Wednesday, April 3, 2013

Oregon's Dumbest Glibertarian, cont. Again.

Oregon's Dumbest Glibertarian has a new article in today's campus paper. (See here and here for the previous installments if you can stand it.)

Today we get the pleasure anguish of reading yet another article about same-sex marriage. Because nobody else in the media is talking about it from that super-special-snowflake of glibertarian perspective. Or something. At least the glibertarians usually want to allow same sex marriage, like sane people should. Unfortunately that's typically where the sanity stops with them, and indeed we'll see that here as well.

As with the last installment in this series, he starts off in semi-sane mode, if you're willing to ignore the usual "government must stay out of governing" angle:

Since the Supreme Court heard arguments for and against gay marriage last week, the bandwagon for marriage equality returned. However, the real issue remains dormant on both sides. We should not be asking government to give us “marriage equality.” Instead, the government should have no part in marriage.

Of course, it immediately continues to accelerate downhill from there:

Marriage has existed longer than the government. Marriage is not a product of the government. Many people believe marriage comes from religion and in America, we have the separation of church and state, but many other ideas of marriage exist, as well. Regardless of any one view, why does the government regulate marriage when it should not?

That's some awesometastic sentence construction there. Good thing you don't write for a newspaper or anything. But yes, why does the evil government have an interest in regulating marriage? It's not like society has any interest in encouraging healthy relationships between people. That's why we also don't regulate any sorts of violence between individuals. And have no regulations whatsoever about interaction between folks in various transactions and how various people treat other people. Because America! FREEDUMB! Fuck yeah! WOLVERINES!!!

Oh wait, what do you mean we do have all sorts of laws and regulations about all sorts of relationships between people? Contracts and such between folks that want to conduct trade without the threat of violence? Oh, yeah, we do! How silly of me.

But still, this one particular form of relationship is one the government should stay completely out of. Uh, because freedom, I guess? Let's see what he thinks:

The government requires marriage licenses in order to call a couple married. But what business of the government's is it if two people want to, and do, get married? The government should not have any rules about it. The government even requires marriage licenses. Why? The original intent of marriage licenses was to prevent interracial marriages. Marriage license laws began in the mid-1800s to stop whites from marrying anyone who was not white. By the 1920s, 38 states had state laws prohibiting the marriage of whites with other ethnicities.

As is his typical pattern, now he's just started making shit up. While he's correct about about states in the '20s specifically using laws to prevent interracial marriage, his assertion that the "original intent" was to prevent them is laughably false. Marriage licenses have been around since at least the middle ages, and were all about contracts between families. That is something glibertarians usually like, sacredfreemarket and all that. I should really stop being surprised by this guy's complete lack of historic knowledge and/or utter contempt for facts, but whatever.

At this point we know how this is going to end, and indeed it proceeds down through all the standard glibertarian tropes of evil government stealing people's money and freedom. I can't be arsed to dissect the rest of it, so just read it if you must. Here's the concluding paragraph:

Marriage equality may be the big uproar right now, but we need to look at the bigger picture. The government erodes our freedoms, and turning to them for more laws and oversight will only wear away at the few freedoms we have left. We need to tell the government to get out of marriage, to get out of our lives, and not return.

At this point I think he only wants the government to stop regulating marriage so he'll finally be able to marry Ayn Rand's corpse. I hope somebody's keeping an eye on her grave.

2 comments:

  1. If he wants to marry Ayn Rand's corpse, why get in his way? Better that than have him inflict himself on a live woman.

    ReplyDelete

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