J. Neil Schulman
@ Agorist.com
Are Social Conservatives as Orwellian as the Left?
Yesterday, speaking to Bill O’Reilly on his Fox News show, Ann Coulter talked about how she hated libertarians like Ron Paul, not because of the ninety percent of the cases where eliminating government was a good solution, but because of the remaining ten percent where she saw government as necessary and libertarians like Ron Paul don’t.
I could note here that a mixture of 90% mother’s milk and 10% cyanide would be 100% lethal to a baby — and that Ron Paul, himself, is only 90% libertarian compared to an agorist like me — but to avoid both analogies and grading libertarian purity on a curve, let me start with Ann Coulter’s first stated objection.
Ann Coulter hates that libertarians like Ron Paul don’t think the government should define the word “marriage.” She argued, albeit briefly, for the view that the consequences of replacing a uniform and traditional definition of marriage defined by law, with new definitions arrived at solely in the private sector, would have unknown consequences.
Ann Coulter
If Ann Coulter’s statement is a conservative meme — don’t allow freedom of choice because we don’t know what the consequences will be — then the mainstream political spectrum is nothing more than an argument between left-wingers who want social engineers to speed change and right-wingers who want social engineers to impede change.
Of course it isn’t that simple.
Take an article I posted here a few days ago, suggesting that arguments favoring the left-wing supported ballot issue in San Francisco to prohibit the circumcision of any male under 18 are mirror images of decades of right-wing arguments to prohibit abortions. It’s not that — as Ann Coulter would quickly point out — abortion and circumcision are in any way equivalents. It’s that in both cases a parental option is criminalized: removed from the individual and given over to the State. In the former case abortion is defined in law as a form of homicide; in the latter case circumcision is defined in law as genital mutilation. In both cases a parent loses the choice to make an individual analysis of what the nature and definition of the action is, and the State becomes the Author of the Moral Dictionary.
The control of words and definitions by the State is precisely the “newspeak” that George Orwell warned about in his novel of absolute totalitarianism, 1984.
The removal of parental autonomy from the individual to the State is what Aldous Huxley warned about in his earlier novel of absolute totalitarianism, Brave New World.
Ann Coulter — with her fear that the word “marriage” left to private definition might end up meaning something with consequences she disapproves, and that a medically-induced miscarriage is not a family’s fecundity choice but a Church-defined termination of a human life and a State-defined crime of homicide — is no less Orwellian in her demand for socially-engineered speech codes than those on the left who demand we say that there is no Israel, only Jewish-occupied Palestine.
Conservatives speak of the “teaching value” of the law, when it is used to socially engineer behavior they approve of, like sexual abstinence in unmarried teenagers, and not using recreational drugs. Then they turn around and criticize liberals for socially engineering against behaviors they don’t like, with “hate speech” laws and banning the incandescent light bulb.
We libertarians are ridiculed as unimportant gadflies when we point out that in their demand to define unapproved of personal behaviors as crimes, social conservatives and liberal socialists are identical in their Orwellian bending of language and social engineering of behavior. Both agree that they dislike what human beings are when they are free to make their own choices. It’s only what sort of Malleable Man they want to end up with that’s in dispute.
Janeane Garofalo
Ann Coulter, meet Janeane Garofalo. You are soul sisters separated at birth.
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June 15, 2011 - 8:17 am
A “medically induced miscarriage” may or may not be state-defined as a crime. It is by biological definition a “homicide.”
June 15, 2011 - 9:22 am
As Thomas Sowell says, “There are no solutions, only trade-offs.” Why do libertarians always attract critics who demand (impossible) 100% solutions? In the debate Ron Paul lacked time to discuss all the ramifications of privatized, contract-based marriage, but Ann Coulter lacked imagination. Yes, questions might arise about adoption and immigration, but these exceptional cases do not justify making marriage a function of government, let alone federal government. One of the original purposes of the marriage license was to prevent blacks and whites from intermarrying. Many like Ann Coulter no doubt feared miscegenation’s unknown consequences, like me.
June 15, 2011 - 2:00 pm
That statement is not universally agreed upon. It is in controversy and relies on defining a specific point on a continuum of gestation — bounded on one end with conception and bounded on the other end with a first breath — that human life begins. So whose definition do we use? Lexicographers? Biologists? Anthropologists? The expectant mother? Her doctor? Jewish rabbis? Christian clerics? The Supreme Court of the United States? Ann Coulter? Janeane Garofalo?
June 15, 2011 - 7:02 pm
Conservatives think morays have evolved for good reasons in most cases, serving a function.
June 15, 2011 - 7:10 pm
Conservative vary in the extent they think government force is necessary. But, libertarians have become ADDICTED to “moral equivalence” of Statists, refusing to recognize the VAST statism of the LEFT as compared to the limited Statism of conservatives. Meanwhile, liberty is destroyed while libertarians tut tut conservative failings.
June 15, 2011 - 7:37 pm
“Conservatives” who think morays “evolve” are by definition progressives, not conservatives.
June 15, 2011 - 7:40 pm
Conservatives who say they’re for freedom, liberty, capitalism, and individual conscience, “but …” invariably spend all their time and effort — just like liberal socialists — on the “but.”
June 17, 2011 - 9:53 am
No Neil, it YOUR “just like the liberal socialists” WHERE YOU ARE WAY WAY OFF, just like most libertarians! The liberal socialists not only want to control what drugs we take, BUT ALSO want to control what we buy at McDonalds on and on. . . it is NOT “JUST LIKE”. It is vastly different! The LEFT would put us in a communist slave pen if they could. The right would stumble along confused like always. . . MORAL EQUIVALENCE is simple-minded nonsense! Matters of degree and extent MATTER. MATTER. MATTER!
June 17, 2011 - 10:37 am
Further, CONSERVATIVES do not spend “all their time” on the BUT! And “it is not just like the liberal socialists” WHO DO SPEND ALL THEIR TIME on expanding STATISM!
June 17, 2011 - 10:44 am
Libertarians started this “moral equivalence” of left and right in a misguided strategy to “get converts” via the “pox on both your houses” strategy. . . ERROR ERROR ERROR!
June 17, 2011 - 11:11 am
“Conservatives” who think morays “evolve” are by definition progressives, not conservatives.
NONSENSE NEIL! Conservatives think they evolved or came into being long ago and are proven by time and, therefore, should most likely NEVER BE CHANGED! Progressive think everything from the past is rife with prejudice, racism, homophobia, etc and should be thrown away wholesale!
There is nothing THE SAME about these 2 views!
June 17, 2011 - 11:12 am
Cut-out the libertarian conversion propaganda! Deal with the issues! Stick to the issues!
June 17, 2011 - 2:07 pm
If you’re going to make a consequentialist argument and compare the evil by the consequences, then the Drug War which imprisons millions of innocent victims and kills many in Gestapo-type raids is far worse than forbidding a parent from buying their kid a McDonalds’ Happy Meal. Charging a woman and her doctor with homicide and imprisoning them for an abortion is far worse than fining a parent who circumcises their son.
So the moral equivalence is, if anything, too easy on the social conservatives.
June 17, 2011 - 2:16 pm
Poppycock. The United States of America is drowning in debt and courts death by hyperinflation by that debt’s monetization. The most consistent advocate of ending this is Congressman Ron Paul, yet social conservatives join with neocons in backing candidates who instead prioritize a conservative coalition which demands prohibition of abortions and meddling in foreign countries over aligning with independents uninterested in these to save the country. That, sir, is putting all your energy into the “but.”
June 17, 2011 - 2:21 pm
So morays evolved then spontaneously stop evolving. Are you even listening to yourself?
June 17, 2011 - 2:28 pm
It’s called having consistent principles, McAlpine — something issue fetishists and opportunists are clueless about.
June 17, 2011 - 2:30 pm
Libertarians stick to principles, not to ad hoc coalition building based on “issues,” like both social conservatives and liberal socialists.
June 18, 2011 - 12:54 pm
Are the as bad as the left? Sometimes worse. Think of the Schaivo circus for example. I also hate the term “social conservative” .. seems too euphemistic. These folks are authoritarians, often quite hardcore, usually motivated by religion.
June 18, 2011 - 1:03 pm
The “Schiavo circus” is one of the few cases where social conservatives happened to be nearly alone on the right side. Opposing state sanction of murder pursuant to insurance fraud is pretty damn solid libertarian ground.
June 18, 2011 - 1:06 pm
“That statement [medically induced miscarriage is by biological definition homicide] is not universally agreed upon.”
That’s true.
And some people disagree that 2+2=4 or that the earth is an oblate spheroid.
We call these people “morons,” and move on with reality.
June 18, 2011 - 5:53 pm
You’re going to have to do a lot better than ad hominem if you expect to “move on with reality.”
The reality is that there are quite a few medical doctors who have studied animal and human biology, gestation, anatomy, physiology, with additional study in specialties such as obstetrics and gynecology, who after all this study perform abortions and don’t consider what they’re doing as homicide. On what basis are you calling these learned women and men morons?
You’re certainly entitled to disagree with them, but what you can’t do is act as if your disagreement makes it a settled issue, either scientifically or morally.
June 19, 2011 - 11:53 am
Neil,
You write:
“The reality is that there are quite a few medical doctors who have studied animal and human biology, gestation, anatomy, physiology, with additional study in specialties such as obstetrics and gynecology, who after all this study perform abortions and don’t consider what they’re doing as homicide.”
Name one.
I’m absolutely certain that there are many people who answer to the description above who don’t consider it murder (the killing of a “person”).
Homicide, on the other hand is the killing of a “human being,” whether that “human being” is a “person” or not. And there is no scientific controversy whatsoever that a distinct iteration of species homo sapiens sapiens is, by definition, a “human being.” It’s fucking tautology — “disagreement” with it is explicable only as idiocy, dishonesty, or unfamiliarity with Romance languages.
June 19, 2011 - 4:14 pm
It’s attacking a straw man to change the term “homicide” — which I used — to “murder” — which I didn’t use — so you can write a screed about the difference between a human being and a person.
You’re the one asserting that only a moron could deny that abortion is an act of homicide. The burden is on you to prove that 100% of educated medical doctors who performs abortions consider that they are guilty of committing either homicide or murder and do it anyway.
Here’s how high your burden of proof is: you have to prove that educated medical doctors who terminate pregnancies as part of their medical practice universally regard a fertilized cell, an embryo, and/or a fetus all to be “human beings,” scientifically indistinguishable from a living, breathing human.
Then you’d have to eliminate the possibility that any medical doctor who performs abortions holds to a belief that it is the immortal soul wherein resides the definition of a human being, and that ensoulment occurs not at conception or during gestation within the womb, but only when the birthed baby “inspires” the soul with its first breath — the original Hebrew belief.
If even a significant percentage of these educated medical professionals disagree with you, then you don’t have to be a moron to hold that belief, and the question is — as I originally wrote, and you attacked as moronic — scientifically unsettled and controversial.