Writes a friend:

No one is less tolerant than those demanding tolerance. - Doug Marlette

I'm very glad you linked to that piece; those "progressive libertarian" gripes about RP are exactly what I was talking about the other day when I sent you the article about the Nevada brothel owner. Did you notice how Mr. Horwitz criticizes the Good Doctor for his cultural conservatism, and asserts that he is insufficiently "cosmopolitan"? Another article I came across expressed those very same complaints, and while that hardly constitutes a pattern, I have little doubt that I would encounter much the same kind of thinking among other left-libertarians were I to go farther afield. But as I had said the other day, it isn't enough for them that RP opposes the state interfering where it has no business; no, they accuse him of "inconsistency" because he does not personally embrace certain of their stances.

And why should he? I regard it as both unrealistic and unfair, not to mention presumptuous and arrogant, for someone to demand that you embrace beliefs that are antithetical to your own, particularly when you have demonstrated beyond all doubt that, even if you disapprove of someone else's lifestyle, you are still more than willing to live and let live. And just as you believe that it is not your business or anyone else's to tell others how to live, neither do you advocate state regulation of nonaggressive personal behavior. What, pray tell, could be more libertarian than that?

Nothing, one would think - but it doesn't pass the left-libertarian litmus test, where you must embrace and become a cheerleader for assorted socially liberal causes, or else you're not a "real" libertarian, for all that you adamantly oppose lifestyle regulation on the part of the state. Not only that, the left-libertarians assert that your cultural conservatism and "lack of cosmopolitanism" are "running a huge risk of long-term damage to libertarianism", because "We were born as a progressive and cosmopolitan movement and we forget our history at our own peril." The message is clear: you're just not hip enough to be libertarian; if you don't embrace our ways, you run the risk of being di buttar via (thrown away - because you're old hat, over the hill, or, as the Brits say, past it).

Not exactly the spirit of live-and-let-live, is it? I fully expect that kind of blinkered thinking from the rank and file of both Left and Right, but it positively grates coming from a self-proclaimed libertarian. Rhetoric about freedom and opposition to the state ring pretty hollow when you yourself display a marked intolerance toward others because they do not subscribe to the "right" beliefs, when you would seek to impose upon them what can only be described as your own brand of political correctness. It is that hipper-than-thou sanctimoniousness, I submit, that is the real danger to the libertarian movement, rather than the fact that many of its adherents embrace unreconstructed anti-statism while also remaining stubbornly - and contentedly - bourgeois.