Rights and minorities: Why the Tea Party Needs Ayn Rand

"Individual rights are not subject to a public vote; a majority has no right to vote away the rights of a minority; the political function of rights is precisely to protect minorities from oppression by majorities." Ayn Rand

The statists in the Tea Party movement were screaming yesterday that the rights of gay people should be decided by the majority of the public. These are the same people who pretend to adore Rand. They pretend even more to read her books. And, a few of them, even pretend they understand her books. Clearly they not.

Meanwhile the Religious Left is mounting a campaign, along with bigoted fundamentalists like Chuck Colson, to attack Rand for not believing in the Sky Man with Magic Powers. They say Rand would have a "bad" influence on the morons in the Tea Party. But, certainly, when it comes to issues like subjecting the rights of minorities to a public vote, would the world be more civilized if they ACTUALLY PAID ATTENTION to Rand.

The Tea Party movement goes bad because it allows the "Bible-based" policies to take precedent over any of the little Rand they read, that the much less of Rand that they understand. Certainly when it comes to social freedoms the more Rand the Tea Party followed, the better.

The Left/Right assault on individual rights moves ahead.

No doubt conservatives are applauding the decision of the California Supreme Court. And while I don’t think that decision will mean the demise of equal marriage rights in California, I don’t think the decision is a good one. And, surely any conservative that believes in individual rights (and there must be a couple such creatures left in existence) shouldn’t applaud the decision.

There is much in this decision that ought to scare the shit out of anyone who believes in rights. Let’s look at just a couple of points.

The court said that the Attorney General, who supported the overturning of Prop 8, “characterizes certain rights as ‘inalienable’.” The court responds that, “the ‘inalienable nature of a constitutional right never has been understood to preclude the adoption of a constitutional amendment that limits or restricts the scope or application of such a right.”

The term “inalienable” means: incapable of being alienated, surrendered, or transferred. But not in California. All inalienable rights in California apparently are alienable after all. A right that cannot be transferred is one that no one can transfer, including a vote of the majority of the voters. What the California court seems to be saying is that the very concept of “rights” is non-existent and all that anyone enjoys are legal privileges, which may be repealed anytime the dominant power in the state wishes to do so.

Of course the initiative process was pushed through in California in 1911, during the heyday of the Progressive movement there. It was a Left-wing “reform” which basically enshrined majority rule as the dominant principle. I don’t mean majority rule in the sense of the majority being able to elect officials. I mean that the majority can decide what rights the minorities have. That idea would horrify the Founders but the Progressives liked it.

What the Progressives liked about popular referendums was that they felt they could around Constitutional restraints on government power that way. Constitutions tended to limit state power and Progressives wanted big government with expansive powers. They argued that “the people” had unlimited powers and could do virtually anything they wished. Therefore “the people” could give the state such powers. Our Founders, of course, argued that while government comes from the people that there are rights, which precede, and are superior, to all government.

These rights, said the Founders, were inherent in human nature. The term “natural rights” was often used to explain them. They argued that since rights precede government that the purpose of government is protect such rights and that no government, not even one supported by the majority, could properly trespass on those rights. “Not so,” screamed the Progressives. And joining them in that chorus are the modern day conservatives.

The court actually noted that the Attorney General “cites selected excerpts from a number of mid-19th-century opinions that gave voice to the natural-rights jurisprudence that was common in that era.” To be fair, this “natural-rights jurisprudence” was also common to the Founding Fathers and inspired such things as the Declaration of Independence and the Bill of Rights. But, don’t worry say the Republican justices in California: “As pointed out in the response filed by interveners, however, the expansive natural-rights jurisprudence of that time long has been discredited….”

The “interveners” were those individuals who supported Prop 8. At least one of them, if not all of them, were thus arguing in the Supreme Court that there are no such things as rights, just legal privileges which the state, in the form of the majority, may take away whenever they feel like it. That is what conservatives were arguing in order to indulge their antigay passions. In a second passage the court says: “The natural-law jurisprudence reflected in passages from the few early judicial opinions relied upon by the Attorney General has been discredited for many years….”

The justices said that while Constitutions often, I would say normally, restrict the power of majorities to strip minorities of their rights, “the California Constitution contains no such restraints” which “place some subjects or portions of the constitution off-limits to the amending process…”

The concept of rights is not just a limitation on the powers of the state but also limitations on the powers that one person may exert over another person. Rights mark boundaries where no one, not even majorities are allowed to trespass. When conservatives are arguing that this doctrine is “discredited” and that majorities may do whatever damn well they please, then conservatives have joined the most radical wings of the Progressive movement.

In many ways this ruling had the world upside-down. Attorney General Jerry Brown, a Democrat, was appealing to natural rights and limitations on the power of majorities, while the conservatives were arguing for expansive powers for the state and claiming that natural rights are discredited and may be ignored. In the long run I suspect the conservative/Progressive theory will continue to dominate the courts since so many judges, as political appointees, are beholden to the powers that be. Since the Progressive/conservative alliance against individual rights loosens the reins of government power the political elites will tend to be drawn to this theory. After all, this theory says they may pretty much do what they wish since rights are a quant fiction from the 19th century.

Prophets or Quislings: The choice for libertarians.

Over the last few months I have had to discuss various matters with Dr. Nathaniel Branden. As a result I have been rereading various essays and articles, which he wrote over the years. Tonight I picked up the October, 1971 issue of REASON magazine, which has an extensive interview with Branden.

In the interview he is asked about what advice he would give to the then burgeoning libertarian movement. His reply is quite interesting.

I think it’s unfortunate that Libertarians so often leave the initiative to the Leftists. For example, it was the Leftists who were the first—publicly and in a big way—to oppose our involvement in Viet Nam. It was the Leftists who were the first—publicly and in a big way—to oppose the draft. It was the Leftists who were the first—publicly and in a big way—to denounce racism in this country.

Never mind that the Leftists had their own motives for doing so and that those motives would not be the motives of Libertarians. The fact remains that we should have never have involved ourselves in Viet Nam, the draft is evil, and racism is contemptible. Libertarians—the true defenders of individual rights—should have been the first to speak up on these subjects, loudly and clearly and publicly.

I don’t mean that these are the only issues to which Libetarians should address themselves. Far from it. But it would have been immensely important had Libertarians been the first to speak up on these problems.

Libertarians don’t seem to know what the vital issues are, where the battle lines most need to be drawn, and which issues should be attacked first. They don’t seem to have a good sense of practical reality in these matters.

Dr. Branden has often, in his career, zeroed in on some very important aspect of the psychology of libertarians. I think these comments actually are very telling and wish that Dr. Branden had expanded on them at the time. I don’t know what explanation he would give if asked why he thought this problem existed. As things now stand we are planning to meet up in a couple of months time and I shall do my best to remember to ask him about this, if time allows.

Dr. Branden’s comments got me to thinking about this issue. First, I look inward to investigate my own actions and thoughts. My inclination has been to speak out on such issues. I have always been that way. Still in grade school myself I remember making black armbands to wear in protest of the Viet Nam war—whether I actually ever had the courage to put them on I actually don’t remember.

As a young man I remember riding in a car as it drove past a gay bar. If my research is right it was a bar called The Gold Coast, which was founded in the late 1950s. It had numerous police cars surrounding it with their lights flashing. The cops were bringing the men out of the bar and taking them off to be booked: their only crime was to be gay. What I most remember was looking out the back window of the car and watching this scene and trying to figure out why this sort of thing had to happen. I never could understand it. I still don’t.

As a boy I watched the black and white news footage that showed the civil rights activists marching through the South hoping to bring equal legal rights to the black community. The various scenes of the police ruthlessly, and without provocation, beating people up offended me.

Even when I got suckered into Christian fundamentalism I was having a hard time buying the agenda. I was spoon-fed ultra-Right garbage about lots of things. Some of it I bought. What I had trouble with was those aspects of the agenda that targeted others for hate.

One of the key things that helped me escape fundamentalism was when some church people took me to a political rally held at someone’s home. I was shocked to see men in uniforms with swastikas on their arms. The leader of this sad collective gave a passionate speech about how the Jews must be killed, how the Blacks must be killed, and how the gays must be killed. I don’t believe he used the same polite terms that I just did. His preferred method of execution was to feed these people live into a one of those large mulchers that grind up trees.

That began my journey out of fundamentalism. When I looked in the face of hatred I knew I didn’t fit there.

I have always had this tendency to want to defend the powerless – perhaps because, at times, I have been powerless. I have been concerned about the oppressed because I have known oppression. I have fought hated because I have been hate’s victim. When I look into the faces of those who are weak, who are powerless, oppressed and victimized I see my own reflection looking back at me. My humanity in reflected in their own.

That such things have caused me great pain reminds me that similar things cause pain to others. Of course I identify with the Mexican seeking a better life for himself and his family. I don’t identify because I am Mexican, since I am not. I identify with him because we share a common humanity.

Over the years I have had the freedom to make choices. Sometimes I botched those choices spectacularly. I have many regrets about decisions I made. But it was important that I make those choices and that I suffer experience the regrets. My freedom was central to my humanity. And the freedom of others is central to their humanity. To rule others is to deny them their equal humanity. It is to substitute your will for their own.

We’ve all experienced the pain of having our will violated by someone else. That experience means I respect the free choices of others, even when they are clearly the wrong choices. I don’t understand those who see things differently here—those who respond to having their will violated by wishing to become the masters of others. Whether their desire to control others is done out of “good intentions” or hatred matters not. Whatever their intentions they hurt others through their actions.

So when I look inside myself I don’t see the tendency that Dr. Branden spoke of. But I have seen it among many libertarians.

My thought is that this happens because many libertarians have come to the philosophy from the political Right. Conservatism is an inherently stagnant philosophy. It clings to the past as good simply because it is the past. It is a fearful political viewpoint that abhors change the way nature abhors a vacuum. Hayek has discussed this well in his essay, “Why I am Not a Conservative.” Oliver Brett wrote an entire book on this, In Defense of Liberty.

Conservatives fear every change. But the Left embraces every change as a revolutionary chance to change things. The Left blindly supports change for the sake of change. The Right fears it. Classical liberalism is somewhere in between. It neither fears change nor embraces it without thought.

The Left’s tendency to embrace radical change for its own sake meant that they were too easily duped by Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, Castro and others. They ended up in bed with genocidal maniacs. This did much to discredit their political views. But at the same time it forced many classical liberals to abandon their alliance with the Left and form an alliance with the Right. That alliance had one primary purpose: to counter the drive toward communist dictatorships, which many on the Left supported.

Decades of this battle meant that many liberals—and when I say liberals I mean classical liberals—were in constant contact with conservatives. As such they adopted conservative temperaments. When modern prosperity allowed humans to seek out what Abraham Maslow called our “higher order needs” for self-actualization the conservative temperament said to resist.

With each new cultural explosion the conservative was defending the past, no matter how bad the past was. And libertarians, acclimated to being allied with such backward-looking types, followed suit.

One example I can think of was a pamphlet put out by a libertarian foundation. This was published at the time that the civil rights movement was fighting for equal rights in the South. From a libertarian perspective most of what they fought for was right and honorable. Some of it was not.

Conservatives fought back, wanting to stave off any and all changes. These libertarians published a booklet which discussed in legal detail why individual business owners had the right to withhold their services to others for any reason they wished, including race. Technically speaking there is no logical fallacy that I can detect in that essay. I would agree with it. What I question is why that was the side of the civil rights movement that they tackled.

We were witnessing large-scale attacks, by the Southern states and their police forces, to extinguish the right of free protest against injustice. We had police officers urging vicious dogs to rip into the flesh of human beings who asked for the right to register to vote. We had Southern juries covering up for the murderous activities of the cowards in the Ku Klux Klan. State governments were forcing bus companies to refuse to treat black passengers with equal respect. Fire bombs were being thrown into churches filled with children. Yet, out of this landscape of atrocities, these libertarians, who were good people, decided to focus on the issue of whether or not a barber should be forced to cut the hair of a black man.

There were a hundred legitimate ways in which libertarians could have stood up for individual rights against an oppressive state regime that was doing violence to millions of people. Instead they concentrated on a small issue of limited importance. Worse yet, by picking that issue, they seemed to be siding with the conservative forces of oppression. Their first reaction was to side with the status quo, in other words, they acted like their conservative allies.

Today there are two major political battles taking place in the cultural arena. One is gay marriage and the other is our war on immigrants. And while many good libertarians are working to establish equality before the law for gays, and stop the war on peaceful immigrants, far too many libertarians are on the wrong side.

Just as libertarians left Viet Nam, the draft and civil rights to the Left we are leaving marriage equality and immigration to the Left today. Some just aren’t involved because the issues don’t touch them directly. They aren’t gay; they aren’t immigrants, so why worry? Instead they may continue to fight for gun rights, a battle that is largely won in fact.

One reason libertarianism is often seen as heartless is that libertarians are too often absent when assaults on people take place. They are afraid to stand up to the mob.

When the young schoolboy, Lawrence King, was brutally executed by another boy who hated him because he was gay, people were horrified. How many libertarians bothered to express outrage? If someone gets pulled over for carrying a firearm, in a state where it is not permitted, libertarian blogs light up in indignation. Both are violations of rights. One meant that the victim spent some time in jail and faced a trial. Another meant a small boy bled to death on the floor of his school classroom. Guess which one they talked about?

Libertarians need to follow Dr. Branden’s advice. There are issues that are igniting passion. By remaining silent you endorse the status quo, or at least you give that impression. By focusing on the motes in the eyes of the victims, and ignoring the beams in the eyes of the oppressors, you send the rather unsubtle message that the victims deserve their fate. When you do that, you do liberty a disservice and undermine the very principles of justice, which ought to compel us to fight for the rights of all.

The more powerless someone is, the more victimized they are, the greater the mob mentality against them, the more necessary it becomes for libertarians to come to their side. The conservative mentality says that the greater the size of the mob gathered to lynch someone, the more likely it is that the person deserves to be lynched. What libertarians ought to know is that this means that justice is more likely to be trampled upon, that rights are more likely to be violated.

When a large mob gathers to burn the witch it is vital that we libertarians speak out in opposition. The short-term, maximize-the-vote mentality says that is disaster. One never wins popularity contests with a mob by stopping them from burning the witch.

My view looks farther ahead. One day the mob will wake up and realize what monsters they have become. Lynch mobs eventually come to their senses. When they do they remember the lone voices that spoke out against their cruelty and they respect them. Helen Suzman was vilified for decades for being the one voice in South Africa’s parliament to speak against the inhumanity of apartheid. Beyond her own constituency there was no hope for her or her party being elected. But apartheid fell and Suzman was honored in nation after nation for being that one lone voice in a sea of anger.

When we side with the safety of the conservative view, when we fear to stand against the mob mentality, we gain some short-term support from the mob, but we lose respect.

Today the mob continues to do horrific things to people. Libertarians will lose votes today by standing up to that – this is precisely why the conservatives who run the LP today have played down the social issues. But in gaining those short-term votes (and not very many of them, I might add) they lose long-term respect.

It is said that a prophet is never respected in his own land. That is false. It is true when he first arrives and preaches his message that the people must repent of their egregious errors. At that moment he is hated, he may even be martyred for raising his voice. Eventually the day comes when the prophet is honored and acknowledged and the people embrace his message.

Unless libertarians are willing to be the prophets of our day, and to stand up for the rights of all people, especially those most vilified and hated, we shall be forever relegated to the footnotes of history. If we can have the courage to stand for justice and individual rights, in the face of popular opinion, the day may come when people see the wisdom of our philosophy. If, instead of playing a prophetic role, we seek the approval of the mob, we shall be forever be following the mobs as they burn their victims. We will become the Quislings of liberty.

Boycotts and rights.

There can be no question, in my mind, that any individual has the right to boycott any business or any other individual for any reason they wish. These reasons can be rational or irrational, motivated by hatred or motivated by a more nobler feeling.


The right to boycott is the right of free exchange. Individuals ought to be free to make exchanges with others. But “to be free” means the individuals involved make the decision. All participants to an exchange must be willingly involved. I have the right to decide how I will spend my money and with whom.

Every day I neglect spending my money on millions of products and neglect purchasing from billions of people. It is a basic principle of freedom that one may exchange with others freely or neglect to do so.

When the morons and the Mormons pushed through the bigoted Proposition 8 in California some people angrily responded by boycotting contributors to the campaign. Conservatives, always willing to stab their own principles in the back, denounced such boycotts. Some went so far as to claim that a boycott violates the rights of people -- as if some people have the right to force other people to exchange with them unwillingly.

People are free to boycott if they wish. So no one’s rights are violated by a boycott. Some on the Right wept crocodile tears from a woman who managed a family owned restaurant. She is a Mormon and gave money to take away marriage rights from gay couples because the church told her to do it. Many of the customers of the restaurant stopped buying there because they were insulted by this woman’s actions. She was not some lowly employee, as some right-wing pundits pretended. Her mother is the primary owner and she was the manager running it for her mother.

Enough customers decided to boycott the restaurant that business was hurt. The woman resigned her position at the restaurant in the hope of attracting back the business she had driven away with her donation.

That conservatives attacked the customers was rather astounding. Freedom of association includes the freedom to not associate. And conservatives have pretended to defend that right. They don’t want anti-discrimination laws because they say people ought to be free to associate or not as they choose. Now are they doing this on principle or not? If on principle then the right of gay customers to boycott a restaurant is not in dispute.

The customers had a simple position. The woman in question, as the manager, received a fairly decent salary from the restaurant. As a Mormon she gave 10% of her earnings, pre-tax, to the sect in question. Mormonism is a very bigoted religion and the customers felt they didn’t want to support it indirectly. Now you might fault the reasoning if you want, but you can’t fault the right to boycott. As I said, since people can boycott for any reason the reason need not be one you consider rational. It can come from entirely irrational motives.

Of course because it was gay people and their friends who were engaging in the boycott conservatives, ever the paid whores of the American Taliban, lined up to condemn the boycott. Now, we see yet another of the hundreds of boycotts which the fanatics in the fundamentalist Right regularly launch taking place and not one conservative seems to have a problem with it.

Rev. Don Wildmon (who really does look like Donald Duck) and his American Family Association has organized a boycott of Pepsi. They are protesting a television commercial that Pepsi used in the UK. Its not even available in the US market except through the wonders of the internet. (I have the commercial above if you wish to view it.)

I’m sure Pepsi thinks the commercial funny. It’s not really that clever and barely amusing. But because it implies that one of the people in the commercial is gay Rev. Wildmon is having fits. Wildmon says it “promotes the gay lifestyle.” (Hint: anyone who uses the term “the gay lifestyle” is clearly brain dead and conversation with idiots is counterproductive.)

I support Wildmon’s right to boycott products for any reason he wants. But what interests me is that none of the conservatives who argued the Prop 8 related boycotts were wrong have come out in condemnation of Wildmon’s proposal. The only thing I find annoying about Wildmon’s boycott is that his stupidity makes me feel obligated to drink Pepsi and I’m not that fond of Pepsi.

The problem with modern conservatism, or perhaps I should say one problem with modern conservatism, is that it has double-standards. Conservatives are hypocrites. They support freedom sometimes but for only some people. The freedom which they demand for themselves they are unwilling to grant to others, especially to those they consider sinful.

They would argue that students in public schools have the right to form Bible Clubs. Then they would turn around and prevent students from forming a Gay/Straight club. When an entertainment company has a product they consider sinful, then they defend the right to boycott. When gays are the ones boycotting then they attack the right to boycott. When a Republican conservative senator, who was married, had illegal sex with a prostitute they defended him. When a single (at the time), gay man admitted to a legal relationship with another man, they demanded his resignation.

Conservatives want to market themselves as defenders of liberty. Yet they regularly work to restrict liberty. What it comes down to is that they are not advocates of individual liberty at all but collective liberty. If you are a member of a group which they approve then you have liberty. If you are a member of a group which they dislike they you don’t have liberty.

While they despair over the concept of “group rights” when it comes to issues like affirmative action they promote group rights in other areas. Their entire campaign to “defend marriage” is built on the idea that certain rights are only given to certain groups. In this case the right to marry is restricted to opposite sex couples only. Even more bizarrely they will call the granting of equal marriage rights to same-sex couples “special rights”.

One reason that conservatives are having trouble attracting support is that people see them as moralistic hypocrites. It is simply difficult to inspire people with slogans like “freedom for some”. As long as conservatives are willing to compromise freedom because of their religious fantasies then conservatism will NEVER be the friend of liberty.

The danger of God-given rights.

One of the arguments I hear from some well-meaning classical liberals or libertarians is that there is some good from claiming that individual rights are grants from God. The argument goes that if God is the author of individual rights then no one can advocate the violation of rights: to do so would be against the will of God. Christians who take this position assume that only evil, godless people would be inclined to violate the will of God and thus violate rights.

I find the whole argument flawed. Not even the religious are going to be more inclined to respecting the life, liberty or property of others as a result of this doctrine. If anything, this argument gives them the premise they need to justify a wholesale attack on the classical liberal theory of rights. Allow me to explain how and why this happens.

If some deity is the author of human rights then this god defines what is a right or what is not a right. There is no such thing as an objective morality with theism. All morality is contingent on the whims of the supernatural being called god who often changes his mind as to what is, or isn’t, the moral thing to do.

If you challenge a Christian theist, about the genocide that Jehovah ordered the Hebrews to inflict in the Old Testament, he will often respond this way: “Killing is only murder when it goes against God’s command. If God commands you kill then to not kill would be a sin.”

If rights are the creation of a deity then that deity may change those rights according to his own wishes. In the Old Testament the religious were allowed several wives, not so in the New Testament. Old Testament Hebrews were supposedly under “Law” while New Testament Christians are under “Grace”.

Consider the punishments that God demands in the Old Testament for victimless crimes like fornication or homosexuality. In both cases he demanded that believers kill the sinners in question. Similarly, he ordered the execution of those who didn’t keep the Sabbath day and disobedient children. Jehovah made Bill O’Reilly look like a bleeding-heart liberal.

The God of Islam is no better than Jehovah. As for Jesus of the New Testament we can see precisely how ready those who worship him are to violate the rights of others in name of God.

The problem with a god as the originator of rights is that all these gods are deathly silent about what these rights are or aren’t. Christians will argue we find God’s view of human rights in the Bible. That is the book that never once condemned the enslaving of human beings. The God of the Old Testament actually went so far as to demand enslaving others and even recommended that the Hebrew warriors keep the young virgins for their own sexual pleasures at one point. Does God condemn slavery, condone slavery or demand it?

Christians accepted slavery as moral for most of the history of that religion. Only after the Age of Enlightenment did they start to debate as to whether it was allowed or not. And only after a very long period of such debate did the majority of believers consider slavery wrong. The most vociferous voices in the American South defending slavery were Christian ministers.

The Bible itself is often very unclear or even contradictory about what it teaches. The existence of thousands of Christian sects battling over just such interpretations makes this obvious. The lack of clarity in Scripture is clear from the multitude of Christians all believing the other sects are either wrong or in deep heresy.

Catholics attempt to skirt around issues of hermeneutics by appealing to authority instead. The Catholic Church replaces differing interpretations with an authoritarian doctrine. The Bible means what the church leadership tells you it means. This, of course, directly applies to issues of human rights.

The Catholic Church did not feel it was violating human rights when it consigned heretics or “witches” to the flames. Today it may be less inclined to do so, though it is impossible to tell for sure whether this is due to a change in belief. or a lack of political power. History seems to show that the moral position of Catholic “authorities” have changed with the times.

That both hermeneutics and authority have evolved over time indicates they are of human origin not divine. A god would not need shifting moral positions. He wouldn’t “learn from his mistakes” as he would allegedly be incapable of committing any.

The final source for godly morality, after revelation and authority is individual inspiration. In this God, instead of simply writing a book, speaks directly to individuals as to what is, or isn’t, moral. Or, if they are Biblically inclined he tells them how he wants them to interpret his word.

Yet again their is a multitude of voices all claiming competing and contradictory inspiration. The Mormon Church claimed direct revelations from God who, in the past demanded polygamy and then later condemned it. Of course, some Mormon sects disagree and claim God still reveals to them the necessity of plural marriage. The Mormons had revelations condemning blacks and then, only after the Civil Rights movement, had a convenient revelation accepting the "Sons of Ham" into the priesthood.

Individual revelations are as fickle and dangerous as Scripture or authority. Individuals, who most of us consider demented, commit crimes in the name of God. A killer may say that God ordered him to kill. Precisely how do we dispute that in a Christian culture? In the past the God of the Bible clearly did order executions. We can’t argue these demented individuals are acting contrary to the nature of the Christian deity. If anything, their killing is more in line with the history of god then the more passive views of the deity held today.

In the end we are left with this God not saying anything of substance at all. It isn’t as if he writes a detailed outline of individual rights in the heavens . No such description is available anywhere. Certainly “revelation” in the form of holy books has proven useless, as already discussed.

Without this deity standing before us and speaking to us clearly, what we are ultimately left with is individuals who claim, or pretend, that they are speaking on God’s behalf.

At best the theologically inclined may argue that puts God-given rights in the same category as rights deduced by reason since the latter are also open to interpretation and debate.

But I would argue that theologically-derived rights are still worse than reason-derived rights. No one pretends that reason is infallible. There is always room for error. There is an inherent humility present in rights theory deduced through reason because we recognize it is a human activity prone to error. A divine being, allegedly lacking such a tendency, is not humble but infallible.

It is often for this reason that people wish to invoke God on behalf of their argument. They feel that using God to support their argument means there is no rebuttal. God trumps all arguments. That these individuals mean different things, and that none of them actually know what such a being wants, is immaterial. Libertarians who want to invoke God on behalf of rights tend to think that ends the discussion. If God says it then there is nothing left to argue.

The fallibility of human reason means that we ought to interpret rights as broadly as is logically possible. If we must err we ought to err on the side of human freedom and autonomy. In addition, the more drastic the action we wish to take against others the more humble we need to be. For instance the justification for having a system of parking tickets is substantially lower than what is needed to justify the state executing people.

Not so with the infallible word of God. There was little reluctance to burn heretics at the stake in Christian history. And, while secular-minded rights theorists debate endlessly as to the limitations of rights, fundamentalist Christians are assured that they speak for God. Libertarians can debate whether the state ought to recognize marriages at all and thus recognize gay relationships. The fundamentalists have no such debate. They know precisely what God says. As the absorb Biblical fundamentalism their skepticism in their intellectual humility diminishes. As this happens any hesitancy to impose force on others diminishes.

Even when they debate issues of hermeneutics they are often convinced the dissenters are merely heretics. Each side tends to be convinced they speak for God and when God is on your side there is little reason for humility or doubt.

The tendency toward self-doubt is inherent in human reasoning. It is absent in divine revelation.

Secular rights theory is inherently anthropocentric. When we debate rights we are asking what rights humans have as humans. Theologically-derived rights theory is quite different. It doesn’t place the well being of humanity at the center of its theory at all. God occupies the center and his will, not human well-being, is the criteria by which all things are judged. The purpose of such a rights theory is obedience not individual fulfillment.

Theological rights theories thus have a tendency toward authoritarianism. They must emphasize obedience over individual well-being. It is obedience to a higher power that is the core of all God-given rights theory. And, once again, since the deity is not standing here issuing orders it is those who claim to be his representatives who are demanding the obedience.

How Progressives helped the Religious Right mug gay rights.

There are issues where the Progressives, from the classical liberal view, are on target, or close enough for government work. Social freedom tends to be that area. They deserve thanks for leading the battle to expand the rights of gay people until they are coequal to those granted heterosexual. Liberalism, that is true liberalism, as Hayek noted is always ready to expand liberty into new areas which terrify conservatives. So true liberals and Progressives have some common ground in those areas.

And many Progressives are disturbed by the well-funded campaign of religious zealots to strip gay couples of marriage rights in California. As am I. But what our Progressive friends don’t realize, recognize or, perhaps even know, is that Progressives were the accomplices of the Religious Right in this campaign to strip people of their rights. They made this antigay campaign possible. To understand how let us look at some history.

America’s founders were not advocates of democratic rule. They worried that people’s passions were too easily riled up by demagogues and that mobs could easily be persuaded to strip individuals or minorities of their rights. The Founders tried to avoid the tyranny of the majority. They created a government that was inherently anti-majoritarian in many ways -- certainly it was openly antidemocratic. The president was not elected directly, he was elected by electors not by the people. And while most people still don’t understand the Electoral College that is pretty much how it is done today.

Secondly, the Founders had the Senate representing the states not the people. They were appointed by each state legislature not directly elected.

The third branch of government was the Supreme Court where justices were appointed by the president (himself not directly elected) and approved by the Senate (which was not directly elected). To give it an even stronger antidemocratic nature they made sure the Justices were appointed for life and couldn’t be removed by popular vote.

The reason they did this was simple. They were not establishing a democracy but a free society where the rights of all people would be respected -- at least that was the goal whatever failings they had in achieving it. They didn’t want the rights of minorities subjected to popular vote. Thomas Jefferson said, “It is ridiculous to suppose, that a man had less rights in himself than one of his neighbors, or, indeed, than all of them put together.” Even a unanimous vote of everyone but the person being targeted is not a legitimate reason for denying rights. The Yes on 8 people don’t understand this and keep harping about previous popular votes to deny rights to gay couples. Rights, properly understood, should not be subject to popular vote,

Jefferson said that when the rights of individuals or minorities are subject to majority approval, “This would be slavery, not the liberty which the bill of rights had made inviolable, and for the preservation of which our government has been charged.” The writer Frank Chodorov warned, “the idea that a number of people, acting together, have a right, which supersedes the rights of the individual is pure fantasy, and one which as experience shows, has been invented for no good purpose.”

We shouldn’t vote on which churches should have freedom of religion. We shouldn’t vote on which minorities have the right to attend schools and which don’t. The rights of minorities do not rely upon majority approval. That was what the Founders were attempting to accomplish. Subjecting the rights of individuals to majority approval leads to social warfare, to conflict between groups and individuals. It increase social instability and breeds violence. Oscar Wilde once described pure democracy as “the bludgeoning of the people, by the people, for the people.” He was right. When rights are subject to majority approval people get bludgeoned. And in California what is happening is nothing short of electoral gay bashing.

So how did we reach the situation where minorities must come begging to the majority for equal protection before the law? Was it some crusade by Religious Right fanatics? Not at all, the religious fanatics exist and are using the law but they didn’t set it up.

The advocates of the ballot initiative process were the Progressives -- or socialists. Hiram Johnson was California’s governor and in 1911 he and local Progressive put through a series of reforms to give the majority more say in politics. Johnson went on to be a founder of the national Progressive Party and was the party’s vice presidential candidate. He was also a supporter of the racist Alien Land Law of 1913 which stripped Asian immigrants of the right to property--a law overturned by the California Supreme Court. Presumably something the Yes on 8 people would resent -- damn activist judges going around protecting rights.


One of the things that stymied the Progressives was that the Constitution limited government powers and the socialists wanted government to have more power. They believed that ballot initiatives would allow them to bypass the legislatures and push through measures that promoted socialism. They believed that the majority would use the power to confiscate wealth from the rich. And they would when they can, and have done so -- see rent control and the measures to mandate lower insurance costs as an example.

But it wasn’t the poor versus the rich. It was a majority of people against a minority of people. The wealthy were, and are, a minority. The socialists were using a method they believed would attack the rights of a minority, the well-off. So majorities tend to favor passing costs on to people other than themselves and focusing the benefits on themselves. That is what majoritarian initiatives tend to do.

The initiative was created so that majorities could strip minorities of rights. The socialists thought it was okay to do this because the minority was wealthy. But, once that process exists, all minorities face problems. If there is sufficient hatred for one minority, say whipped up by religious crazies, then that minority may be stripped of rights barring other Constitutional protections enforced by judges.

In California, the Progressives allowed the Constitution to be changed by majority vote. So voters in California can, in regards to matters that are under state control, such as marriage, impose their own biases on that document and strip a minority of their rights.

One of the things I have harped on, repeatedly, to the exhaustion of some readers I suspect, is the matter of expanding state power. I have argued that when the Left expands the powers of the state to do what they consider to be good things, they create a situation where their opponents can then win office and use those expanded powers for what the Left would consider to be bad things. That is precisely how gay people are being stripped of their right to marry in California.

It was understandable that this process was pushed through but short-sighted. The California government was corrupt and in the back pockets of certain business interests. But this is only a problem when we have government with massive powers. If government has few, clearly delineated powers and no ability to redistribute rights and wealth from majorities to minorities (which is what tends to happen in the legislative process) then few corrupt business interests would be interested in owning the legislature. It is the power they wish to purchase and when the power is limited the value of corraling the legislature is very low.

But the Left believed that the goals of liberalism, such as expanded rights, greater wealth, more equality, could best be achieved by conservative means -- the use of state power. So their dilemma was keeping the power in place for their own use and removing the corrupt businessmen from the arena. And the initiative process was one way they came up with for doing that.

The Left created a process called ballot initiatives. That allows majorities to vote for the redistribution of the rights and wealth of minorities. It does more than allow it, it encourages it. The result is being seen today. More state power is never the answer. It will always be grabbed by the powerful and used against the powerless. In this case the majority is using it against a small minority. And the only recourse the small minority has is to beg the majority of people to please not let it happen. A right should not depend on majority approval but the Progressives set up a system where that was inevitable.

Expanded state powers never stay in the hands of those who first created them. Eventually their enemies get hold of the reins of power and then those new state mechanisms get used for purposes very much in opposition to their original intentions. As much as I support sex education for the young I long felt that having such programs would eventually backfire. We have now had millions of federal tax dollars used to change the courses into anti-sex education. The same is true with the initiative process in California. The Progressives didn’t see it as a means of stripping minority groups of their rights (though they were then fairly weak on the topic), they wanted it to hurt the business interests. But the powers created for one purpose are easily diverted to contrary purposes.

The great conflict between the classical liberal and the socialist has been over precisely this issue. The classical liberals warned that the use of illiberal means (state power) to achieve liberal goals will eventually be perverted into the means for the destruction of liberal goals. That is what we are seeing with Proposition 8. True liberals know that both means and ends must be consistent. A true liberal wants Proposition 8 defeated but then ought not rest until the initiative process itself is abolished.

PS: I do see one role for initiatives, to veto legislation passed by the state assembly. As the nature of legislative law is to pander to special interests to confiscate rights from majorities to minorities, a people’s veto would allow the repeal of laws that do this. But the majority should not be allowed to reverse the process, that is to strip minorities of their rights or wealth. By acting as a break on legislative tendencies to pander to organized interests a people’s veto, as opposed to an initiative process, helps restrain the evils of government.