GOP witness at Biden impeachment inquiry advocated on behalf of a polygamist who raped a 13-year-old, said "I’m pretty libertarian."

As docosc suggests above, the modern Libertarian’s investment in personal freedom ends at the tip of his (almost always his) nose. The philosophy boils down to “I get to do exactly what I want, and the rest of you get to do exactly what I want.”

Personally I’d like to see Turley and his like exit, pursued by bears.

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Privileges sure, but I kind of feel like rights are things that everyone should be entitled to regardless. For instance even Trump is still entitled to a fair trial, and if I had my way he would still be entitled to food and health care and even voting from prison. Because that’s just how you treat people.

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he has a blog

While the justifications have changed over the years, the most common argument today in favor of a criminal ban is that underage girls have been coerced into polygamist marriages. There are indeed such cases. However, banning polygamy is no more a solution to child abuse than banning marriage would be a solution to spousal abuse. The country has laws to punish pedophiles and there is no religious exception to those laws.
In Green’s case, he was shown to have “married” a 13-year-old girl. If Green had relations with her, he is a pedophile and was properly prosecuted for a child sex crime — just as a person in a monogamous marriage would be prosecuted.

Libertarians like to ignore the obvious, if the obviousness is based on social groupings larger than the individual.

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Jesus Christ on a pogo stick…Jonathan Turley used to be (like a decade plus ago) a thoughtful, intelligent commentator on issues…what in the actual Hell happened to him?

You got some examples of that? :thinking:

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:thinking:

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Certainly if one is defending the idea of multiple marriage, one really doesn’t want to be defending this kind of abusive culture, but if one supports the idea of polyamory and take issue with the government criminalizing it, it might be hard to avoid ending up defending Mormons because they’re the ones being prosecuted for it. On the other hand, one could be defending that particular toxic culture which results in giving the appearance of defending polyamory in general, and it’s hard to tell which is which.

In the first case, the situation can end up being like when prosecutors angrily accusing marijuana-decriminalization advocates of wanting to free drug kingpins who tried to murder cops, etc. (but got jailed purely on drug charges). Those arguing for decriminalization end up functionally supporting violent drug dealers, but only because they feel, of all the things that person did, the thing that got them put away was the one thing they shouldn’t have been prosecuted for.

In this case, given the (insane, right-wing) context of his current appearance, I rather suspect a support, on his part, for the right-wing patriarchal nature of Mormon polygamy was at least what inspired him to take the stance (if not the whole point), rather than some general objection.

Yes, yes, absolutely - but his stated objection was to “morals legislation” that criminalized having multiple spouses, which theoretically would be bigger than just polygamy (and far, far more encompassing than that particular, patriarchal culture). I mean, yeah, I very much suspect he’s only interested in the patriarchal, right-wing, abusive version embodied by Mormon polygamy, contrary to what he claims, though.

It’s just that “I don’t think he should have been prosecuted for polygamy” necessarily leads to the conclusion, “Oh, you approve of everything else he did?” (Even if it might in this case.)

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Trump happened, of course.

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Ain’t nothing “pretty” about that.

And he seems pretty uninterested in the liberty of a young girl for a “libertarian.”

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Modern libertarians really do not give a shit about anyone who isn’t a rich white male and their “freedoms” to oppress literally all of the rest of us…

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“Liken”, not “like in”.

That is true of some of them. The official New Hampshire Libertarian Party has posted some very mask off posts.

Yep.

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