Do libertarians have an obligation to support gay rights?

When I read the wonderful debate between Kerry Howley, Todd Seavey and Daniel McCarthey about whether or not libertarians have an obligation to stake out opposition to social and cultural oppression, rather than only to governmental oppression, I was fascinated. Hooked. All three were articulate and I commend to you the link, again.

It raises the truly great question, what is the proper scope of insistence upon liberty?

It got me thinking about how one might resolve a specific politically charged cultural question with liberty as an ideological aim and with a conservative respect for private institutions and traditions.

Certainly one example of my affinity with Kerry Howley’s full-throated cultural libertarian distrust of coercion from any source, governmental or cultural:  I support legal gay marriage. I do not believe gender preference in a private – and publicly institutionalized – relationship is a matter of government concern.

Should libertarians, as libertarians, support gay marriage?  Yes, I believe they should.  Should libertarians, as libertarians, support the gay agenda generally?  No – or maybe so maybe no – precisely the discomforting and arguably irresolvable ambiguity that Todd Seavey and Daniel McCarthey highlight in their cautionary essays against Kerry’s cultural libertarianism.

Where government sanction is necessary, as with marriage, it should extend equally to hetero- and homosexuality. Where government sanction is not necessary, and the matter is a cultural or social question, any of the many varieties of libertarians may search their own consciences and conclude that they support or oppose the matter in question, without recourse to any inquiry into consistent libertarian philosophy.

I respect private institutions and traditions and their capacity to resolve individuals’ existential questions. I respect religion, tradition, cultural mores and ethnic identity because I believe all of these, in different ways, allow an individual human being to locate him or herself in a social and/or cultural context that is comforting, explanatory, and empowering.

And I am mindful (and this is sometimes a weakness of libertarian thinking) that not many of us are capable of the heroism of Howard Roark, Dagny Taggart and Hank Rearden.  Most of us lead lives of quiet desperation, or perhaps once imagined ourselves heroic but now simply wish to give our children a better shot.

Libertarianism, for its viability, depends very much upon its effects on those who do not know what libertarianism is.  And I do not mean merely that the rich get richer and the poor get richer.  I mean that there must be an appreciation, writ large, for liberty and its consequences.

I believe liberty embraces tradition.  It is inexcusably condescending, from a position of liberty, to question anyone who freely embraces tradition.  I have the right to be just so free, and not more, as I wish.  Moreover, even if I am weak, and merely capitulate to tradition, that is also my right.  Your philosophy may not know the trade-offs, you may not understand the personal and social politics and the psychology, you may not understand me.