Posted on 05/09/2016 5:33:16 AM PDT by Benny Huang
If you're like me you're probably searching for a third party candidate in the wake of Donald Trump's clinching of the GOP nomination. For those of you considering the Libertarian Party (LP), I hope you'll reconsider.
The party's current frontrunner, former New Mexico Governor Gary Johnson, doesn't seem to understand this liberty thing. He thinks it means drugs and abortion but should you decide that you don't want to engage in a business transaction he wants the government to coerce you. The party's other candidates aren't quite as extreme in their statism though none of them will make an unqualified stand for your Thirteenth Amendment right not to be held in involuntary servitude--which is exactly what private sector nondiscrimination laws are.
Is this really a problem? No really; has this ever happened in the history of the universe? Where do they get these ridiculous scenarios?
I don't mean to imply that slippery slope arguments are inherently suspect. To the contrary, we're racing down a slippery slope at breathtaking speed but in the other direction. The idea that business owners can't discriminate is being taken to absurd lengths and it will only get more bizarre in coming years. It isn't just nondiscrimination laws either. Once we've accepted that private businesses aren't really private there's essentially nothing the government can't mandate or prohibit. If you're okay with that then please don't call yourself a libertarian, a conservative, or even an American. Call yourself something else. Please.
The mental roadblock I think most people encounter when thinking about this issue is that most of us received very simplistic lessons about the so-called Civil Rights Movement in our grade school years. It's sacrilege to suggest that maybe we made a mistake when we enacted, for example, the Civil Rights Act of 1964. When reasonable objections are raised to private sector nondiscrimination laws--objections that are grounded in the Constitution, the free market, and federalism--we tend to get nervous. Though we know that these objections make sense we also know that they might have been used by yesteryear's white southerners to continue to refuse service to blacks.
But that's the nature of freedom. Just as I will defend the right of free speech regardless of whether I personally agree with what's being said, I will also defend the right of people to refuse service for the reason of their choosing. Just saying "I don't want to" ought to suffice.
Strange things start happening when that right disappears. What seems like an absurd application of the law today may seem quite normal in twenty years. The sky's really the limit. Just imagine if you could go back in time and tell Ralph Abernathy, one of Martin Luther King's closest advisers and an ordained minister, that the precedent he was setting would one day be invoked to make Christians such as himself bake wedding cakes for homosexual weddings. He would have thought you were mad.
Nondiscrimination laws are now being used to force private businesses to allow men to use the ladies' room. That's what Houston's HERO was about, as well as Charlotte's recent law which was preempted by the state of North Carolina, which may in turn be preempted by Obama's dictatorial powers. The Obama Administration's wacky position isn't even that we should integrate bathrooms, only that each of us should have the freedom to self-select which group we belong to.
Unlike most people, I won't say that having separate bathrooms isn't discrimination. Of course it is! Making any distinction between two things is discrimination by definition. If you think men belong in the men's room then you are not unequivocally anti-discrimination. You believe, as I do, that some kinds of discrimination are at least tolerable if not acceptable or even desirable.
The hottest new fad in nondiscrimination law is protection for convicted felons. Most of us don't think that being a murderer or rapist is a status deserving of protection but then against most of us don't work for the Obama Administration. Last month, the US Department of Housing issued a decree saying that refusing to rent to a prospective tenant on account of a criminal record may violate the Fair Housing Act. Actuality, it doesn't. The act prohibits discrimination based on race but not on felony conviction. The Department maintains that discrimination against felons is de facto discrimination against racial minorities. So there you have it folks--Democrats think minorities are a bunch of criminals. And we're the racist ones?
Here's the weirdest one I have seen in a while. It is now illegal in New York City, through a bureaucratic regulation not passed by the city council, for a bartender to refuse to serve a woman because she's pregnant.
If we don't serve margaritas to pregnant ladies it's a slippery slope back to Jim Crow! Or something.
Keep in mind that drinking while pregnant, as bad an idea as that may be, is not illegal in New York. Pregnant ladies can get as smashed as they want to; they just have to find someone willing to sell them the alcohol. What's changed is that you no longer have a choice to serve them. According to the guidelines: "Judgments and stereotypes about how pregnant individuals should behave, their physical capabilities and what is or is not healthy for a fetus are pervasive in our society and cannot be used as pretext for unlawful discriminatory decisions."
They hit on all the right words--judgement, stereotypes, pretext. A pretext, by the way, is "a reason that you give to hide your real reason for doing something," according to Merriam-Webster. So the city of New York has decided that if a bartender claims not to want to contribute to fetal alcohol syndrome he's actually lying. There must be a more sinister reason lurking behind that "pretext." Much like our First Amendment, it's a "cloak for prejudice."
Unlike Governor Johnson's silly scenario involving an electricity company shutting off power for religious reasons, all of the aforementioned examples are actually happening. No hypotheticals here. That doesn't mean, however, that we have reached peak insanity. There's always a new frontier in "civil rights" and I have no doubt that it will get worse before it gets better. Should nondiscrimination laws be used to protect child molesters? I don't think that's so far-fetched. Given the current administration's policy on discrimination against felons, I would have to assume they're already protected. A landlord can't say that he will rent to criminals but not that kind of criminal. Will Curves gym be forced to take men? I don't see why not. Discrimination is part of their business model.
We're on a slippery slope for sure but not toward too much freedom. We're like the Jamaican bobsled team racing toward total government control. I want off.
Card the fetus, no ID? not 21? NO DRINK.
Certain felons are restricted by government as to where they may even live (etc. x number of feet within a school).
I wish the Libertarians would put up a serious candidate. Gary Johnson is a fine person, I have met him a few times, but not serious about public office. On the other hand, Austin Petersen is serious. Libertarian without the nuttiness or the “Paul” arrogance.
It suffices for doctors and lawyers.
Houston's "HERO" was about that and so much more, thirty someodd pages about a "panel" that would try local businesses if they ere charged (on private claim) of being politically incorrect. Tribunals to push liberalism. If there is a criminal or civil charge to make, take it to the courts, don't erect new systems of socialist justice.
What is the point? Really, man!
That laws prohibiting private discrimination are an abomination? Well write about that.
Or that Gary Johnson doesn't get your point - whatever the F that is?
Or this - "Unlike Governor Johnson's silly scenario involving an electricity company shutting off power for religious reasons"
That is actually not so silly. If I, a private business, can argue that I should not bake a wedding cake for gays over a religious disagreement, why can I, a private utility, not deny them electric power on the same basis>
There is a difference, e.g. natural and government recognized monopolies, but that alone would make a good essay - not this muddled kitchen midden of garbage you are wasting everyone's time trying to figure out.
A lot of us are actually libertarian in bent and have to live with the fact that libertarians are subject to a lot of derision, well earned, because of the nutty hangers on. You are doing nothing to dispel that view.
>The Libertarian Party would be far more effective and powerful if it were a club similar to the National Rife Association.
I contend: They are already ‘birds of a feather’.
Seems to me (I went (I) after the Muslim outreach), they’re already in the same boat: The NRA pushes for ‘common sense gun control’, endorses DEMs, etc.; and here we’re reading the (L) are looking to use govt to FORCE biz....IMO, that makes then both non-grata (whether a ‘powerful’ punching-bag for the opposition or not).
The Libertarian Party is a party which likes to brag about how they supported sodomite marriage in the 70s, so I’m not surprised at all that they are more interested in catering to those people instead of a free market philosophy. Their party platform has, for the longest time, pushed the open borders nonsense as well.
Look to the Constitution Party if you want a decent and (as viable as can be) third party.
The Libertarian party is useless as long as it keeps being disingenuous about abortion.
If you can use your “liberty” as a justification to deny another person their most fundamental rights, then you using liberty as a justification for oppression, which is the complete antithesis of liberty.
As long as the Libertarian party continues to believe a person can deny another person their fundamental right to life and claim that their liberty gives them that right, they are being intellectually dishonest and bastardizing the very concept of liberty.
I have never seen in my entire life any libertarian address this complete insanity that their “party” embraces.
The problem is that CP vote totals are pathetic even by third-party standards.
Yeah, that’s true. They have occasionally put forth good local candidates, though. The Libertarian Party has also put forth some good local candidates who don’t much care for the obnoxious social/globalist tenets of the party platform. From what little I know of him, McAfee seems like a decent guy (he stood up for religious liberty); Johnson is representative of the worst in the party.
America’s Party is the true party of Liberty. The Constitution Party is rouge, on issue’s like Abortion and foreign policy etc. Plus, the Constitution Party has a bad habit of putting party over principles.
Libertarians have this weird idea that rules shouldn’t be enforced on anybody. They’re the most gutless people ever.
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