As Nick Gillespie
observed a bit earlier, Robert Draper’s
New York Times Magazine piece, “Has
the ‘Libertarian Moment’ Finally Arrived,” has provoked an
interesting and occasionally comedic series of reactions among
people who are invested in disliking libertarians. Roy Edroso, the
sour media critic of The Village Voice, who has previously
just
made stuff up about me in the course of venting his distaste,
is back at it again on that front, in a
column that otherwise has an interesting frame about elected
libertarian Republicans tending to be socially conservative.
The stuff about Reason is wrong, and worth
correcting:
Libertarians, like members of any underpopulated political
group, like to portray their movement as a tent big enough to
accommodate a wide range of liberty-lovers. For example: Want to
free the weed and drink
raw milk? You might be a libertarian! In our experience,
however, some liberties are less important in libertarian land than
others.Gay rights is generally an easier lay-up for libertarians
– remember, many gays are male and white! – but it still
presents problems of the sort you don’t find among the statist
Democrats, again probably owing to the need to peel off Republican
voters. […]At Reason, you’re far more likely to
see defenses
of the poor bakers who are being forced to bake gay
wedding cakes than defenses of gay marriage. When NBA
player Jason Collins came out as gay in 2013, Matt
Welch explained to Reason readers “The
Importance of Allowing People to Say That You Can’t Be a Gay
Basketball Player and a Christian,” in which he focused on
the real victims of the controversy,
such as ESPN’s Chris Broussard, who was “beaten to a rhetoric pulp”
(that is, briefly criticized on Twitter) just for saying gay people
are Hell-bound. (Hilariously, Welch managed to work Martin Luther
King’s “Letter From a Birmingham Jail” into this article.)
Bolding mine. Far more
likely sounds like a testable claim, so I hit the Reason.com
search button for “gay marriage,”
sorted the results by “newest first,” and started counting which
results included defenses of gay marriage, and which included
defenses of people from punishment by the government over their
unwillingness to serve gay customers. The first result, a Steve
Chapman
defense of gay marriage over stupid government attempts to ban
its recognition, includes some verbiage that is relevant to the
broader discussion:
Experience also prompted Americans to reassess their objections
to same-sex marriage. For a long time, it was seen as a
radical fantasy. In 1996, only 27 percent of Americans supported
it.But the world changed. Gays grew more open about their sexual
orientation. Same-sex couples became more common. In 2004,
Massachusetts allowed gay and lesbian couples to wed, and in 2008,
Connecticut followed. Other states let them enter into civil unions
that approximate marriage.Opponents predicted disastrous effects. But the Almighty did not
send a plague of frogs or otherwise evince outrage. The more
exposure Americans had to the notion of gay marriage the less they
minded. Today, it has the support of 55 percent of Americans.
Bolding again mine, to underline an important point: Back when
same-sex marriage was seen as a radical fantasy, particularly by
those whose political loyalty lay with the two major political
parties, Reason was making the often lonely case for legal
recognition.
For instance: As recently as 2003, the
Village Voice (to pick one publication out of a hat) felt
the need to publish calls-to-action such as “The
Radical Case for Gay Marriage: Why Progressives Must Join This
Fight.” Reason, on the other hand, was editorializing
in favor of gay marriage way back in 1975:
The marriage laws are obviously discriminatory and thereby deny
to homosexual couples legal benefits granted to heterosexual
marrieds—lower tax rates, immunity from being forced to testify
against a spouse, etc. Probably the most blatantly homophobic
institution in our society is the military and security
establishment. The armed forces’ refusal to allow homosexuals to
join or to stay in the military reaches beyond the issue of whether
homosexuals should have a chance to receive the training, pensions,
and other benefits their tax dollars are paying for-veteran status
and an honorable discharge affect a man’s chances of getting a job,
being admitted to a school, receiving preferential insurance rates,
etc. […]In the final analysis a libertarian society will have to be
a tolerant society, since not initiating force
against your neighbors means that you are willing to let them live
as they please no matter how alien their life style is to yours, as
long as they aren’t initiating force against you (if you don’t like
them, you don’t have to deal with them). This political commitment
to tolerance is the main thing that distinguishes libertarianism
from conservatism[.]
In 1996, when the major-party political question was not “Do you
support gay marriage?”, it was “How loudly will you support a
federal prohibition on recognizing same-sex unions?”,
Reason was publishing attacks
on the Defense of Marriage Act, examinations of tactical
considerations within the pro-gay-rights
movement, and columns with subheds like “Gay
marriage is better.”
Moving back to 2014, July saw Reason.com publish a
profile on three gay GOP candidates that begins from the
starting point that the party will have to change its policies on
gay marriage or go the way of the dodo bird; another of an
Austrialian libertarian pushing for same-sex marriage
recognition; a post
making the case for those new (or hostile) to libertarians that
“Libertarians are the ones who tend to both support same-sex
marriage and people’s right not to be compelled to work in service
of one”; an essay
defending marriage-recognition against gay activists who would
prefer abolishing the institution altogether; and an
attack on Rick Santorum’s anti-gay-marriage nonsense.
If Reason.com readers are indeed “far more likely to
see defenses of the poor bakers who are being forced to
bake gay wedding cakes than defenses of gay marriage,” then that
allegedly overwhelming emphasis has stubbornly failed to
materialize over the past six weeks.
This despite the fact that, given the near-certain inevitability
of gay marriage being legal across the land soon, the more
contentious philosophical argument in front of us is no longer the
question of same-sex recognition, but rather the ancillary legal
and societal questions, including (yes!) whether individuals will
be allowed to express their bigotry without government sanction.
When discussing that particular issue, Reason writers are
likely to formulate it not as a hi-five for odious behavior; but
rather like Sheldon Richman does
here: “The test of one’s commitment to freedom of association,
like freedom of speech, is whether one sticks by it even when the
content repulses.”
Now let’s talk about Roy Edroso’s typically misleading
characterization of me. In the cited section above, Edroso
paraphrases me as saying “the real victims of
the controversy” over NBA center Jason Collins coming out as gay
were those who were “criticized” for “saying gay people are
Hell-bound.” This is a willfully inaccurate rendering of what I
wrote.
Read the
whole post in question to judge for yourself. Here are some
passages:
I think today is a wonderful, watershed day for people…to live
as open and free as they wanna be […]Jason Collins in his essay from today talked about how former
NBA great Tim Hardaway had come around from being a rhetorical
gay-basher to a strong supporter of gay rights. The country is
changing fast, and while many of us are yelling faster!,
it’s important to recognize that a lot of people feel uncomfortable
about it all. Better to have that conversation out loud, than let
it fester.
Does that sound like I think the real victim of Jason
Collins’ lifestyle being controversial for far too long was some
ESPN clown who thinks God hates the homsexualists? It takes a
remarkable amount of basic intellectual dishonesty to reach that
conclusion.
And yes, I referenced the “Letter From Birmingham Jail”—as an
example of how “sometimes engaging with the I’m not ready
to go that far just yet crowd brings out the best in
activists.” Given Edroso’s middle-school snark about how gay rights
are “generally an easier lay-up for libertarians” because
“remember, many gays are male and white,” it should come as no
surprise that he is attempting to draw boundaries around who can
and can’t take inspirations from
Martin Luther King.
And since Edroso was using my writing to support the wobbly
thesis that Reason (and Planet Libertarian) were trying to
somehow de-emphasize gay marriage “probably owing to the need to
peel off Republican voters,” here is video of me at the
Conservative Political Action Conference doing precisely the
opposite:
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