Over at Inkandescence, I’ve concluded what began in Part One and Part Two of my series discussing the Libertarian Party and why, despite my formative preference for many libertarian thinkers and principles, I cannot support the Libertarian Party.  In my most recent post, I deal with arguments from party politics and from pragmatic efforts to leverage the Libertarian Party to achieve policy goals different than those its current leaders espouse:

So far, every reason I can adduce for attempting to ignore the utterly unconscionable elements, and the philosophically incoherent elements, of the Libertarian Party platform has always been a better reason to keep pushing forward those elements within the GOP that can and have made effective changes, while also shoving back at worthless fellows like Sen. Mark Kirk of Illinois, and maintaining my freedom to criticize the GOP when it’s wrong.  And under current circumstances I have been regularly calling for the defenestration of GOP leadership, so a fortiori what will I do with the current and longstanding Libertarian Party leadership?
…
We seem to be left with a Catch-22:  While the Libertarian Party remains ineffective, any argument against “protest” or “symbolic” or “identity-group” voting, made in terms of consequential political compromise, seems to favor leveraging sympathetic elements of a viable party rather than hoping to simultaneously change and boost an ineffective party that is wrong on top-shelf issues; and should the Libertarian Party become viable, its being emphatically wrong on the top-shelf issue would make it unconscionable to support it.

(source: Why I failed to be Libertarian, and why we still need a better way – Inkandescence)

Over at Inkandescence blog, I have a fresh post continuing the conversation about the Libertarian Party I mentioned earlier:

I’ve emphasized the serious philosophical incoherence at the heart of Libertarian Party expressions of libertarian political philosophy:  the notion that “individuals” are somehow proper subjects of law apart from “their bodies,” such that “their bodies” can be regarded as objects they “own,” is a metaphysical belief about the nature of human creatures, the nature of property, and the foundations of justice–and it is one that simply cannot be true.  In fact, the idea that a human creature’s proper subjectivity is radically distinct from bodily existence is a constant threat to the possibility of a binding natural law that addresses humans as they actually are.

All human creatures are embodied before they become capable of responsibly exercising their freedom, and live their whole lives in relationships, in varying degrees of dependency, which condition their freedom; no responsible law or standard of justice can possibly address humans as though they existed in a state of radical or unbridled subjectivity, or as though the human body was a negotiable economic instrument.

In fact, this denigration of the body to a merely instrumental role in human existence, and the concomitant treatment of a disembodied will as the proper subject of the laws, reverses the Lockean derivation of property rights from which it–especially the peculiarly American treatment of private property–nominally descends.  Rather than “property” being a necessary condition for each human creature’s freedom to live securely in society with other free creatures, and hence a moral imperative intrinsically related to each one’s basic needs and flourishing in society, “property” becomes a hypothetically natural and absolute responsiveness of the real to each individual’s subjective inclination.

(source: Inkandescence – Reflections and Reviews, Spiritual and Social)

I just posted over at Inkandescence the first of a couple posts throwing cold water on an utterly understandable movement among many of my best and favorite people in favor of not just a protest vote but an actual, continuing advocacy of the Libertarian Party.  This first one, mostly concerned with principles of practical political advocacy for Christians, crescendoes thus:

Despite [and I might here have just as well said “precisely because of”!] my profound love of the Anglo-American tradition of enumerated liberties against the imagined total reach of government, rooted properly in the natural law tradition that recognizes that each human creature’s transcendent obligations to God and other people, in justice and in charity, individually and in marriage and the Church, are such as demand that no merely secular power claim the right to bind the conscience or impede the performance of these duties; despite my adolescent passion for Locke and Bastiat and von Mises and Hayek, despite my ardency in favor of the “historical best” nature of the United States Constitution and the openness to an honest natural law reading of the Declaration of Independence; despite having for years labelled myself a “civil libertarian” and still defaulting to libertarian arguments and principles whenever a merely American and Constitutional question is in view (though I then often have to correct myself)–despite having longed for decades, literally more than half my life now, to be able to vote for a candidate labelled Libertarian Party or Constitution Party or Taxpayers Party, and having not a few times actually cast sober or protest votes for them–despite all this, I fail to see how it is possible to faithfully relate Christianity to secular regimes and then advocate in favor of the Libertarian Party. Now, go back and note my concessions, and remember that I wish I could agree with you, friends & family who want the Libertarians to be right. But…they just aren’t.  And I would have to sin by taking counsel of despair for all effectual advocacy, or sin by advocating what I know to be utterly unconscionable, to support them.  We’ll have to find another way.

(source: Why I failed to be Libertarian, in spite of myself. – Inkandescence)

Anyway, I would be happy to hear discussion of the matter.

I’ve started putting together a playlist of things that hearten and console, In These Times:

And here’s the oldest poem I have written down in my archives (not absolutely the first, but I’m not going to dig out my old file with scraps of blotter pads and napkins on it to check, right now).

For, y’know, a sense of depth.

“To Live”

to laugh at the threat of evil;
to defy death and pain
in a quest for the right,
the greatest gain.

to sneer at wrong and might;
to breath free and deep;
to laugh and love,
to lose and weep.

to be free to the last,
to die with grace;
in the pursuit of truth
to set high the pace.

1991 PGE

Send me a link if you have something to suggest for this playlist. I think we all need it.

(continued from Part One elsewhere)

And then there’s the other question: how to handle situations in which people, whatever their states of brokenness and healing, want to access basic social necessities (access to institutions, the ol’ “bathroom” question, etc.) that we would not dream of denying anyone, but which are treated socially or administratively under conventions that they don’t “fit” in some way?

It seems obvious to me that we should make such decisions with careful reasoning that preserves intact–lip-service to neither–two principles:

• Reasonable people try to encourage the integration of each person into any society whose formal principle that person espouses; and
• Reasonable people do not demand social integration as a means of destroying a society whose formal principles they oppose.

Now, a society whose formal principles are based in the reality of the creaturely being of humans is not going to be able to agree that someone who is known to be a man should be approved in presenting as a woman (except obviously for comedy &c) or vice versa. However, a society whose formal principles included hospitality to those who do not fully understand its principles, or who espoused its principles but were not at this time able to “fit” its conventions, might obviously seek some third way.

Such a third way seems manifestly appropriate, for example, in the case of Christian schools (and, frankly, ought to satisfy secular requirements best, too): the availability of one-hole “family” bathrooms that had already begun to provide a less-awkward facility for Mommy out with The Boy or Daddy out with The Girl. If one is interested in reality, rather than defeating euphemism in order to secure nominal endorsement, that provides a “fig leaf.”

Also, it should not be omitted that a basic habit of decency forbids peering into other’s off-stage (hence potentially “obscene”) behavior uninvited, where such knowledge is not forced upon one (which is unseemly) or part of one’s strict obligations (as, for example, a pastor to teachers in a religious school). Thus a hospitable society should consider finding many tacit ways to reinforce that habit, to make the use of one’s genitalia not seem like a fit subject of everyday conversation.

Good luck with that, in a day when trying to be nice to everyone and not ask about their tackle makes you a probable target of a lawsuit or a federal administrative action, though; I say better to be boldly “out” about Christian principle, down to the metaphysical nitty-gritty, and then throw arms wide and red carpets of hospitality, friendship bread and all, out to any who nonetheless choose to come among you, no matter what kind or where from. And good luck with that, too.