I found this interesting, as it mirrors some of my own attitudes on a couple of thorny social issues.   Libertarians, Gay Marriage, and Freedom of Association: A Primer.  Excerpt:

How can a libertarian support gay marriage but also the right of businesses to decline to provide goods and services such as cakes, wedding dresses, and photographers for gay weddings? For many libertarians, it makes perfect logical, philosophical, and legal sense.

But from the outside perspective, it often does not. As a result, critics looking for an opportunity to throw shade on the increased media and public interest in libertarian ideas can focus on just a piece of this mentality. We saw the Village Voice do just that recently, as media critic Roy Edroso incorrectly declared that we here are “more likely” to defend the rights of private individuals and businesses who want to discriminate against gays than the rights of gay couples to demand marriage recognition from the government.

I’ve made my stance on social issues abundantly clear:  I really don’t give a damn what people do, as long as they leave me alone.  I expect the converse in return.

I’ve likewise made my stance on gay marriage (or any kind of marriage) abundantly clear:  I don’t give a damn who people marry, as long as all parties involved are freely consenting, competent adults.  Their actions don’t affect my marriage any.

I don’t understand why a man would want to marry another man, or even how a man could find another man sexually appealing – but I don’t have to.  I don’t understand why people like watching sports on television, either, but it doesn’t affect me if they do.

But liberty is about more than just marriage.  Freedom of association also means freedom of disassociation, even if you (or anyone else) disapproves of a business owner’s reasons.  A baker, yes, should be free to refuse to make a wedding cake for a gay couple.  If we can use the force of government – men with guns – to force a baker to make a cake for a gay couple, where does such coercing end?

Liberty is not situational.  Liberty is a principle.  Sadly, it’s one we’re losing.

This just in from the always-worth-reading Dr. Victor Davis Hanson:  Our ‘Face in the Crowd.’  Excerpt:

So what is collapsing the presidency of the once mellifluous Obama? It is not the IRS, AP, VA, or NSA scandals. Nor did the nation especially fault him for Benghazi or the complete collapse of U.S. foreign policy, from failed reset to a Middle East afire. In each case, he either blamed Bush or denied there was a smidgeon of wrongdoing on his part.

Certainly, the stampede at the border, as disastrous as it was, did not ipso facto sink Obama’s ratings. Ditto the embarrassing Bergdahl deal, in which we traded a likely deserter for five Islamist kingpins. Was it the ISIS ascendance that is leading to genocide and a nascent caliphate? Not in and of itself.

We could go on, but you get the picture that it was all of the above that finally became too much, as Americans turned Obama off because they were all lied out. In all of these scandals a charismatic Barack wheeled out the teleprompter, smiled, dropped his g’s, soared with “make no mistake about it” and “let me perfectly clear,” and then, like Lonesome Rhodes, told the “folks” things that could not be true or at least were the exact opposite of what he himself had earlier asserted.

To a certain extent, we can’t fault President Obama for lying; he’s a politician.  After all, when a dog pisses on a fire hydrant, he’s not vandalizing public property; he’s just being a dog.  So it is for pols; most of them lie as reflexively as they breathe.

Some of them, however, do have core principles.  Texas Governor Perry has them, whether you agree with them or not.  President Reagan had them.  The Founders had them in large measure.

But, at least in the estimation of yr. obdt., Barack Obama has no core principles other than self-promotion.  (Also in my estimation he is joined by Hillary Clinton in this respect.)  He is a creature of pure expedience; whatever serves his purpose at the moment is the Good and Right thing to do.  In this he is hampered by a tragic lack of executive experience and a certain intellectual laziness.

Dr. Hanson concludes:

The secret to Lonesome (Rhodes)’s success was to hide his contempt for those he lied to. When he is caught ridiculing his clueless listeners, he finally crashes and burns — sort of like Barack Obama serially vacationing with the 1% whom he so publicly scorns, or golfing in the aristocratic fashion of those who, he assures us, did not build their businesses.

Lonesome did not end up well, and neither will the presidency of Barack Obama.

As usual, Dr. Hanson is correct.

Thanks once again to The Other McCain for the Rule Five linkery!

Who Lost the Cities?  Excerpt:

Philadelphia, for example, has not had a Republican mayor since the Truman administration. It did enjoy the services of Mayor Frank Rizzo, a Democrat who endorsed Nixon in exchange for federal handouts and who governed in the progressive style: He converted a private utility into a public one and promptly turned it into a patronage machine, he was close with the labor unions and raised the city’s wage tax to fund spending on transportation and infrastructure projects, worked for economic benefits for the elderly, etc. He was a classic welfare-statist Democrat — and a man who, as police commissioner, famously promised to “make Attila the Hun look like a fag.” (Rizzo later ran as a Republican.) It wasn’t a right-wing radical who bombed a Philadelphia rowhouse and burned down the neighborhood — it was an African-American progressive, Wilson Goode. Closet Ayn Rand fans have not been running the affairs of Detroit all these years, and the intellectual patrons of the Chicago Boys have had approximately zero influence on the municipal affairs of Chicago. Ralph Reed will never be the mayor of San Francisco.

There is a correlation here that is strong enough it is hard to discount to probability of causation:  Progressive urban politics leads to a loss of economic opportunity, the diminishing of personal responsibility and, eventually, Chicago, Detroit and Los Angeles.

Anyone living in or near any of our major cities should be living in fear of the day the Imperial Federal government finally realizes we are broke, and that the endless stream of wealth transfer payments have to stop.

Our major cities will destroy themselves in a matter of weeks.

Thanks once again to The Other McCain for the Rule Five links!

Speaking of Robert Stacy and company; the inestimable Mr. McCain has been handed a win in his legal case, in which he (and numerous other high-profile bloggers) have been sued for defamation by convicted perjurer and peripatetic asshole Brett Kimberlin.  Kudos and congratulations to Mr. McCain on this event, and (of course) to his co-defendants as well.

And while we’re on the topic – why the hell is it that perjuring assholes like Kimberlin feel so free to sue?  Mostly for one reason; if they lose, they are only out their own expenses.  (Since Kimberlin apparently represented himself, proving once more the maxim that anyone who represents himself in a trial has a moron for a client, he apparently isn’t even out that much.)

If there is a better argument for a loser-pays tort reform, I don’t know what it is.  Liar and asshole Kimberlin, having lost miserably, should now be liable for the legal expenses of the defendants.  That, if nothing else, would make assholes think twice before filing stupid, frivolous lawsuits.

Speaking of assholes, in New York City a cowardly, sniveling young punk sucker-punched a 72-year old man and ran off, in another disgusting example of the “knockout game.”  If there were any justice, this cowardly little shit would be put in a ring and left at the mercy of an MMA fighter for ten or fifteen minutes.

And on that note, we return you to your Thursday, already in progress.

Today we have another egregious Charles Fox from the least competent, most corrupt Attorney General since Ed Meese:  Hey, Eric Holder:  Voter ID Isn’t Stuck in 1965.  Excerpt:

To wit, black voter registration in North Carolina exceeds that of whites—data from 2012 indicates black registration at 95.3 percent and white registration at 87.8 percent. Given that black registration in North Carolina is 7.5 percent greater than among whites, the court was less than convinced that a voter ID requirement would suddenly lead to an unequal access to the polls. Moreover, Holder and the NAACP asserted that the elimination of same-day registration would lead to a decrease in black voter participation—another claim swatted away by the court.

Their expert witness testified in court that without same-day registration the number of blacks would have declined by 3 percent in 2012 and that one could predict similar results in future elections. This claim, too, was batted away when Schroeder, a George W. Bush appointee, noted: “Plaintiffs have not shown that African-American voters in 2012 lacked—or more importantly, that they currently lack—an equal opportunity to easily register to vote otherwise.

The resistance to voter ID laws staggers belief.  Setting aside AG Holder’s pandering to the self-appointed “civil rights” leadership, it’s impossible to make a realistic case that a society that requires ID for boarding an airplane, for cashing a check, for buying a firearm or a car, or for any of a thousand other transactions of everyday life, should somehow allow a citizen to vote without showing such ID.

How many people care enough about their country to vote but not enough to take an hour out of the year to go to the DMV and obtain a state-issued photo ID?

Such people deserve very little sympathy.