Bits And Pieces

Would you give up freedom for sex?

Chicago Boyz » Blog Archive » How Sex Sells the Loss of Freedom

Let’s look at a little table that compares the degree to which the Left or the Right ideologically grants more freedom in a particular area. Blue indicates one side ideologically and consistently grants more freedom to the individual in that area. Red indicates the opposite. Grey or green indicates an area in which neither side is consistent. (For these purposes, libertarians are grouped with the Right. Although, there are so few libertarians it doesn’t alter the balance much.)

Freedom	Left	Right
Speech
Work
Business
Food
Housing
Consumer Goods
Transportation
Medical Care
Education
Free Trade
Self-Defense
Property Rights
Parental Rights
National Security
Police Powers
Recreational Drugs
Sexuality

Kinda shocking to see it laid out like that, isn't it?

Most of these comparisons should be obvious. National security, police powers and recreational drugs are pretty much a wash. When in power, leftists have implemented or signed off on broad expansions of national-security powers. Those on the Right generally support more police power to combat ordinary crime but leftists support increased police power in matters of environmental enforcement and guns. The social conservatives on the Right and social engineers on the Left balance each other out in supporting drug laws. Libertarians on the Right and libertines on the Left balance each other out on ending the drug war.

As little as 30 years ago, the Left would have trounced the right on issues of free speech, yet today the Left is the source of almost all assaults on free speech. The Right seeks to impose traditional restrictions on pornographic speech, but leftist speech codes on campus, sensitivity training, gangs of leftist thugs shouting down non-leftist speakers on college campuses, hate-crime laws, the reimposition of content control on broadcasters via the 'Fairness Doctrine', etc., all reveal a Left that no longer defends free speech on critical political matters. Today, it is the Right that protects people's right to engage in unpopular, stupid or hateful speech.

Only in the area of sexuality does the Left demonstrate a pronounced and consistent preference for individual decision-making. Why? I think it merely a matter of individual and group self-interest. Leftism as an ideology exists to provide a mechanism for advancing the economic interest and social status of articulate intellectuals. As an ideology leftism seeks to restrict the freedoms, especially the economic freedoms, of everyone who doesn’t work as an articulate intellectual, while at the same time maximizing the freedom of articulate intellectuals. Advocating sexual freedom, sometimes to the point of subsidizing irresponsibility, lets articulate intellectuals kill two birds with one stone. On a personal level it creates moral permission for individual leftists to make their own sexual decisions. For the group, it lets leftists collectively claim to be increasing personal freedom in one very powerful area (especially among the young) which disguises their destruction of individual choice in every other arena of life.