In September, Minnesota Vikings Punter Chris Kluwe made the news for defending a fellow NFL player’s activism in support of gay marriage. Maryland State Delegate Emmett C. Burns sent a letter to the owner of the Balitmore Ravens demanding he do something to stop linebacker Brendon Ayanbadejo from speaking out in favor of allowing gay couples in the state to have their marriages legally recognized.
Kluwe’s response, published at sports blog Deadspin, garnered quite a bit of public attention, mostly for his amusing turn of phrase in defense of his fellow athlete’s right to speak, as well as in declaring his own support for gay marriage. “I can assure you that gay people getting married will have zero effect on your life,” Kluwe wrote. “They won't come into your house and steal your children. They won't magically turn you into a lustful cockmonster.”
Beyond that letter, Kluwe has been an outspoken supporter for gay issues on his own. He posed for gay magazine Out. In December he joined Athlete Ally, a nonprofit group devoted to pushing back against homophobia in sports, as an “ambassador.”
He was profiled in November by OC Weekly, where he talked about his activism, as well as his love of all things considered nerdy, like science fiction and video games.
Kluwe also, while reluctant to use labels, described himself as a libertarian and said he was not a fan of President Barack Obama, nor Gov. Mitt Romney. Reason 24/7 Associate Editor Scott Shackford spoke with Kluwe by telephone about the extent of his libertarian philosophy, the November election, Ayn Rand, and the way American culture responds to celebrities and athletes wading into political discussions.
Reason: I had been following your activism on gay marriage since your infamous letter to Emmett Burns. I read your OC Weekly profile last month, and you were reluctant to label your politics. You said you’re libertarian, but also said that doesn’t quite sum it up. What makes you libertarian?
Chris Kluwe: For me personally it’s the belief that I would like to be free to live my own life. There’s the golden rule to treat other people the way you would want to be treated. That will solve a lot of the world’s problems.
Reason: Why do you feel that even that libertarian label isn’t complete?
Kluwe: I’ve never been a big fan of labels. It’s hard to sum up a person with a single label. I say I lean toward the libertarian side. Some things I lean more liberal and some things I lean more conservative. But it’s all about not taking the rights away from somebody else
Reason: After I posted on our blog about your interview, some of our commenters read it and described you as an anarchist. You do occasionally retweet some comments from Anonymous. Have you explored the various philosophical underpinnings of anarchism?
Kluwe: In an ideal society you don’t need a government because everybody knows how to treat somebody else. Unfortunately we aren’t going to reach that place for some time. The world I imagine is from the Culture Series by Iain M. Banks [a sci-fi book series taking place in a semi-anarchist utopian culture]. The fact that once you reach a post-scarcity economy, you have people realize what people want to do with their life doesn’t affect me. You don’t need a government to tell you what to do.
Reason: You tweeted recently that you had just read Atlas Shrugged. What did you think?
Kluwe: Not a huge fan. I like some of Rand’s ideas. I think the core aspect she’s missing is empathy. Without empathy you don’t have stable society. What do you do when the real world intrudes? What do you do when there are earthquakes or disasters? If you don’t have concern for the people around you, eventually society is going to collapse. I think that’s one of Rand’s flaws. She doesn’t consider empathy to be a worthwhile trait.
Reason: It’s interesting that you see empathy as an important trait for libertarian philosophy.
Kluwe: If you don’t care for anybody else you’re a sociopath. It’s about finding what that level of safety net is without living off other people. If you truly want to live your life for yourself, then you wouldn’t want to take somebody’s labor, because you wouldn’t want somebody to do that to you. Empathy isn’t just about taking care of other people. It’s also recognizing what your actions do to other people. I have to make sure I’m wary of what I’m doing.
Reason: Are you willing to say who you voted for as president?
Kluwe: Gary Johnson. I don’t like any of the choices because our government is fundamentally flawed and won’t change any time soon. The good thing about our government is that it is resistant to huge, sweeping changes. The bad thing about our government is that it is resistant to huge, sweeping changes. Our founding fathers relied on an educated voter system. Our laws are now being written for corporations and organizations, not for people. A corporation is not a person. It’s a collection of people, but has no value on its own.
Take the Libor banking scandal. These banks laundered billions of money. If a person did that, they’d go to jail. Because it’s not a person, it’s fines instead. Bernie Madoff got life in prison.
Reason: There is an interesting cultural tension whenever somebody like an athlete, celebrity, or a rock star speaks out on political issues. They get a lot of attention, but they also get a lot of backlash. You yourself got attention for defending another athlete’s right to speak out to defend gay marriage. Do you feel as though there are particular obligations or hazards to being outspoken about politics when you’re not a member of the political or media classes?
Kluwe: I think that goes back to the label thing. It shouldn’t matter what your job is. What should matter is who you are as a human being. Your job has no bearing on who you are.
Reason: But in your case, you have more of a megaphone for your voice because of who you are.
Kluwe: The way I approach life is that everyone should have an equal voice. That I have a larger voice shows what our society values. Society values entertainment over education.
Reason: Right now, Vikings Special Teams Coach Mike Priefer would prefer you focus on your punting and less on your politics. What do you say when you’re told that your discussion of political issues is a distraction from doing your job well?
Kluwe: This is who I am, that’s who I’m always going to be. I’m totally cognizant that the NFL is a business. If I don’t perform on Sunday they’re going to cut me. When I’m at the facility, I’m focusing on football. If I’m not at the facility, it’s my own life. If I don’t have to think about my job, I shouldn’t have to.
Reason: If you were in a position to make decisions about how American politics operate, what would you change?
Kluwe: There’s several things. First would be getting money out of politics. The business of buying politicians and buying votes is way too widespread. Donors are giving huge amount of money to people creating policy. Business deserves a vote in government because they’re part of it, but there needs to be a limit. I would limit donations to about $100,000 per campaign and only allow only six weeks for campaigning running up to the election.
Term limits on congressmen. We have these people who are basically institutionalized. When we were founded, public service was a service. You took time away from your life. Now it’s a job. That’s not what stable government is about.
Limit lobbying. As new people are filtered in because of term limits lobbyists have more power. And we need a waiting period between serving Congress and becoming a lobbyist. These guys make these laws and pass bills and then three months later they’re working for these same groups.
Make the tax code a lot simpler, which is easier said than done. When you pay your taxes, 50 percent should go to the government for its use and the other 50 percent can be allocated in a couple of different areas. Then they won’t have to throw pork in bills. People will be telling you what your money will be spent on. It gives people more of a voice. People complain “I pay my taxes but I have no say in what my government does with it.”
You’re Not Free If You Can’t Secede From an Oppressive Government
Is all the recent talk of secession mere sour grapes over the election or perhaps something deeper? Currently there are active petitions in support of secession for all 50 states, with Texas taking the lead in number of signatures. Texas has well over the number of signatures needed to generate a response from the administration, and while I wouldn’t hold my breath on Texas actually seceding, I believe these petitions raise a lot of worthwhile questions about the nature of our union.
Is it treasonous to want to secede from the United States? Many think the question of secession was settled by our Civil War. On the contrary, the principles of self-government and voluntary association are at the core of our founding. Clearly, Thomas Jefferson believed secession was proper, albeit as a last resort. Writing to William Giles in 1825 he concluded that states “should separate from our companions only when the sole alternatives left are the dissolution of our union with them, or submission to a government without limitation of powers.”
Keep in mind that the first and third paragraph of the Declaration of Independence expressly contemplate the dissolution of a political union when the underlying government becomes tyrannical. Do we have a government without limitation of powers yet? The federal government kept the union together through violence and force in the Civil War, but did might really make right?
Secession is a deeply American principle. This country was born through secession. Some thought it was treasonous to secede from England, but those “traitors” became our country’s greatest patriots. There is nothing treasonous or unpatriotic about wanting a federal government that is more responsive to the people it represents. That is what our revolutionary war was all about and today, our own federal government is vastly overstepping its constitutional bounds with no signs of reform. In fact, the recent election only further entrenched the status quo.
If the possibility of secession is completely off the table there is nothing to stop the federal government from continuing to encroach on our liberties, and no recourse for those who are sick and tired of it. Consider the ballot measures that passed in Colorado and Washington state regarding marijuana laws. The people in those states have clearly indicated that they are ready to try something different where drug policy is concerned, yet they will still face a tremendous threat from the federal government. In California the feds have been arresting peaceful medical marijuana users and raiding dispensaries that state and local governments have sanctioned. This shouldn’t happen in a free country!
It remains to be seen what will happen in states that are refusing to comply with deeply unpopular mandates of Obamacare by not setting up healthcare exchanges. It appears the federal government will not respect those decisions either.
In free country governments derive their powers from the consent of the governed. When the people have very clearly withdrawn their consent for a law, the discussion should be over. If the feds refuse to accept that and continue to run roughshod over the people, at what point do we acknowledge that that is not freedom anymore? At what point should a people dissolve the political bands which have connected them with an increasingly tyrannical and oppressive federal government? And if people or states are not free to leave the United States as a last resort, can they really think of themselves as free? If a people cannot secede from an oppressive government they cannot truly be considered free.
November 20, 2012
What Does Ron Paul Read?
In Ron Paul's latest best-seller, Liberty Defined: 50 Essential Issues That Affect Our Freedom, he offers us his thoughts on a series of controversial topics, from Abortion to Zionism. His purpose is to inspire serious, critical, and independent thinking. Here are the books he cites for further study. Read 1, 2, or more:
Anderson, Terry. Free Market Environmentalism
Belfield, Richard. The Assassination Business: A History of State-Sponsored Murder
Burleigh, Anne Husted. Education in a Free Society
Caplan, Bryan. The Myth of the Rational Voter
Carter, Jimmy. Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid
Chodorov, Frank. The Income Tax: The Root of All Evil
De Jouvenel, Bertrand. The Ethics of Redistribution
Denson, John. A Century of War
___ Reassessing the Presidency:The Rise of the Executive State and the Decline of Freedom
Epstein, Richard. Forbidden Grounds: The Case Against Employment Discrimination
___ Takings: Private Property and the Power of Eminent Domain
Faddis, Charles S. Beyond Repair: The Decline and Fall of the CIA
Fisher, Louis. Presidential War Power
Fridson, Martin. Unwarranted Intrusions: The Case Against Government Interventions in the Marketplace
Flynn, John T. As We Go Marching
___ The Roosevelt Myth
Grant, James. Money of the Mind
Higgs, Robert. Crisis and Leviathan: Critical Episodes in the Growth of American Government
___ Depression, War and Cold War: Studies in Political Economy
Hoppe, Hans-Hermann. Democracy: The God That Failed
Horner, Christopher. The Politically Incorrect Guide to Global Warming
King, Martin Luther, Jr. The Autobiography of Martin Luther King
La Boétie, Etienne de. The Politics of Obedience: The Discourse of Voluntary Servitude
Larson, Edward J. The Creation-Evolution Debate: Historical Perspectives
Lott, John. More Guns, Less Crime
Mann, Vivian. Convivencia: Jews, Muslims, and Christians in Medieval Spain
Mencken, H. L. Notes on Democracy
Mises, Ludwig Von. Human Action: The Scholars Edition
___ The Theory of Money and Credit
___ Omnipotent Government
___ Nation, State and Economy
___ Theory and History
Morley, Felix. Freedom and Federalism
Napolitano, Andrew. The Constitution in Exile: How the Federal Government Has Seized Power by Rewriting the Supreme Law of the Land
Paterson, Isabel. The God of the Machine
Paul, Ron. Mises and Austrian Economics: A Personal View
___ The Case for Gold
___ A Foreign Policy of Freedom
Petro, Sylvester. The Labor Policy of a Free Society
Rockwell, Llewellyn H., Jr. The Left, the Right, and the State
Rothbard, Murray. An Austrian Perspective on the History of Economic Thought
___ For a New Liberty
___ Education: Free and Compulsory
Saenz-Baillos, Angel. A History of the Hebrew Language
Savage, Charlie. Takeover: The Return of the Imperial Presidency and the Subversion of American Democracy
Schoeck, Helmut. Envy: A Theory of Social Behavior
Slezkine, Yuri. The Jewish Century
Spooner, Lysander. Let's Abolish Government
Sowell, Thomas. Race and Culture
Thompson, C. Bradley. Neoconservatism: An Obituary for an Idea
Thornton, Mark. The Economics of Prohibition
Thoreau, Henry David, Civil Disobedience
Weiner, Tim. Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA
West, E. G. Education and the State: A Study in Political Economy
Woods, Thomas. Meltdown: A Free-Market Look at Why the Stock Market Collapsed, the Economy Tanked and Government Bailouts Will Make Thing Worse
___ Nullification: How to Resist Tyranny in the 21st Century
Dr. Ron Paul is a Republican member of Congress from Texas.
End the war on terror and save billions
As we debate whether the two parties can ever come together and get things done, here’s something President Obama could probably do by himself that would be a signal accomplishment of his presidency: End the war on terror. Or, more realistically, start planning and preparing the country for phasing it out.
For 11 years, the United States has been operating under emergency wartime powers granted under the 2001 “Authorization for Use of Military Force.” That is a longer period than the country spent fighting the Civil War, World War I and World War II combined. It grants the president and the federal government extraordinary authorities at home and abroad, effectively suspends civil liberties for anyone the government deems an enemy and keeps us on a permanent war footing in all kinds of ways.
Now, for the first time since Sept. 11, 2001, an administration official has sketched a possible endpoint.
In a thoughtful speech at the Oxford Union last week, Jeh Johnson, the outgoing general counsel for the Pentagon, recognized that “we cannot and should not expect al-Qaeda and its associated forces to all surrender, all lay down their weapons in an open field, or to sign a peace treaty with us. They are terrorist organizations. Nor can we capture or kill every last terrorist who claims an affiliation with al-Qaeda.”
But, he argued, “There will come a tipping point . . . at which so many of the leaders and operatives of al-Qaeda and its affiliates have been killed or captured, and the group is no longer able to attempt or launch a strategic attack against the United States, such that al-Qaeda as we know it, the organization that our Congress authorized the military to pursue in 2001, has been effectively destroyed.” At that point, “our efforts should no longer be considered an armed conflict.”
Phasing out or modifying these emergency powers should be something that would appeal to both left and right. James Madison, father of the Constitution, was clear on the topic. “Of all the enemies to public liberty,” he wrote, “war is, perhaps, the most to be dreaded, because it comprises and develops the germ of every other. War is the parent of armies; from these proceed debts and taxes. . . . No nation could preserve its freedom in the midst of continual warfare.”
If you want to know why we’re in such a deep budgetary hole, one large piece of it is that we have spent around $2 trillion on foreign wars in the past decade. Not coincidentally, we have had the largest expansion of the federal government since World War II. The Post’s Dana Priest and William Arkin have described how the U.S. government has built 33 new complexes for the intelligence bureaucracies alone. The Department of Homeland Security employs 230,000 people.
A new Global Terrorism Index this week showed that terrorism went up from 2002 to 2007 – largely because of the conflicts in Afghanistan/Pakistan and Iraq — but has declined ever since. And the part of the world with the fewest incidents is North America. It could be our vigilance that is keeping terror attacks at bay. But it is also worth noting, as we observe the vast apparatus of searches and screening, that the Transportation Security Administration’s assistant administrator for global strategies has admitted that those expensive and cumbersome whole-body scanners have not resulted in the arrest of a single suspected terrorist. Not one.
Of course there are real threats out there, from sources including new branches of al-Qaeda and other such groups. And of course they will have to be battled, and those terrorists should be captured or killed. But we have done this before, and we can do so in the future under more normal circumstances. It will mean that the administration will have to be more careful — and perhaps have more congressional involvement — for certain actions, such as drone strikes. It might mean it will have to charge some of the people held at Guantanamo and try them in military or civilian courts.
In any event, it is a good idea that the United States find a way to conduct its anti-terrorism campaigns within a more normal legal framework, rather than rely on blanket wartime authority granted in a panic after Sept. 11.
No president wants to give up power. But this one is uniquely positioned to begin a serious conversation about a path out of permanent war.
comments@fareedzakaria.com
Read more from The Washington Post: Michael Gerson: Obama lacks leadership in the war on terror The Post’s View: Drone war demands accountability Charles Krauthammer: Barack Obama — drone warrior
