Libertarians are insane anarchists

Nick Gillespie, the editor of Reason, writes in the November issue of that magazine:

It’s a shame that Idaho Sen. Larry Craig didn’t draw on his own political principles to defend his right to engage in consensual sex in toilet stalls with men. Or with women, for that matter.

So Gillespie thinks that public restrooms ought to be turned into free-sex zones. So long as the behavior is consensual, men and women should be allowed to engage in sex acts with men and women in men’s rooms and women’s rooms. If people don’t like entering a public restroom and finding a sex act in progress (or, for that matter, finding numerous sex acts in progress), well, how is that harming them? They don’t have to look.

Gillespie continues:

It’s nothing short of pathetic that Craig would deny the possibilty of matrimony to gays even as he seeks sex from them.

How does it logically follow that a homosexual, who presumably supports the right of people of the same sex to engage in sex acts with each other, must support the right of people of the same sex to marry each other? Gillespie shows a contempt for reason that amounts to vandalism.

* * *

On a side point, Craig is not “Idaho Sen. Larry Craig,” which makes him sound like a state senator. He’s a United States senator from Idaho, not an Idaho senator.

- end of initial entry -

C. writes:

Between the gay sex and the Muslim foot washing, public restrooms are going to resemble something from the last days of the Roman Empire!

A reader writes:

I agree that supporting laws that permit engaging in sex (i.e., opposing anti-sodomy laws) is not particularly related to opposing or supporting marriage between homosexuals. You can certainly be in favor of A and against B.

I also totally agree that supporting/permitting what one might do in private has little bearing on what one might do in a public restroom or any other public place.

LA replies:

Ahh, but that’s where the catch comes. Libertarians want the state out of everything, eliminating the very concept of “public.” For example, they want the entire U.S. to be turned into private property so that the government would have nothing to do with immigration laws. Immigration would be a matter of whether private property owners want to allow foreigners to enter their property. Similarly, libertarians want to remove the state’s authority over the institution of marriage. Marriage would be instituted and performed by private individuals and groups, with no state involvement, and with each group defining marriage as it likes. Libertarians want to turn all of public society into private society, and all public spaces into private spaces. So, in a libertarian America, there would be no such thing as a public restroom. If people have the right to engage in private consensual activity, and if the owner of the Minneapolis airport or the O’Hare airport allows homosexual activity to go on in the airport restrooms, there would be no basis on which to oppose it, other than not using that airport.

The reader replies:

I think there are degrees of libertarianism or degrees of people who call themselves libertarians. The extreme case, as you cite below, makes no sense (and will never happen).

LA replies:

Of course it will never happen. I am showing where the libertarian logic would lead, if the libertarians were allowed to pursue it.

LA continues:

However, my point does hold in this instance. I’m not just talking about the ultimate implications of Gillespie’s argument, but about what he’s plainly saying ought to be done, namely that people should be allowed to engage in consensual sex acts in an airport restroom. His argument is based on the premise that the airport restoom is not public but private, since the airport is (presumably) privately owned. By this logic, the right to engage in private consensual activity applies to an airport restroom, or any other privately owned facility used by the public. State and county legislators should therefore have no power to ban consensual sex acts in an airport restroom, or a bus station restroom, or a movie restroom, any more than they can ban consensual sex acts in people’s homes.

It’s not some unrepresentative, way-out libertarian who is saying this. It’s the editor of the leading libertarian magazine in the country, a magazine treated with respect (and, I believe, funded) by the neoconservative establishment.

LA continues:

Liberals say that religion (translation: Christianity) should be banned in the public square, not in private, but then, through never-ending growth of state authority, they keep expanding the public square until religion is banned virtually everywhere.

Similarly, libertarians say that consensual sex acts can only be banned in public, not in private, but then, through never-ending reduction of state authority, they would keep expanding the private sphere until consensual sex acts cannot be banned anywhere.

Thus the statist liberals on one side and the anti-statist liberals (i.e. libertarians) on the other have the liberal bases covered: Religion permitted nowhere; sodomy permitted everywhere.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at October 17, 2007 10:04 AM | Send