....So Maybe it's Conservative!

What has most upset me about this whole Santorum thing is not so much the reminder that moral conservatives disapprove of homosexuality, but that so many of them would indeed like to put homosexuals in prison.

Fortunately, the comparatively short (and still unfolding) history of modern freedom evinces a trend away from locking people up because others do not approve of their lifestyles. Few reasonable people have any quarrel with society protecting itself against force or fraud, i.e. against bad guys. A bad person is someone who will hurt you, take advantage of you, do something to you against your will, take advantage of a child, or (and here we go) take away your freedom. To the extent that moral conservatives (or social conservatives, or fundamentalist bigots, or whatever you might call them) want to do the latter, I would consider them bad people. (There! I guess the above means that because I do believe in good and evil, that I am not what I am sure the fundamentalists would call me: a "moral relativist.")

As a libertarian I oppose all drug laws for exactly the same reason. The state (which is composed of men -- and "men" is a collective word for all human beings in the classical sense) has no right to put people in prison because they have engaged in an activity deemed harmful to themselves. Those who would imprison them are, once again, bad people. In a strict moral sense, I consider them even worse than those who would lock up homosexuals, because (applying their own argument that drug use harms the individual user) by locking him up they are engaged in the genuinely evil activity of inflicting further harm on a person for having harmed himself. Might as well jail fat people for overeating. Or people who by recklessness turned themselves into paraplegics.

Bottom line: no matter how offensive or immoral a lifestyle may seem, if he has not harmed others and you jail him for it, you become far more immoral than he.

In the year 1982, I found myself subjected to verbal and physical abuse because of my lifestyle choice, and I am posting this account of it to this blog thanks to the very kind urging of a really inspiring blogger.

Place: San Francisco, city of tolerance, liberalism, an "anything goes" atmosphere, in the era before such things as AIDS, mass deaths (over 20 friends so far -- each one taking part of me along with him), the Internet, blogs, or so many of the things we take for granted.

One of "The City's" big annual events was the Lesbian/Gay/Bisexual/Etc. Parade. I attended my first one in June 1973, and watched them get bigger and bigger until, sadly, political correctness and government sponsorship crept in, killing much of the original spontaneity and innocence. By 1982, all floats had to be approved in advance, although once the parade was underway people were free to join any float they wanted.

There had been a great deal of antigay violence that year, and all sorts of ideas were floating around about how to deal with it, including the use of whistles, the funding of a 24 hour a day reporting line, hiring more gay police officers, and (gasp) even courses in self defense.

Self defense. Now, there's something I believed in. And I owned my share of firearms. I even subscribed to the heresy that the Second Amendment is a good thing. (Still do, which is why I am a Lifetime Member of the NRA and urge every reader to become the same.) So I, along with a group of similar-minded citizens, petitioned the parade committee to let us enter a "GAY GUNS" float in the parade. We wanted to march with unloaded firearms, as was our right legally.

What should have been a simple and dignified exercise of free speech turned into an unforgettable nightmare. The parade committee refused to let us march with unloaded firearms (so we substituted a large wooden gun attached to a pickup), and we ended up being forced to march in a solitary position towards the end of the parade, surrounded by suspicious and unfriendly parade monitors. These "monitors" did nothing to defend or help us; their sole purpose seemed to be to stop sympathetic spectators from joining us -- unlike the case with the other floats. I will never forget the angry faces, shrieks at every turn, boos, jeers, and invective. I was called a "traitor," "the enemy!", spat upon I don't know how many times, had beer thrown on me (along with at least one bottle; a couple of times I had to dive for cover into the bed of the pickup). Several members of our original group were so frightened that they deserted the pathetic, struggling float. Every time some supporter in the crowd would try to cheer, he would himself be booed, and drowned out.

Well, I was not hurt, but I had trouble sleeping that night. Every time I closed my eyes I saw these angry faces of seething hatred -- at least as mean and evil looking as any of the Southern bigots shown in films from the Freedom Riders era in the 1960s. The boos, jeers and invective reverberated for days, and sometimes I still hear them.

I have yet to experience anything resembling this kind of treatment from the right wing, and on a number of occasions I have deliberately put myself in the position of inviting it.

Perhaps some readers will be arguing that incivility and meanness is one thing, but at least those angry San Francisco gay leftists would not put people in prison for their lifestyle choices.

Really, you say? They wouldn't?

Ever heard of a thing called GUN CONTROL???

That's this deal where if you believe in the right of armed self-defense and deem it prudent to get a gun, the angry gun-hating people will put you in jail for it! Believe me, I remember the faces of that mob; some of them had pure murder in their eyes, and the idea of merely putting us in jail would probably have struck them as an act of permissiveness.

And if you don't think owning a gun for self defense (or any other reason) is a permissible lifestyle choice, I suggest rereading the Constitution.

As I said in an earlier blog, dick control is wrong, and so is gun control. Nobody locks me up for what I do with my own body or my own life. I have a right to use my body as I see fit, and I also have a right to defend it!

If this makes me a liberal, I guess I am a liberal. If that makes me a conservative, I guess I'm a conservative. Which side gets to call names?