- Joined
- Jun 21, 2012
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- Political Leaning
- Libertarian - Left
One of the curiosities of our modern political (mis)alignment is the association with the rhetoric of liberty by those who, essentially, have no idea what the word means.
'Freedom' is more than the right to wear a sloppy red t-shirt sporting a bald eagle and a badly-printed copy of the Constitution that you found on the clearance rack at Wal-Mart. It is, rather, the absence of imposed inhibitions: negative liberty is the only liberty worthy of the name. And, I'd argue, the Jeffersonians were wrong when they held this freedom to be universal and inalienable, else we must grapple with our lack of freedom to voluntarily surrender freedom: freedom cannot be... compelled.
Consequently, we must accept that, in order to be free, one must free one's self. And the only way to do this is through self-creation.
All this is really simply a convoluted way of saying that freedom is rooted in individual actions and individual wills, not in some spurious, glazy-eyed patriotism. As such, the freedom to act is the first and fundamental freedom. And this by necessity includes the freedom to act sexually, as such activity is profoundly self-definitive.
This is one reason that the conservative argument that homosexuality is a 'choice' makes little sense to me, and liberal protestations to the contrary make even less: what of it? I hardly see that we should be less 'permissive' of it (assuming we have the right to not be so permissive) if it were a choice: for liberty requires choice. The execise of freedom is the exercise of choice.
'Freedom' is more than the right to wear a sloppy red t-shirt sporting a bald eagle and a badly-printed copy of the Constitution that you found on the clearance rack at Wal-Mart. It is, rather, the absence of imposed inhibitions: negative liberty is the only liberty worthy of the name. And, I'd argue, the Jeffersonians were wrong when they held this freedom to be universal and inalienable, else we must grapple with our lack of freedom to voluntarily surrender freedom: freedom cannot be... compelled.
Consequently, we must accept that, in order to be free, one must free one's self. And the only way to do this is through self-creation.
All this is really simply a convoluted way of saying that freedom is rooted in individual actions and individual wills, not in some spurious, glazy-eyed patriotism. As such, the freedom to act is the first and fundamental freedom. And this by necessity includes the freedom to act sexually, as such activity is profoundly self-definitive.
This is one reason that the conservative argument that homosexuality is a 'choice' makes little sense to me, and liberal protestations to the contrary make even less: what of it? I hardly see that we should be less 'permissive' of it (assuming we have the right to not be so permissive) if it were a choice: for liberty requires choice. The execise of freedom is the exercise of choice.
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