Differences between Libertarians and Conservatives
I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately, and Dafydd at Big Lizards discusses the conservative/liberal divide on Gay Marriage and find both sides lacking. Liberals want “society to applaud perversity” while Conservatives pretty much follow the same argument but come to a different conclusion: “If you have a right to cohabitate with anybody, that necessarily implies a right to marry anybody. Therefore, you have no right to cohabitate.” I’ve argued numerous times that the State shouldn’t even be in the marriage business, and that people should be able to incorporate the way businesses can.
He concludes:
Where does this leave us? It’s not the only issue on which conservatives can be as mulish and irrational as liberals. Immigration and drug policy are two others, but the worst is modern biological evolutionary theory. The last is the most similar example to conservative allergy to sexual liberty:Many dyed in the wool atheists—including Richard Dawkins, Chris Hitchens, Philip Pullman (of the wretched His Dark Materials books)—insist that accepting the idea of evolution by natural selection requires one to reject God and faith and embrace atheism.
A large number of conservatives with inadequate scientific schooling—including Ann Coulter, Glenn Beck, Michael Medved, Ben Stein—completely swallow the liberal argument.
Therefore, being unwilling to reject God, they instead reject modern evolutionary biology, casting overboard more than a century of brilliant and apolitical science.
In fact, there is no logical or rational connection between allowing sexual freedom and requiring the definition of marriage to include any old relationship somebody might want; just as there is no reasoned conflict at all between biological evolution and faith in a theistic God, as Francis S. Collins conclusively proves in the Language of God; but there you are: Conservatives reject both as unthinkingly and reflexively as liberals denounce the Koch brothers, and for eerily similar reasons.
So I say again: Extremism in defense of conservatism is certainly less annoying than the liberal strain… but it’s no less extremist—and no more rational.
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