A Tale of Two Temperamentsby Myles Kantor Note: FreeEmigration.com changed servers last weekend, which disabled our e-mail capability. I apologize to readers unable to contact me and will be happy to address any questions or comments regarding last week’s article. Monday’s episode of The Edge with Paula Zahn examined Disney World’s sponsorship of a Gay Day on its facilities. Director of the Culture and Family Institute Robert Knight appeared on the program. “The federal government should crack down on Disney’s abominable endorsement of the sodomites. Our government must affirm America’s Judeo-Christian heritage and set an example for our youth.” This is precisely what Knight did not say. A truly tolerant man, he recognized Disney’s right to hold such an event while criticizing the exercise of that right with temperance. Golfer Casey Martin recently triumphed in the Supreme Court: Thanks to its construction of the Americans with Disabilities Act, the PGA must exempt him from walking on a golf course. The athletic circumstance of this decision should not obscure its fundamental entailment that private organizations are not really private – so much for James Madison’s claim that “Government is instituted no less for protection of the property than of the persons of individuals.” The respective methodologies of these individuals exemplify the essential polarity between genuine liberalism and contemporary “liberalism”: advocacy versus force. An old-fashioned liberal, to use Vladimir Nabokov’s fine phrase, pursues his passions through persuasion, whereas contemporary “liberals” pursue theirs through proscription. Robert Knight has not enlisted the State to mandate Judeo-Christian morality against Disney, but Casey Martin has enlisted the most elitist branch of federal power to coerce the PGA. The former seeks public consideration of his values, the latter governmental imposition of his values. Knight could advocate an ADA for traditional values (the Americans for Decency Act?) that would forbid “public accommodations” from promoting homosexuality; he could ask the Florida legislature to pass a D.I.S.N.E.E. (Demanding Iniquitous Sodomites Not Enjoy Endorsement) law. That is, he could coercively implement his conviction that homosexuality should not be celebrated. The supposedly intolerant Bible-thumper’s failure to do this contrasts sharply with the supposedly innocent Martin’s deliberate use of force to realize his desire. To describe the disparity in economic phraseology, Knight’s efficacy is predicated upon a marketplace of ideas (“This is what I believe and you should, too”) and Martin’s upon a command ideology (“This is what I believe and you will, too”). As a non-golfer and non-golf enthusiast, I have no vested interest in the PGA’s deformity by the Supreme Court. (I prefer racquetball.) As citizens, though, we all have a vested interest in the private sphere’s subversion. The obliteration of private immunity from political authority is a hallmark of an omnipotent regime. Benito “Everything within the state, nothing outside the state” Mussolini adored this kind of system, but fascism is not an American value.
Give me tolerant traditionalists over aggressive do-gooders any day. June 7, 2001 Myles Kantor [send him mail] edits FreeEmigration.com and lives in Boynton Beach, Florida Copyright 2001 LewRockwell.com |
Coercive
and corrosive rhyme in substance as well as sound; the deployment
of force corresponds to the diminishment of freedom. Conventional
wisdom holds that America’s Robert Knights are the threat to our
liberties, but a closer evaluation indicates otherwise.