Well, Differing From a Libertarian Meme Point
Familiar readers may recall that I used to serve early morning daily mass before going to high school at the air force base where my dad was working. I also thought that I had a vocation to the priesthood. Shortly before my starting at OLLU, the chaplain gifted me with his 4-volume copy of Aquinas'
Summa Theologica. This is
one of my favorite excerpts, from the second part of the second part, question 10, article 11:
Human government is derived from the Divine government, and should imitate it. Now although God is all-powerful and supremely good, nevertheless He allows certain evils to take place in the universe, which He might prevent, lest, without them, greater goods might be forfeited, or greater evils ensue. Accordingly in human government also, those who are in authority, rightly tolerate certain evils, lest certain goods be lost, or certain greater evils be incurred: thus Augustine says (De Ordine ii, 4): "If you do away with harlots, the world will be convulsed with lust." Hence, though unbelievers sin in their rites, they may be tolerated, either on account of some good that ensues therefrom, or because of some evil avoided.
This is one of the key insights behind my Catholic Libertarianism. I don't do (and never have done) drugs, have never smoked, and rarely drink (I've been known to drink a glass of beer over 4 hours, and I don't think I've had anything with alcohol in over 8 months. My Mom ordered a bottle of wine for the table at a recent family reunion, and I didn't have any.) So this touches on a couple of points in the list. However, the meme comes across as somewhat morally indifferent. MYOB is generally a good practical principle. But for instance, I consider someone under the influence who drives is violating the non-aggression principle.
But, for instance, when I briefly lived in Irving, TX, I discovered I couldn't buy a six-pack of beer at a local grocery store, so I picked one up on the way to visit my sister who lives in a northeast collar county of Dallas. When I visit my Mom, who lives in a San Antonio collar county, you can buy beer in a grocery store--well, except not on Sunday morning, when you find their spirit sections roped off. I don't have an issue with Baptists advocating abstinence; I do have a problem with their imposing their moral/faith preferences on other people. I also have a problem with the unintended consequences of prohibition practices, including the high taxpayer costs for compliance. I believe in voluntary transactions, free will, of unfettered transactions between consumer and seller. I like having the option to buy beer on Sunday morning, if that's my convenience. You can't really enforce your prohibition--you simply make it inconvenient. This is a well-known concept in regulatory economics called "
bootleggers and Baptists", i.e., bootleggers profit from more expensive alcohol made possible by government prohibition by majoritarian rule.
The biggest issue I have with the meme is the very first point, about "gay marriage". This is not like the others, and it certainly doesn't reflect a "right" taken from others. Marriage is not a legal construct; it's an evolved social construct. Marriage has been an exclusively heterosexual construct over thousands of years; other cultures (e.g, Roman and Greek) tolerated, even celebrated homosexuality without the need to co-opt the foundation of the socially-normative family construct, marriage, since procreation is not a natural outcome of homosexual sexual behavior.
Now I am well aware that homosexual behavior is not unique for humanity among species, and I am not foolish enough to believe the State can or should attempt to frustrate mutually inclinations among attracted, mutually consenting adults. I think gay people should be guaranteed their rights as individuals to make contracts, to have visitation right of access by their partners. The "gay marriage" question was not about the ability of gay people to have relationships, which I see as explicitly Constitutionally guarantee under the principle of free association (First Amendment).
In fact, when I moved to Houston (in socially conservative Texas) I learned about gay sections of the city, mostly from unsolicited small talk at work. (I am decidedly straight.) From what I could tell, most people, like me, had a "live-and-let-live" attitude. The same thing when I was a Navy math instructor in Orlando. One of my fellow female instructors, an avid DisneyWorld fan who accompanied me on my first and only visit, was a lesbian. (The subject came up because the male-to-female ratio was heavily male on base, which limited finding a relationship at work.) I had a huge crush on a petite yeoman while I worked in the Staff Judge Advocate's office on my way out of the Navy.) She had a fellow enlisted female friend who must I have known I liked her and told her one day while I was present, "Tell him to go out and buy us some ice cream cones." The yeoman refused to use her powers for evil, but there was a time she asked me to drive her friend looking for her lost beret (we didn't find it). Any way, my yeoman was saying something about lesbians, and I said something to the effect I had never met one, and she laughed at me, saying I had--Beret Girl. The point being, we knew at the time the military had a policy against gays in the military, and nobody I knew, including myself, was interested in making trouble for these service members.
For some years afterwards, each state (well into the 90's) had retained a traditional definition of marriage, and some provided alternative quasi-marriage-privileged civil unions or domestic partnerships. The allegation was government was "discriminatory" is absurd; marriage was not an arbitrary one where gender was an incidental fact.. Society has a strong interest in promoting familial stability, and mixed gender is a necessary (but insufficient: e.g., fertility, age or other health problems) basis for natural procreation. We often have qualifications which are not discriminatory but serve functional purposes, e.g., clearance qualifications, vision tests for driving, etc.
The "gay marriage" movement was largely spurred by judicial activist fiat; the main concerns of social conservatives were not directed as a non-existent ban on gay relationships, which violates the natural right of association but Statist intentions of using marriage reciprocity agreements to intervene on local laws and culture. We don't see marriage as a legal construct; for us Catholics, for instance, marriage is a sacrament. We see states of a variation of the association construct, and we libertarians naturally resist imposition of a central authority (i.e., SCOTUS), especially a single-vote decision, trumping decentralized government policy.
In short, government should NOT have a say in marriage; it's always been primarily a religious/private vs. government institution. I think in my extended family, only one niece has had a civil ceremony.
I have no doubt that gays are motivated by insecurity in trying to co-opt the definition of marriage, as if by renaming a domestic partnership a "marriage", the majority will be more accepting of gays in general. But as the saying goes, "you can put lipstick on a pig...." Do I think my gay nephew deserves to be happy, find love in his life? Absolutely. And if one day he decides to get "married", I'll wish him the best.
For me, though, the State has no role in marriage, and I am concerned about unintended consequences of intervening in the local/state culture. And I am concerned about the intolerance on the Left who seem ready to impose their dubious values, threatening boycotts, etc., against those who disagree with them.
