Letter to my Libertarian Friends.

From the summer of love to the fall of the Berlin wall, the Left’s basic concepts were built around the belief that Western civilization – more specifically America - was wrong, that free enterprise was evil, that individualism was selfish, that our Judeo-Christian heritage was really a stalking horse for theocratic despotism. We were all just meat puppets with all the meaning and grace of mayflies.

The fall of the USSR revealed that to be false. So now the Left is falling back to a kind of intellectual terrorism, to insult and ridicule, to putting borders around what can be said. Liberals can get away with that because they “own” the popular culture. It’s why they direct so much of their venom to voices that disagree or don’t reflect their views: Limbaugh, Beck, FOX News. These figures threaten the homogeneity of the Liberal culture, exposing its false facade. It’s why – for Liberals – the priests who molested altar boys were a gift - forgive the term - from God (and why they will vehemently deny that these priests were practicing homosexuals). For Liberals, the Catholic Church can now be smeared as a collection of sexual perverts thereby destroying its edifice.

The argument we are having in this country between the Left and the rest is not fundamentally an argument about taxes or government programs. It’s an argument about culture, an argument about religion and about good versus evil. That is one of the primary reasons why the Libertarian demand that Conservatives park their social issues at the door in choosing candidates is unrealistic. It’s essentially a demand that the majority of Americans give up their essential beliefs so that a small minority that has never managed to get more than a few percentages of voters to the polls can set the agenda.

Libertarians, the ones who write and publish and go on the internet to denounce people of faith as proto-Fascists and believers in fables, are going to have to decide whose policies are most closely aligned with their own. If you want to see laws enacted sanctioning homosexual marriage and the abolition of all drug laws, vote for the Liberal. The odds are in favor of you getting your agenda enacted into law faster. Just keep in mind that the Liberal has other items on his agenda that will make the government more intrusive than it already is. And those things either make you do something, stop you from doing something, or cost you money, limiting the choices you have and the resources you have left to do your own thing.

If the top item on your agenda is to be left alone by the government, vote for the Conservative. You may not like the fact that they consider some of your actions sinful and tell their kids not to do things that you think are perfectly great, but they turn a blind eye to what you do in private as long as you don’t scare the horses. They may not want the government to issue marriage licenses to Joy and Jane or Steve and Bill, but they won’t stop them from living together. It may outrage Joy, Jane, Steve and Bill to be denied this piece of paper, but they and their forebears lived by the same rules for millennia, so live with it. Lots of Jacks and Jills are living together without that piece of paper; maybe they’re on to something.

Conservatives in power may defund some government programs that you think are perfectly great, but that means that you can get together with your fellow Libertarians and fund them as private citizens.

One other thing that Conservatives will do is turn a jaundiced eye toward “Crony Capitalism.” Remember that Conservatives favor free enterprise. When government gets into bed with business, that’s not free enterprise. What Obama did to GM when he made government and the auto unions partners in the theft from bondholders is not free enterprise. What GE’s Jeff Immelt and Obama are hatching in their collusion is not free enterprise. Government hand-outs to government-preferred “green energy” producers is not free enterprise. Government is notoriously poor at predicting the future including the future of technology. Meanwhile the opportunities for corruption are limited only by the creativity of the ruling class and the number of dollars that are available.

Libertarians are a small voting minority with a loud voice. There are several aspects of Libertarianism that I support because I believe that the government is too intrusive and I believe that Libertarians agree. But I don’t believe that we are meat puppets. I believe that there is a higher power; that there is a God and that he is responsible for the creation of the universe. I also believe that he instilled in us the knowledge of right and wrong. Those things that are wrong fall under the term that has fallen into disuse: sin. Some in the Libertarian community are of the belief that the belief in sin is itself evil. If we are meat puppets, that would be true. Most Americans disagree. And it’s why Libertarians, as currently understood will always be a minority.  It's why I am a Christian Conservative.