Category Archives: Strategies For Advancing Liberty

Instead Of Giving Gay Marriage Opponents Special Rights, Get Rid Of All Anti-Discrimination Laws

The Alabama House passed a bill on Thursday that allows judges to refuse to perform gay marriages. It passed after a four-hour debate by a vote of 69-25. More “religious protection” bills are on the way according to groups pushing this legislation.

The bill was passed to ease fears that judges and ministers would be forced to perform gay marriages if court rulings legalizing gay marriage in Alabama were upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court. This bill to be blunt is a travesty, would open the door to lawlessness by Alabama’s judges, and should be vetoed.

The first problem with this bill is that it tries to link judges performing gay marriage ceremonies with other travesties on this issue, such as requiring bakers to bake cakes for gay wedding ceremonies. There is a major moral difference between a private company refusing to offer a service and government official refusing to perform their legal duty. Judges are bound by law to serve all of their constituents and perform certain duties as described, despite their own personal feelings on the matter. One of those duties is solemnizing marriages. A judge cannot refuse to perform an interracial marriage because they personally disapprove it.

On the other hand, fining or legally punishing a private individual because they refuse to perform services for a gay wedding is immoral. In this age of Yelp and social media where customers can easily leave reviews of businesses, we need to ask ourselves if anti-discrimination laws covering the private sector are obsolete. If a business is discriminating based on gender, sexual orientation, race, or religion; it’s more easy for customers to identify those offending businesses and for people to vote accordingly with their pocketbooks. There is no need for the state to get involved and punish businesses with fines and other punishments.

If a judge cannot perform a gay marriage ceremony because they disagree with it, they should not be a judge. This is like refusing to sentence someone to jail because they object to a law. Judges do not have that discretion in criminal law and should not have that kind of discretion in marriage law.

As for ministers being forced to perform gay marriages, that’s a red herring. The First Amendment already protects the rights of ministers to refuse to perform gay marriages. The decision of churches to solemnize marriages to whom ever they want, as long as they can legally consent, is a protected religious practice. This legislation to protect them is not necessary.

The best way to solve is to divorce government from the act of solemnizing marriage. Make the only legal paperwork that has to be signed off is the marriage contract itself. Whenever a county or parish official files or signs off on a contract, they’re not passing judgment on the issue. All they’re doing is just filing legal paperwork so it can be enforced in courts. We should also look into ways into getting government out of marriage for tax purposes and other services.

All of these “religious protection bills” miss the big picture. Why should private businesses have the right to discriminate against potential customers based upon their religious beliefs and not have the right to discriminate based on other factors? Here’s another way to put it, why should gay marriage opponents have special rights?

Instead of writing “religious protection bills” to protect business owners from being bankrupted and driven out of business by government agencies for deciding who they want to serve, legislatures should consider a different approach. Every legislature should pass a bill or better yet an amendment to their state’s constitution stating this:

The right of any private business to deny service for any reason, except for emergency medical services and emergency lodging in a licensed hotel, shall not be infringed by any law.

 

 

Anti-discrimination laws, in this era of social media, are relics of the past. It’s time to make these laws history and let the marketplace punish discrimination. I don’t know about you, but I prefer to trust ordinary people than the government.

 

I’m one of the original co-founders of The Liberty Papers all the way back in 2005. Since then, I wound up doing this blogging thing professionally. Now I’m running the site now. You can find my other work at The Hayride.com and Rare. You can also find me over at the R Street Institute.

Why Are Young Libertarians More Interested In Utopia Than School Choice?

Editor’s Note: This is a guest post from Veronica Peterson whom I met at a recent Franklin Center conference. She was formerly with California Watchdog.org.

As an advocate for libertarian philosophy I have found the common conception of “libertarianism” seems to be one of mixed ideas and an internal clash of anarchism vs. state-ism.

It seems among ourselves, the only thing libertarians can agree on is that individuals have rights-from there war breaks out between the utopias of everyone involved in a discussion (but don’t worry, the sacred NAP keeps the peace-or fosters more war). These discussions usually hit a brick wall when everyone concerned realizes that nobody is willing to accept someone else’s utopia, and someone calls someone else a “statist” or depending upon their feelings about the NAP, a “filthy statist.”

Libertarians like to discuss all sorts of important political topics like immigration, economics, the environment, and intellectual property. Each libertarian creates a utopia, centered in the concept of individual rights, and explains how their perfected version of the State can accommodate these rights (or not).

But for a group of people who are so passionate about the rights of individuals, it surprises me there aren’t more-and more fruitful-discussions of school choice.

It seems libertarians would be interested in the rights of the parents and government authority, but the topic of school choice is embedded with slightly less obvious rights, as well as our government supporting autonomy. Then we are faced with the reality that while we seem to believe in supporting liberties and markets, the government is facilitating actual liberty for families and children where it was not otherwise achievable.

Young libertarians should be up in arms over these ideas. Young libertarians have the opportunity to create and enact a libertarian ideal in the real world-that will help their own children-if they begin now.

Last month the Franklin Center held their #AmplifyChoice event in the Washington DC, area to raise awareness of National School Choice Week. The event included campus tours, meeting with teachers, families, and students, lectures about the logistics of charter schools and education, as well as opportunities to ask one on one questions with experts in education, politics, and operators of private and charter schools.

In contrast to many areas of the country, families in the Washington DC area have many educational options for their children. While a lot of upper middle-class families might want to send their kids abroad to a boarding school for boys in Sydney, for instance, the DC area itself offers traditional public schools or a diverse choice of public charter schools and private schools.

Now here is one of the twists: the DC area offers the Opportunity Scholarship, which awards qualifying students scholarships to attend private schools. This scholarship is federally funded and is only available to the DC area. There are about 50 private schools accept students using this scholarship for their tuition.

This scholarship helps break down economic barriers and overall families more educational options-but it is federally funded…

Ok, so, government funding isn’t uncommon for schools. Traditional public schools are the standard in the governmentally funded education. These are where you end up if there are no other options-children are entitled an education, and what the government provides them is what they get.

What’s interesting is the most common alternative (besides home schooling) is public charter schools that are regulated differently state to state. DC has created a system that leaves charter schools funded through the government while leaving them autonomous. This autonomy is possible because of the District of Columbia Public Charter School Board (PCSB), which authorizes and oversees the public charter schools that are run by independent nonprofits. Charter schools have the freedom to use the teaching methods that the individual nonprofits choose, in contrast to whatever the government wants to teach your kids. Focusing on quality education, PCSB bases a tiered rating system of charter schools on student progress, parent satisfaction, and student achievement.

Why is this not a thing everywhere?

The liberty movement is the prime group to advocate for educational freedoms and the autonomy of families. Why are we arguing over who is a “real libertarian,” and instead be arguing over what schooling options are legitimate and why?

I’m one of the original co-founders of The Liberty Papers all the way back in 2005. Since then, I wound up doing this blogging thing professionally. Now I’m running the site now. You can find my other work at The Hayride.com and Rare. You can also find me over at the R Street Institute.

Moral Authority

There is a very important distinction I think we need to make clear.

Government, as expressed in law, should have no moral system. Morals are not embodied in law. Ethics, are the province of laws.

The men who create laws, and who enforce them, need to be guided by morals in their conscience; and these morals should roughly accord with the laws they create and enforce, to the extent possible.

Further, these laws should roughly accord with the morals of those expected to live under them, to the extent possible.

NOT, to reflect in law all that which any may believe to be moral or immoral.

Our nation exists for the sole purpose of, and with the sole authority and validity of, preserving the fundamental rights of man against those who would abrogate them.

The day we forcibly encode a specific religious moral system into law, is the day we cease to have any validity as a nation.

We were created, chartered, and draw our authority to be a nation, and execute those powers delegated by our citizens; from a constitution which specifically prohibits us from doing so.

If you believe we already do, or seek to prove we have always done so, you are a fool at best, and a danger at worst.

I am a cynically romantic optimistic pessimist. I am neither liberal, nor conservative. I am a (somewhat disgruntled) muscular minarchist… something like a constructive anarchist.

Basically what that means, is that I believe, all things being equal, responsible adults should be able to do whatever the hell they want to do, so long as nobody’s getting hurt, who isn’t paying extra

Sympathy for Paranoia

The moon landing was faked by the U.S. government for propaganda purposes to win the Cold War. The terrorist attacks of 9/11 was actually an inside job as a pretext to go to war. Space aliens landed in Roswell, NM but the government has been covering it up. The Sandy Hook massacre was faked to increase support for new gun control laws; the “victims” were actually actors who are all alive and well today. The Illuminati is the secret entity which actually governs the whole world…

The natural response to these statements is to say “these people are mad barking moonbats” and to keep ourselves as distant as possible from the people making them. Those of us in the liberty movement who want to be taken seriously are very quick to renounce anyone who is within six degrees of Alex Jones or anyone else who states any of the above. It’s difficult enough to be taken seriously about legalizing drugs, the non-aggression principle, free markets, and freedom of association; the last thing we need is to be lumped in with “those people.”

While it is very important to defend the “brand” of the liberty movement, it’s also important to recognize the reasons why people believe some rather nutty things.

[W]hen I say virtually everyone is capable of paranoid thinking, I really do mean virtually everyone, including you, me, and the founding fathers. As the sixties scare about the radical Right demonstrates, it is even possible to be paranoid about paranoids. – Jesse Walker, The United States of Paranoia: A Conspiracy Theory, (p. 24) (Read my book review here)

Once one learns about some of the activities governments been proven to have been involved in, some conspiracy theories no longer seem as outlandish. I used to refer to conspiracy theories and wacky beliefs as “black helicopter” stories and I’m fairly certain that others used the same terminology. Once I learned that black unmarked helicopters were used in the assault by the FBI on the Branch Davidians in Waco, TX,(Napolitano, p.110) I stopped calling such ideas “black helicopter.”

Not everything that sounds crazy is.
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An Article V Convention Is A Great Idea……If You Want To Destroy The Republic

Article V to the U.S. Constitution lays out two methods for amending the Constitution:

  1. Congress passes an amendment by two-thirds vote and sends it to the states for ratification
  2. Two-thirds of state legislatures pass a resolution call for a convention to propose amendments, that would be sent to the states for ratification.

Amendments proposed either way have to be ratified by three-fourths of the states. All 27 amendments to the Constitution have been proposed by the first way. However, many conservatives are calling for an Article V Convention of The States to curb what they see is a Federal government that refuses to deal with a debt crisis, regulatory overreach, infringements upon state sovereignty, and Federal government overreach. Other Article V proposals include the “liberty amendments” that were proposed in 2013 by conservative talk show host and constitutional attorney Mark Levin.

However, without dealing with the specifics of the proposals laid out by those who are supporting an Article V convention, I believe that an Article V convention is a terrible approach to amending the constitution and in fact will likely result in a less free America.

The first problem with the Article V convention is that it’s never been tried before, with good reason. Matthew Spalding wrote this for the Daily Signal:

The requirement that amendments proposed by such a convention must be ratified by three-fourths of the states is a significant limit on the process and would likely prevent a true “runaway” convention from fundamentally altering the Constitution. But we don’t think it is at all clear, for instance, that two-thirds of the states calling for an amendments convention can limit the power of all the states assembled in that convention to propose amendments to the Constitution. Other questions include the many practical aspects of how an amending convention would operate and whether any aspects of such a convention (including going beyond its instructions) would be subject to judicial review.

 

 

Which leads to the second problem with an Article V convention, which is that everything will be on the table. The New American magazine reports that at least one progressive PAC is calling for an Article V convention in order to pass an amendment to overturn the Citizens United decision. In addition, progressive Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens has released a wish list of amendments. In an Article V convention, all of these things can be considered and what may result if a series of proposed of amendments reflecting a populist smorgasbord of proposals designed to cobble together the support of 37 states.

The third reason why an Article V convention should be rejected is that all of these proposed changes can be accomplished through the normal Congressional amendment process. An Article V convention should be reserved just for national emergencies given all the inherent unknowns that would be involved. No one in their right minds can credibly argue that any issue we’re facing right now that an Article V convention would remedy is truly a national crisis that needs to be solved with the dramatic step of a constitutional amendment, let alone one passed in this measure.

The final reason why liberty-lovers should reject an Article V convention is that it essentially is a shortcut to doing the hard work of persuading fellow Americans and our representatives that we need to make these changes. What the Article V proponents are essentially trying to do is to overturn 80 years of election results without actually putting in the hard work of persuading fellow Americans that they should make the changes. If they could not convince the American people to endorse this agenda in an election, how are they going to convince 37 states to endorse these ideas?

An Article V convention is a radical measure that will, unfortunately, provide a platform for populist demagogues to promote their agenda to the detriment of liberty. Need I remind everyone that the original mandate of what became the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia in 1787 was merely to revise the Articles of Confederation. Instead, it produced a brand new governing document. It’s just as likely that an Article V convention will produce a constitution that will radically different than what its proponents advocate.

In the end, there’s just simply too much risk and too many unknowns surrounding the Article V convention to go down that road.

I’m one of the original co-founders of The Liberty Papers all the way back in 2005. Since then, I wound up doing this blogging thing professionally. Now I’m running the site now. You can find my other work at The Hayride.com and Rare. You can also find me over at the R Street Institute.
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