Today I am quite pleased to present this special guest commentary from long-long time FR friend Christopher Lauer… Flash
The "Liberal"-tarian Party of Death
By Chris Lauer
Recently, I had an interesting political discussion with an old friend who is a proud, card-carrying member of the Libertarian Party. He was urging me with great enthusiasm to vote Libertarian in this year’s presidential election.
I explained to him that while I have sympathy for the Libertarian Party (and consider myself somewhat of a libertarian); I could not associate my family’s name with it as long as the Libertarian Party platform includes support for abortion. In essence, this platform sanctions using of the full police power of the state to guarantee a person’s right to kill human babies at any time during their first nine months of life (in utero), and I find this barbaric position to be completely inconsistent with any claim of liberty.
Our liberty supercedes the authority of the state, and the state does not have the competency to dispense or withhold it in the same fashion as food stamps. My well-meaning friend had always believed that defending a woman’s right to end her child’s life was fully consistent with the cause of liberty. I offered to him the shocking proposition that the Libertarian Party, in its current form, had devolved into being an advocate of the most diabolical form of authoritarianism. Of course, I had to spend a few cycles during this conversation assuring him that my view of liberty is perfectly consistent with a secular view of natural law and does not rely on, nor is it limited to, my Roman Catholic faith.
The Libertarian Party generally and correctly believes that government has a legitimate duty to protect human life; however, it misses the logic boat completely by ceding to the state the authority to determine that defendable life begins some time other than at its beginning.
With the stroke of a government pen, the state—through one of it’s more maniacal tentacles: the Supreme Court—declared itself the sole arbiter of whose life is worthy of defense. By enshrining this flawed ideology into its official platform, the Libertarian Party rejects our Founding Fathers who so boldly declared: that we are each endowed by our Creator with a liberty that is unalienable.
If I accept that the state has the authority to arbitrarily deny my liberty during the first nine months of my life, I also thereby grant the state the authority to arbitrarily deny it at other times, as the state sees fit. To demonstrate what I mean, allow me to refer to a recent interview that appeared on LifeSiteNews.com. The interview was with Baroness Mary Helen Warnock of Great Britain, who remarked that "people suffering dementia have a duty to commit suicide." Baroness Warnock, called the "philosopher queen," is regarded as Britain’s leading moral philosopher on bioethics. She said that she hopes people will soon be "licensed to put others down" who have become a burden on the health care system. She told the Church of Scotland’s Life and Work magazine, "If you’re demented, you’re wasting people’s lives, your family’s lives, and you’re wasting the resources of the National Health Service."
By my estimate, somewhere about age 52 ½ , men reach their break-even point were they start drawing from, more than they contribute to, a typical health care system, and thereby become a "burden" to the system. For women, who have higher medical expenses in their lifetime, I imagine the break-even point is much younger. Mark my words: given the rapid pace at which society is racing toward nihilism, Baroness Warnock’s policies will be generally accepted in the United States during our lifetime, and most likely right about the time many of us reach the "burden" point on Barack Obama’s proposed health care system.
Our liberty does not originate with the government. Our liberty did not originate with the Magna Carta nor with the U.S. Constitution. Our liberty originates from our Creator, which means we have liberty from the first moment of our creation, and it is from this moment which the government owes us its full power in defense. One doesn’t have to hold strong religious beliefs to understand these basic truths. Some might even say that these truths are self-evident.
As a libertarian, I value consistency in my love of liberty far too much to enroll my name among the ranks of the current Libertarian Party or to vote for its candidates. And as a Roman Catholic, I value my ever-lasting soul even more.
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Chris Lauer, a longtime friend of the FlashReport, once the Chief Consultant to California Senator Ray Haynes, now resides in Charlotte, North Carolina with his wife Katherine and his two children (and counting). Mr. Lauer currently works in the private sector as a consultant for a global technology company.
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