the first word of the sentence.
Big-L Libertarians are often affiliated with the Libertarian Party, and are primarily interested in political solutions. Some of these people are libertarians, while others are not.
In other words:
There are libertarians that are not Libertarians
There are Libertarians that are not libertarians
There are Libertarians that are also libertarians
And then of course there are people who are not Libertarians or libertarians.
I hope that makes sense.
Now, as for the "live and let live" line...
Its iffy, it really is, because it really just depends on what you mean.
Some libertarians have a very "socially tolerant" attitude toward basically anything that doesn't involve violence, and don't really have opinions on much of anything else. This position is certainly compatible with libertarianism, but it isn't a requirement for being a libertarian.
But others don't.
Let's look at one particular issue here. Let's think about prostitution.
There are three general attitudes a libertarian could take toward prostitution (there are probably more, but I'm just simplifying things, bear with me.) Say a libertarian encounters a prostitute:
He could encourage her to keep doing what she's doing.
He could simply have no opinion, her life her choice, kind of that "live and let live" thing you were saying.
Or he could try to discourage her from doing it. Try to persuade her, peacefully, that she shouldn't do what she is doing and that she should do otherwise instead.
Note that options that are not on the table are "beat her up", "physically restrain her" or "call the cops." And, if we exchange "automatic weapon ownership" instead of prostitution, its really the same situation. The morals of the situation are different in my opinion (I don't think owning an automatic weapon is morally wrong, while prostituting oneself is). But a pacifist might disagree with me, and really, the choices are the same. Support the machine gun owner, be indifferent, or peacefully oppose it.
while perhaps not a bad idea in and of itself, seems dangerous because we are in a post-modern, post-feminist age, in which things have really slid very badly into the abyss.
I think one mistake a lot of people make is making bad assumptions about what you can actually do with politics.
For instance, in a pro-gay, anti-Christian culture, are we really ever going to see homosexuality criminalized? Now, I don't think that's a good idea, but lets say it was. Is it going to happen? Of course not.
But a pro-gay, anti-Christian population that is trained to think that government force is the answer to problems is certainly going to use that government force against Christians, doubly so if they are justifying it because they think Christians would do the same thing to them if they could.
Does this sound familiar? It does to me.
There's no such thing as magic. And there is no way a population that is predominately pro-homosexual is just going to let it be criminalized.
I'd rather keep my rights. And since I prefer that, I also have a moral obligation, per the Golden Rule, to respect the rights of other peaceful people, even if they do things I find disgusting (again, we are talking about PEACEFUL acts here, not aggressive acts like theft, murder, etc.)
It's not that one wants to police anyone by force. That could never align with American, democratic thinking in any case - and it is not the way to achieve anything great.
There are lots of people, especially here, that want to police people by force. And that is where libertarians part with the religious right. We don't part on the morality of things like homosexuality, adultery, drug use, and so forth (again, libertarians disagree with each other on the morality of these things) we part on the desire to use the force of law to prevent them.
It's more that some sort of cultural cleansing is needed - a robust one, not some Nazi sadism is envisioned, but some hard feeling to counterbalance the "mush culture" into which we have descended, and from which we may one day perish.
I certainly don't think you're endorsing Nazism, but honestly, I'm not sure what you are endorsing. Do you actually disagree with anything I've said so far? And on what grounds?
Looking to p 38 Newman post now....
