The Dan Savage andrewsullivan.com is more to my taste than the Andrew Sullivan andrewsullivan.com. This is great:
And make no mistake, hetero readers: Santorum doesn’t just seek to stamp out the kind of relationship I enjoy with my longtime personal secretary. The Santorum wing of the GOP is targeting your privacy, your rights, and your pleasures, too. From porn (just as popular in red states as it is in blue) to divorce (more popular in red states than in blue) to masturbation (equally popular in red and blue states), the Santorums and Scalias and Bauers and Dobsons want to tell you how to live, who to love, and how exactly you should love ‘em. When Santorum made his famous “man on dog” comments he wasn’t just defending anti-gay sodomy laws, but anti-straight sodomy laws too. Santorum doesn’t just believe that the state should have the right to regulate gay sex out of existence, but two out of three most popular straight sex acts too. . .
Personal freedom is like free speech: Some people are going to exercise their personal freedom and/or freedom of speech in ways that make you uncomfortable. So long as they’re not imposing themselves on you, they should be left alone. And, I’m sorry, Rick, but the haunting fear—or certain knowledge—that someone, somewhere, is enjoying himself in ways that you think are sinful does not qualify as an imposition.
This isn’t so hard to grasp, now is it?
Anyway, the social conservative dominance of the Republican party is about to move me, like Radley, to join the ACLU. Indeed, looking around from my lonely libertarian perch, I find that DLC Democrats are closer to my politics overall (not very close) than the mainstream alternatives. Perhaps I’ll register Democrat, and start defending the DLC against the sophisticated attacks of “progressives.”
I assume you mean “DLC,” not DNC, yes?
Um, Yes. Thanks. Will revise and resubmit. Whoops!
I like having my ACLU membership card in my wallet right next to my NRA membership card. It gives me that warm and fuzzy Bill-of-Rights-y feeling.
Email Dan Savage and tell him to get his own blog. I’ve been reading him too and he’s good stuff.
“Anyway, the social conservative dominance of the Republican party is about to move me”
As much as I dislike the social conservatives, it’s their economically/fiscally “liberal” tendencies that drives me away from the Republicans. Unfortunately, unlike on the social issues, I can’t find refuge in the Democrats.
Social conservatives have been fighting a losing battle for 50 years, so I’m not too concerned about their latest stupidities.
“When the moral law is denied, all human actions begin to seem ‘inevitable’, for it is only by living a moral life that man can be in control of his own life.”
Something written by a particularly brilliant friend of mine (nom de plum “Shulamite”).
Sorry to see you do it, Will. Sorry to see you give in to the Left’s hyperbole and scare mongering. Seems pretty effective though.
But hey! After all, porn is just as popular in the Red states as in the Blue, right? Won’t then legions of single-handed keyboard users (!) across the fruited plain vote out the scum politicians who would dare abrogate their prurient delights?
Will’s daliance with DLC gives further proof of a phenomenon to have been under scrutiny by certain people for quite some time: radical libertarianism — as a revolt against Progressivism — unwittingly radicalizes Progressivism/Statism. It occurs precisely for reasons adumbrated in the quote above: Flouting and confusing the distinction (and inherent connection) between the moral law and the political.
The political is, alas, not “neutral” (not in the Rawlsian sense; it is, however, neutral by virtue of claiming to be final arbiter. But the law is partisan with respect its own interest, i.e. the moral cause of its own survival and promulgation).
P.S. Don’t get me wrong, I’m all in favor of the freedoms — porn and everything — which you seek to defend. Cashiering many other liberties in exchange for the extreme latitude being an essentially ghost with-an-erection seems somehow pretty dehumanizing. One can pretty much enjoy sexual abandon to one’s anarchic delight in socialist Berlin and Stockholm, after all.
correction:
“extreme latitude [of] being [ ] essentially [a] ghost with-an-erection…”
I assume you mean “DLC,” not DNC, yes?
Um, Yes. Thanks. Will revise and resubmit. Whoops!
I like having my ACLU membership card in my wallet right next to my NRA membership card. It gives me that warm and fuzzy Bill-of-Rights-y feeling.
Email Dan Savage and tell him to get his own blog. I’ve been reading him too and he’s good stuff.
“Anyway, the social conservative dominance of the Republican party is about to move me”
As much as I dislike the social conservatives, it’s their economically/fiscally “liberal” tendencies that drives me away from the Republicans. Unfortunately, unlike on the social issues, I can’t find refuge in the Democrats.
Social conservatives have been fighting a losing battle for 50 years, so I’m not too concerned about their latest stupidities.
“When the moral law is denied, all human actions begin to seem ‘inevitable’, for it is only by living a moral life that man can be in control of his own life.”
Something written by a particularly brilliant friend of mine (nom de plum “Shulamite”).
Sorry to see you do it, Will. Sorry to see you give in to the Left’s hyperbole and scare mongering. Seems pretty effective though.
But hey! After all, porn is just as popular in the Red states as in the Blue, right? Won’t then legions of single-handed keyboard users (!) across the fruited plain vote out the scum politicians who would dare abrogate their prurient delights?
Will’s daliance with DLC gives further proof of a phenomenon to have been under scrutiny by certain people for quite some time: radical libertarianism — as a revolt against Progressivism — unwittingly radicalizes Progressivism/Statism. It occurs precisely for reasons adumbrated in the quote above: Flouting and confusing the distinction (and inherent connection) between the moral law and the political.
The political is, alas, not “neutral” (not in the Rawlsian sense; it is, however, neutral by virtue of claiming to be final arbiter. But the law is partisan with respect its own interest, i.e. the moral cause of its own survival and promulgation).
P.S. Don’t get me wrong, I’m all in favor of the freedoms — porn and everything — which you seek to defend. Cashiering many other liberties in exchange for the extreme latitude being an essentially ghost with-an-erection seems somehow pretty dehumanizing. One can pretty much enjoy sexual abandon to one’s anarchic delight in socialist Berlin and Stockholm, after all.
correction:
“extreme latitude [of] being [ ] essentially [a] ghost with-an-erection…”
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