Last week, Time Magazine published a column by Mike Murphy, a well-known Republican political strategist. In the column, Murphy argued:

“Young voters need to see a GOP that is more socially libertarian, particularly toward gay rights. With changing demographics come changing attitudes, and aping the grim town elders from Footloose is not the path back to a Republican White House.”

In recent cable television programming, Murphy followed-up on his column by calling on Republicans to support gay marriage legislation as a matter of libertarian ideological purity.

We dissent on the grounds that the pro-gay-marriage legislation position is liberal and not “socially libertarian.” It is the top-down regulation of a cultural practice intended to use the power of the state to change the way a majority of people think about marriage, particularly religious people. It uses the coercive power of the state to send the message to traditionalists and religious Americans that they must acknowledge unions between people of the same sex as marriages because that’s both the position of the elites and the official position of the state.

A libertarian viewpoint, on the other hand, might be that the state should not issue marriage licenses to anyone regardless of their sexual orientation. Libertarian legislation might allow the state to license both heterosexual and homosexual partners as “civil unions,” but leave the question to whether they are married to private institutions like churches. This increases the power and authority of the church in a crucial aspect of people’s lives and diminishes the authority of the state.

If Murphy wanted to argue within a libertarian frame, he’d be revealing pro-gay marriage legislation as an effort to use the state to bully religious people into changing their beliefs about what marriage means in order to accomplish social change. Instead, he urges conservatives and libertarians to accept the frame of their opponents and compromise accordingly.

We think there can be an intelligent internal conversation between conservatives who believe that local communities should have the power to govern themselves and determine what they stand for collectively in terms of the definition of marriage and other social concepts and libertarians who are less willing to do so, but that debate does not require either conservatives or libertarians to accept the idea that a minority should be able to use the power of the state to try to effect social change in the views of the majority of that community as pro-gay marriage legislation does.

Mr. Murphy, Ted Olson, Dick Cheney, and their intellectual leader in this debate, Meagan McCain are using the term “libertarian” to trick Republicans into adopting a position that is not at all libertarian. So long as these folks are taking up all the bandwidth on the issue, we wouldn’t be surprised if young Americans continue to support gay marriage.

We’ll address Mr. Murphy’s problems as a wannabe social scientist and why his appeal to changing demographics doesn’t concern us as much as it might later, but for now we just wanted to state for the record that sometimes we feel that with debating partners and friends like Mr. Murphy and his ilk, we should be asking “who need enemies?”

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