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 THE LIBERTARIAN ENTERPRISE Number 853, January 3, 2016 Believe me, to get what we want to make of society, libertarians must learn not to act like Republicans.
Attribute to L. Neil Smith's The Libertarian Enterprise As most gun activists are presently aware, late in December of what is now last year, California Governor Jerry Brown signed into "law" an act which pretends to permit police in that state, unfettered by Constitutional considerations, to enter the property of otherwise innocent human beings and steal whatever firearms they may be keeping there. The Bill of rights lacks any enforcement or penalty clause, although there are criminal statutes within the United States Code which make Brown's signature and advocacy an unlawful act, for which any decent court—counting up the number of individuals damaged by what he has done—would sentence him to a couple of lifetimes in prison. Preferably in the reopened federal prison on Alcatraz Island. As it is, this decades-old sick leftist fetish for rendering ordinary people helpless, is going to cost some incalculable number of human lives, Americans defending to the death their right to own and carry weapons, and brain-dead jackbooted minions of the totalitarian state, intent on violating them. California will end up looking like Kosovo. Now I don't really give the traditional rodent's rear end about what happens in the state of California. Bumper stickers on cars in my state used to read "DON'T CALIFORNICATE COLORADO" and I agree wholeheartedly. What does concern me is what this siuation tells me about the upcoming general election: that there is no hope to be found in it for anybody who cares about individual liberty and the Bill of Rights. Consider: the First Amendment holds that it is wrong, no matter the Big Lie that Rush Limbaugh or Mark Levin or Glenn Beck or Michael Medved have spent the last two decades asserting to the contrary, to base policy on religious beliefs. Not really understanding the course that Western history has followed over the last thousand years, or why the Founding Fathers might have bothered to include it, they have twisted and distorted and denied the First Amendment exactly the way they accuse the left of twisting and distorting and denying the Second Amendment. Every time one of these religious cooties asserts that the Constitution protects some "god-given" right, I cringe, along with Thomas Jefferson. No imaginary playmate gave me my rights, they are carved into my genes by a million brutal years of evolution by natural selection. As a result of the right wing's ugly and ignorant propaganda, and the war on women they claim not to be fighting, there is not one individual among the Republican candidates being shoved in our faces who is openly willing to recognize the sovereignty of fully half of the human race. At all costs, women must never be allowed total and unquestionable dominion over their bodies and the products of their bodies. Look: here's the way I arrived at my opinion regarding abortion (that is what we're talking about, here, you understand that, don't you?); if you disagree with me, at least be good enough to acknowledge that you have abandoned reason and fallen back on faith: if people own nothing else, they own their own lives and the bodies that house them. They own all of the products of those lives and bodies, the good ones, like songs and poems and sculptures, right along with the "bad" ones, which modern civilization prefers them to dispose of tidily and sanitarily. In any case, nobody sane, with an Intelligence Quotient more respectable than that of a bedbug, questions the individual's absolute right to those songs and poems and sculptures. Equally, the unpleasant products must be recognized as property, to be dealt with approporiately. A fetus is one of those products of a person's body that belongs to them. What the rights of the father, whose contribution consists mostly of information, may be, I'll address at another time. But undeniably, the fetus is constructed, cell by cell, from its mother's flesh, and it is therefore her property, to do with, to keep and to nurture or to dispose of, exactly as she wishes. Nobody else has anything to say about it, especially those religious cooties that I mentioned. Conservatives claim abortion is murder, which is defined as "the wrongful death of a human being" and yet any definition of a human being over the past three thousand years, involves the operation of the human mind. Can it play chess? Can it tell, or laugh at, dirty jokes? A fetus has no rights until it can assert, in some acceptable way, its will to exist, an event that doesn't occur until after birth. Now: which one of the current dozen or so Republican candidates for President would protect a woman's right to own and operate her own body? This is far from a trivial issue to young women or the mothers of young women. And while we're at it, which one of these candidates would arrest and punish those responsible—like Jerry Brown—for smashing into your house and stealing what the Constitution has guaranteed you? Think very hard, because they're exactly the same issue. You listening, Republicans? No, of course not. The only viable candidate for any decent, intelligent human being is "None of the Above".
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