TIME Magazine offers some thoughts about the Libertarian Party and "last month's child-porn-gate." LP Presidential candidate Mary Ruwart, who opposes child pornography, says the government should not interfere with children who consent to participate in child porn. Nathan Thornburgh writes for TIME:
Ruwart's is a classic libertarian take — a defense of free will (even for "child performers") and an attack on government prohibitions of any kind. It's also political poison. As libertarian blogger Steve Newton put it, Ruwart and her allies run the risk of turning the party into "the poster child for NAMBLA and the aluminum hat brigade."
The party's executive director, Shane Cory, saw the danger as well, and rushed out a press release titled, "Libertarians call for increased communication to combat child pornography." Cory was attacked by hardliners who saw the release as an endorsement of increased federal prosecuting power. The party refused to vote on a resolution asking states to strongly enforce existing child porn laws. Cory resigned in protest, depriving a party in the midst of what may be its most promising election season of one of its most able organizers and fund raisers. But for many libertarian faithful, adherence to the most rigid of principles always trumps practical considerations about how those principles might be more broadly observed.
That rigidity has long been libertarianism's greatest asset. If the Democratic and Republican parties have any ideology, it's an ideology of power — their policies shift and twist in the wind according to what they think will appeal to the biggest slice of the electorate. Libertarians have no power, but they have consistency and principle. If they lose that — and, presumably, the general election as well — they may be left on November 5th with nothing at all.
Libertarians will lose in November -- unless Americans regain a commitment to the radical pursuit of happiness and liberty which animated America's Founding Fathers. What purpose does the Libertarian Party have if not to educate voters and shift public opinion from the lukewarm and moderate to the passionate extremism of John Hancock, Thomas Jefferson, and Sam Adams, who said:
Contemplate the mangled bodies of your countrymen, and then say "what should be the reward of such sacrifices?" Bid us and our posterity bow the knee, supplicate the friendship and plough, and sow, and reap, to glut the avarice of the men who have let loose on us the dogs of war to riot in our blood and hunt us from the face of the earth? If ye love wealth better than liberty, the tranquility of servitude than the animated contest of freedom — go home from us in peace. We ask not your counsels or arms. Crouch down and lick the hands which feed you. May your chains sit lightly upon you, and may posterity forget that you were our countrymen!
Speech, State House of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia (1 August 1776)
Las Vegas gambling advocate Wayne Allyn Root was one Libertarian candidate who attacked Ruwart for her consistent libertarianism. "I'm trying to change mainstream libertarianism," Root told TIME's Thornburgh at Root's home in Las Vegas in early May. "I want to make us electable."
That's the choice Libertarians face:
• making their party fit the mold of voters who would embarrass the Founding Fathers,
• or raising Americans up to the high standards of 1776, who would then see the Libertarian Party as the only logical alternative.
Is Ruwart's position as nutty as her rivals allege?
All libertarians agree that unconsented sex is wrong.
America's Founding Fathers believed that all sex outside the sacred life-long commitment of heterosexual marriage is sinful. Today's legal system is founded on a belief that "anything goes."
Imagine you're on a jury, hearing a child porn case, and the 40-year-old defendant is arguing that the 6-year-old "consented." How easily will you be persuaded of this after hearing the testimony of the child and the child's parents?
On the other hand, suppose you are a 14-year-old who has consented to marry an older man you love and respect, and have already had a child by him, a child you love very much, and the government wants to take your child away to an institution, based on its claim that -- regardless of what you say -- you are deemed legally incapable of "consent," therefore your marriage is invalid, and your child belongs to the government. Should you be allowed to try to convince a jury that you knew what you were doing so you can keep your child?
Mary Ruwart says you should be able to do so. "Child Protection" authorities in Texas say otherwise.
In a more Christian nation, the 40 year-old would be quickly convicted because the sex was outside marriage, and marriages were usually contracted within an extended family, with ties to the community, sanctioned by an educated church. Easy decision.
Yesterday's crimes are today's "alternative lifestyles," but a "fanatic" religious belief in marriage can be criminal, as fundamentalist Mormons in Texas have found out. We're now living with the descendants of people who were educated in schools where it is illegal to teach "the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God" to students. This not only produces polygamous cults, it produces "the cult of the omnipotent State."
I've been in the home of a couple who were married at age 14, and after more than 50 years of marriage, they have many children, grand-children and great-grandchildren who are glad the couple was not subjected to the wisdom of bureaucrats in our great nanny-state.
But What About the Children? by Llewellyn H. Rockwell, Jr.
See comments on Christine Smith's Open letter to Shane Cory (LP Exec. Dir.) & Andrew Davis (LP Media Coordinator)
Another "child abuse" angle:
The all-powerful, all-wise state
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