libertarianism

 

it seems to me that there are two different aspects to libertarianism, one of which progressives should be supportive of and one of which they should not. There is a social component that involves what people should be able to do on a personal level.  Then there is the notion of making the government smaller and spending less money on government services. I don’t understand why these two pieces are considered part of the same philosophy at all. Given that they seem to have little relationship to one another in my mind. It is not in fact true that these two are always thought about together. But thinking about them together is the philosophy of the libertarian political party which is what in our society most people think about when they hear the term libertarian.

I think that progressives should take back the part of libertarianism that we agree with and not let conservatives take complete control of the term. There is historically the notion of libertarian socialism, which is in some ways in some ways the opposite of the conservative approach to libertarianism. Libertarian socialists believe in the abolition of capitalism and the collectivization of the means of production of goods and services. It also represents a belief that nature needs to be preserved and basically left alone. The notion is of cooperative maintenance of all natural things with no ownership of things individually. Libertarian socialists also feel that workers should control the businesses they work for, rather than have them controlled by investors as is the case in the United States

Libertarian socialists are also believers in civil liberties and have historically focused on issues like women’s rights, particularly in the context of sexual rights, including the right to birth control and free love and free thought. free thought in this context refers to thinking based on science, logic and reason rather than on authority, tradition or power. Understanding that it’s hard to think that free thought is really a part of the principal as conservatives think about it since science seems to be something conservatives don’t think matters at all.

Both conservative and progressive libertarians believe in the notion of nonaggression, meaning that they should not get involved in fights with other countries . It’s not absolutely necessary to protect noncombatants. That means that violence in self-defense or in defense of others can be tolerated but starting a conflict really can’t be justified except in the context of looking out for the interests of people caught in the conflict who have no role in it. Free thought in this context means thinking that is  based on science, logic, and reason rather than on authority, tradition or power.

Gay Marriage

It is probable too late now to take the approach I would suggest but there was and maybe still is a much less controversial approach to the issue of Gay Marriage. I think the proper answer would be to get government out of the marriage business altogether and leave terms like marriage that have religious connotations out of the terms we use to describe governmental services and statuses. While the gay community would not accept the idea of civil unions as a solution  I wonder if that would have remained true if we had decided as part of that decision to have civil unions be the term applied to the status used by the government for all relationships, both gay and straightsthat are sanctioned by government authorities. I think the real problem is that the terms marriage is a term used in religious contexts as well as in the context of defining a legal relationship applied by the courts and the states to the relationships they endorse as legally significant.

If governments didn’t use the term marriage at all to describe the relationships that they are creating there would be no reason for anyone to complain about gays getting the same benefits from their relationships as straight people receive. I think governments to just stop using the term marriage at all to describe the relationships that it creates to have a legal status for people that gives them certain rights. I know this would be a hard thing to do because it seems impossible to go back and do this for existing relationships already established. I think you would have to agree that government only needs to do this prospectively with regard to new relationships.

If we took this approach. I don’t think a lot of the backlash would occur. I think that the reaction that people have in the conservative community to the notion of gay marriage is based on the use of this particular term to describe the government sanctioned status involved, which I think is unnecessary to use. I think we would be better off avoiding the term marriage and thereby avoiding all the backlash that occurs as a result of the use of that term.

I am pretty amazed that I’ve never even seen this approach suggested in any of the discussions I’ve seen about gay marriage. I don’t believe we should be creating a situation where every church needs to accept the notion that it should be willing to marry gay people, which is where we are going with this issue today, I think that should be left to each church to decide for itself and that I may rights standpoint the only thing that really matters is rights that apply, that government confers or uses to make decisions. If governments in use marriage. In this way the idea of denying gay people the same rights as straight people have with respect to family status and other government sanctioned statuses would not be so controversial and so fraught with getting government involved in decisions that it doesn’t belong involved in like how churches govern themselves in terms of what constitutes a marriage. They are willing to sanction.