Libertarianism and Liberalism: 2 Wings Flapping on the Same Old Rattlesnake
By Donald Hank
I received a letter from the Tancredo campaign last week and was surprised to read that Tom Tancredo, the champion of border control, is concerned primarily with how his own personal freedom was infringed upon by a fellow congressman who reported him for smoking a cigar in his office on the Hill.
Amidst Tom’s complaints about bans on swimming, boating and alcohol consumption in national parks, his signature campaign against illegal migration, the main reason many people might have voted for him, virtually got drowned out in the letter. This didn’t prevent him for requesting donations.
A few days later, I noted that Tancredo had abstained from voting on HR 1592, the hate crimes bill that added “sexual orientation” to the list of protected categories.
Now, in this letter, Tancredo referred to himself as a libertarian.
Our society at large, on both the Left and Right, seems obsessed with the personal freedoms of well-to-do pampered adults, as evidenced by Sean Hannity’s anemic interview with shock jock Howard Stern in 2004. Ironically, Hannity had defended Stern’s First Amendment right to spout profanities ad nauseam around the time of the arrest of the Philadelphia 11, a Christian group who dared oppose the gay agenda and for their pains were arrested and threatened with life sentences. Hannity, who claims to be Catholic, never whimpered in protest at that egregious, blatantly unconstitutional persecution of these Christians. Obviously, for him, and for countless other highly placed persons, the First Amendment was written exclusively for celebrities, not for ordinary people like us.
America has bought into the myth that if it feels good it is a civil right and if it feels bad, it is grounds for a civil suit.
The Bible says there is a way that seems right to man but the end thereof are the ways of death. And with every breath I take, I see evidence of this ancient truth.
The link between libertarians and the gay agenda, and hence, with hate crimes legislation, is not well understood as yet, but it behooves us to pay attention here. I first encountered it when my company offered to translate, free of charge, into English a pamphlet hyping the French libertarian group Liberté Chérie, and I saw that, in this pamphlet, the group completely ignored the issue of religious freedom, while giving long shrift to freedom for homosexuals. I emailed my contact in France with this concern and was told just to skip the part endorsing gay rights. I later requested a copy of the professionally printed pamphlet. The contact agreed to send me one but never complied.
Both groups of philosophical materialists, the Libertarians and the Liberals, are focused on the satisfaction of base human urges. Now, no ideology that seeks the lowest possible denominator ever inspires people to high ideals or heroic feats in defense of their nation. That is why both groups harp on boring, insignificant trivia. Which might be all right, except they also write laws to muzzle their opponents.
In his article Diss a ‘Gay’? Go to Jail!, Bob Unruh writes:
Under current “hate crimes” legislation, two Christians in Australia have already been INDICTED for remarks critical of Islam. Another person was INDICTED for criticizing Zionism. And a filmmaker was threatened with being arrested for merely using the term “homosexual” instead of “gay.” A German priest faces prison time for criticizing abortionists and in The Netherlands, “adulterers” and “fornicators” cannot be criticized because they now are a protected class.
You see the double talk? While paying lip service to “freedom,” both libertarians and liberals (which I see as 2 wings flapping on the same old rattlesnake) are working overtime to steal your freedom of speech and of religion. And far from helping any group become free, they pull the safety net our from under the weak. Please observe the outcome of this complex set of behaviors.
An article of May 5, 2007 in the Dutch-language newspaper Volkskrant reports that, based on figures from the National Investigation Service in the Netherlands, 70-80% of prostitutes are exploited or are victims of human trafficking. (You’ll have to take my word for this. I found nothing on this in English).
The Netherlands has accepted prostitution as a woman’s “right” since 2000, when it legalized prostitution to “free” her. Of course, past human experience with prostitution had led Holland, like almost all civilized countries, to recognize that prostitution exploits women and therefore needs to be banned. This experience has gone toward what we call common sense, or wisdom. Post-modern man is persistently denying that wisdom, with predictable consequences.
Featuring, as it does, legalized prostitution, gay marriage, gay adoption, euphoric drugs, euthanasia, and even an officially recognized pedophile party with seats in parliament, Holland can be considered the quintessential libertarian haven.
The irony that everyone sees with their own eyes but refuses to acknowledge is that the more material freedom a country has, the more people are enslaved. That is not a casual observation. It is a natural law, and failure to acknowledge it—what our Founders called the God of nature, and His laws—is wreaking havoc everywhere.
According to Christian aid organization Scharlaken Koord, 450 of the 892 prostitutes they surveyed in 2001 (roughly half) handed over all their earnings to a pimp.
However, the above-cited latest police investigation, based in part on wiretaps by the Dutch National Investigation Service (roughly equivalent to the FBI), shows that reports from the prostitutes themselves are unreliable and that, despite what they say, not just half, but in fact the overwhelming majority of these women are victims of human trafficking, forced to serve unwanted clients and robbed of their income—all of the things that were not supposed to happen once legalization took effect.
Libertarians, like liberals, are preoccupied with the comfort of the comfortable, the power of the powerful, and the money of the rich. Spoiled adults have rights. Children and their problems don’t exist, except where they interface with adult interests. For them, whether or not a homosexual has the right to pursue his lifestyle unfettered by conventions is of far greater importance than whether or not children adopted by homosexuals are happy and not abused. Yet, some studies show that a disproportionately high rate of them are in fact abused. Others find a higher risk of sexual molestation.
Another of the many ironies associated with this issue is that, thanks again to the liberal/libertarian notion that Christians need to be muzzled by hate crime legislation, Muslims have a perfect right to infringe on everyone’s rights. This may seem incongruous, but remember that the main concern of the “libers” is to overcome all of society’s inhibitions and rules of conduct that make no sense to them, and Christianity has historically been the source of these, epitomized by the 10 Commandments. In this willingness to trade a relatively mild-mannered religion for a hostile, virulent and unrelenting one lie the seeds of Europe’s destruction. Americans seem eager to import this anti-Christian ideology.
Thus the vast majority of the pimps exploiting these prostitutes in Holland are youths of Moroccan origin, known as “lover boys,” followed by Turks. These are both Muslim groups, which explains in large part the exacerbation of the women’s plight following legalization.
In other words, by enshrining libertarian ideals and libertarian-inspired ideas in legislation, Holland has given itself a double whammy that demolished the very goals of human happiness and pleasure it initially targeted: it has not only opened women to exploitation and human trafficking by legalizing prostitution (based on the fatally flawed assumption that this would eliminate exploitation by encouraging women to open free-market sex businesses), but further, in an effort to counteract the anti-libertarian tendencies of Christianity, it has liberalized immigration laws to allow Muslims to flock into the Netherlands and settle there. And some of the young Muslims have greatly compounded the existing exploitation by imposing far harsher conditions on the women—thanks to the anti-female component of Islam—than did the pimps in the traditional illegal sex trade. It was like importing the mongoose to kill rabbits on behalf of farmers, and then discovering that the mongoose likes chicken better than rabbit.
This is a perfect example of how the implementation of man-centered libertarian ideas exacerbates exploitation of humans, particularly the weak, and hence, how a civilization obsessed with the rights of the irresponsible eventually becomes a civilization of lawlessness, where the rich and powerful enslave the poor and disenfranchised, just as they did in the Stone Age. In other words, it shows, once more, how vastly superior God’s laws are to man’s.
Finally, all of the above shows that the difference between “liberal” and “libertarian” is not much more than a matter of spelling. Both lead to the same sad result.
Donald Hank is an independent writer and the owner/operator of a technical translation agency in PA.
