The Libertarian Edge

by Michael Gilson de Lemos

A consolation of being Libertarian and sticking to Libertarian principles is that if you don't like what people are saying about you, stand perfectly still.  

In due time--usually a half-generation, sometimes a month--you'll find yourself on the social vanguard--and like me, invited to all the best let's-party-like-we-still-think-it's-1999  parties. (I confess having a vibrant wife who is a fashion photographer, graphic artist, and distant cousin of Andy Warhol who never drinks and understands car engines, helps.) 

By the same token, one of the irritants is to either find yourself denounced in due course for the opposite reason of a few years before--or find that what people denounced in one year as extreme predictions are blandly announced as government policy. 

GIBRALTAR SWAYED 

A Libertarian, by remaining so, is  never bored. To the unstable ocean, Gibraltar seemingly moves. 

In the '70's, Libertarians regularly warned that with precedents--legal and psychological--being set by  marihuana prohibition, the government could as arguably seek to ban tobacco or fatty foods; drug paraphernalia laws would lead to selective arrest for even housewive's implements and cooking knives.  At the time this was viewed as  "loony-Libbie" rhetoric. Now it is prophecy. 

In the 80's, Libertarians were hailed as defenders of the child for calling for retention of the relatively low ages of consent, while warning that other trends would create a legal nightmare where the undefended young would be tried for crimes, and those who tried to stop real abuse were persecuted.  Now teachers who stop bullies are reprimanded. Then, lusty mature 12 year olds were ignored and 18 year olds were technically held unaccountable for mass murder. Now you must be 21 to buy  beer,  while 12 year old mental defectives are judicially lynched for crimes caused by imbecility.  

THE PRESENT IS EPILOGUE 

Not very long ago I pointed out that marriage has in effect been abolished as a legal category in US and Canadian governments. Domestic abuse, marital and domestic rape charges become a feminist shakedown racket begun in role-confused hatred and surviving on government-encouraged theft. It is promoted by law-enforcement, where putatively gender-neutral warnings metamorphose into only women being victims of such horror as  "being criticized for the little things."  

…which is now,  a felony of "sexism." The true objective, I warned,  was to make marriage a crime--it was without legal standing already as an independent category.   

Many readers contacted me to say no, no, I had misread the tea leaves or would turn women off Libertarianism with such bizarre pronouncements.  

Ah.  

Now a  Canadian Court has ruled that marriage had no legal status in law and implied that a father who tried to name his child with his surname was an abuser. This, while finding for the mother who openly admitted she had tried to blackmail the father with false charges and clearly deceived him in becoming pregnant: in effect, raped him. The court, a dissenting Judge warned,  is clear: 

Fathers are in the same legal category as those who have "raped, assaulted [or] otherwise abused or abandoned the mother…" 

The majority,  declaring that only women "have rights" that are to be taken into consideration: 

"The legislature no longer considers that marriage ... is a social institution of paramount or, ... any importance. ... The appellant is in no worse legal position than any other father."

"... The legislature has left no 'gap' in this question of a child's name and surname. It has decreed that fathers have no rights."  

Once, revolutions were fought for the glorious right to carry one's ancestry publicly. Will the day dawn when the Libertarian issue is preserving intact our social ID number and not having it changed arbitrarily? 

WHAT'S IN A NAME? 

Latins, who can often recite both parental lines going back centuries as a mark of freedom and  Civilization, and many of whom have both a public nickname and a private name of spiritual significance only known to family and intimates--their true name--may soon be discriminated against under this barbarian practice. Will it be mandated someday that we have only one name--plus our occupation or other identifier? 

Meanwhile the "right" of the mother is revealed as the truth of feminism: government institutionalized child-abuse.

Anti-feminine and anti-intellectual statist women, supported by the misconstrued chivalry of weak or envious men, do to the child what Hitler could not.  

The mother is glorified for sexually abusing (by their own standard) and robbing the father-- her willingness to condemn him to civil death and a life sentence on a false accusation ignored, and thus legalized and rewarded.  And hence the child of his inheritance and history, and now memory of his own name and protection of his family.  

He is unplugged from relationships, and now a social number. His birthright is sold for a mess of alimony. His father is evaluated on his ability to get along with the perjuring mother, and found wanting and discarded. 

Our decadent North American culture is blind to the reality that government-encouraged female legal, financial, physical and sexual abuse of men is the real problem here.  

Combined with the all-intrusive State of the drug-war, financial "aid' and commercial regulations, it is spreading this viewpoint in a sinister New Imperialism to ideologically vulnerable countries and developing nations.  

WHEN WOMEN ACTUALLY CHOSE 

Men are now in a situation where they have been denied marital and parental choice.  

A court in Utah convicted a man of polygamy precisely because he made a point of following every technicality to not be married. 

A court in Canada simultaneously allows that a man seeking to enforce even weak common law marital rights is wrong because marriage is the plaything of the State. 

How long before many women find themselves similarly prosecuted? The soup is hot; no, the soup is cold. Only the State, post facto, knows for sure. 

Libertarians however, go a little further still. For in denying men choice, women who wish as in this case to make unconventional--truly unconventional--but voluntary choices are brutally penalized. The problem is not the attack on this or that gender. Libertarians correctly realize that it is an attack on individual, non-coercive choices--whether to be different or to hand down tradition--that are not sanctioned by the social paradigms. 

More: we are seeing a new Puritanism in the sheep's clothing of an alleged liberating, progressivism. Queen Victoria is alive and well: and she thinks she is a leftist interested in gender equity. And it is not just a matter of time before opinion leaders are attacked as well. 

It is happening now. And--good news: Libertarians are at the forefront once again.

In the sometimes  abstruse discussion on the War between the States, several Libertarians pointed out the obvious. The Stars and Bars, as symbol of slavery, must take a back seat to Old Glory, which waved over the cotton-slaves for decades, and where a new slavery of manufactured pseudo-crime is still legal, just government regulated (read the 13^th and 14^th Amendments).  

This caused an uproar with dismayed charges of Right-Wing nutbar, anti-Black insensitivity. What is in effect a side-discussion in Libertarian historical analysis, however, was broadcast in the Left  far and wide. Now, the vigor of Libertarianism is that even this minor point is having the effect of shaking--and providing an anchor to the changing-- perceptions. 

For a Black Leftist legislator agrees. Fed up with saying of the feudalist  Pledge of Allegiance (written by a Dark-Age admiring socialist, by the way; and used as part of the successful plot  to make socialism respectable under cover of jingoism and nationalist de-Federalization) in the State legislature, where arguably the Federal flag has no place, the government made an issue of her non-committal silence.  

Banned  by outraged if confused colleagues, the ACLU is jumping in while local Black leaders line up to defend her. Any bets on when the Libertarian proponents of this view are denounced as…Left-Wing nutbars? 

Libertarians see this time and again. While people caution Libertarians against being too "extreme" --a seemingly "Libertopian" idea or abstruse point of scholarship springs unexpectedly into controversy.  

Again and again, Libertarian predictions that seem far-fetched come true, while wild-seeming notions to the conformism of our times--gold ownership, 200 TV channels, non-government alternatives in everything from community dispute resolution to Social Security--penetrate slowly and suddenly click, hailed as cutting edge.  

Some people line up to attack Libertarians, thinking Libertarians adopt positions as others do: from power-lust, group-alliances, shoddy interests, stolen money, ego, class, gender, race--on anything but intellect and principle.  

They do not yet understand that the simple structural idea of Liberty cannot be cut to measure to be "acceptable" but is the uncut edge--the cutting edge-- that cuts through the Gordian knots of  foolish  times.  

June 8, 2001