Huckabee on G&H

chris,

Its meaningful to note that even though libertarians talk about themselves as having a consistent ideology, within libertarians there are a number of different views on social issues.

There are some libertarians, like Ron Paul, who don't think there's a conflict with principles of freedom and equality and laws on abortion and gay marriage. To Ron Paul, you can make a law against abortion just like you can make a law against murder, and you can establish a type of contract for heterosexual couples without violating rights for homosexual couples. They don't see a contradiction between social conservativism and libertarian philosophy.

Other libertarians don't believe in social conservative policies but believe, like social conservativces do, that the court is activist when they declare that the Constitution disallows laws on abortion or requires that marriage rights be granted to gay couples. They might be supporting liberal positions on these types of policies, but support a conservative, strict constructionist, position on the role of the courts.

Then there are libertarians who find themselves agreeing with liberal justices on the point that the Constitution created a government with limited rights, and the government has some restrictions on it that aren't specifically spelled out in the text. They point to the 9th and 10th amendments.

Finally, there are also libertarians who handle the issues of states rights in different ways. Some look at libertarianism as a form of anti-federalism and simply want to reduce the power of the federal government on these issues and not the state governments. Others may want to reduce the power of all government, but don't think the federal Constitution should have sway over state governments; they may not agree that restrictions for the federal government should be incorporated for the state governments. Yet some others think state government power should be restricted, but think that some issues are okay at an even more local municipal level.

And with the Libertarian Party having infighting between its different factions on the nomination of Bob Barr, maybe we don't only need to define a Conservativism 2.0 , but also a Libertarianism 2.0.