September 12, 2007
From the desk of Mindles H. Dreck:Hey look, It's me! More
Hey look, It's me!
More than perhaps any other American political group, libertarians have suffered the blows of caricature. For many people, the term evokes an image of a scraggly misfit living in the woods with his gun collection, a few marijuana plants, some dogeared Ayn Rand titles, and a battered pickup truck plastered with bumper stickers reading "Taxes = Theft" and "FDR Was A Pinko."
Well, this might be:
many wonder why the state should be involved in the marriage business at all, a question that has come to the fore in the debate over gay marriagePosted by Mindles H. Dreck at September 12, 2007 9:52 AM | TrackBack | Technorati inbound links
The idea that the state stands outside the people it governs is only a few centuries old, isn't it?
I'll confess to the dogeared Rand titles and the bumper sticker. The rest doesn't describe any libertarian I know.
In a contest between granting the right to same sex marriage and lowering taxes, a libertarian will take the lower taxes, and foist off the marriage issue by saying that, really, you're opposed to civil control of marriage in general, so voting for homophobic jackasses is tolerable, but voting for people who want an increase in social spending is akin to theft.
Please drop the act. Pretending that you could care at all about civil rights when dollars are at stake is not working.
I think this characterization must rely heavily on the speaker's situation. While the sort of people who identified as "libertarian" where I grew up (East Texas) probably fit the stereotype quite often, the libertarians in college towns and big cities tend to be educated, reasonably well-off, and distinguishable from the local Republicans only by their preference for books and computers over humans, unless it's humans with whom they can have sex. (The one stereotype of libertarians that seems to hold true regardless of locale is that they're much more likely to be male than female.)
marriage was too important to be left to the tender mercies of the state religion
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