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Entry: The Relativist Roots of Libertarianism Link: http://www.takimag.com/blogs/article/the_relativist_roots_of_libertarianism#25576 Post contents: Free (or at least freer) societies may indeed by the way to go *under today's circumstances", which are characterized by a great moral dissensus in America and the West today, M. Nucci. But I'm Catholic too, and things were not always like this. There once was Christendom, and in many important ways it seems superior to today's self-destructive, liberal order. What if we had a Catholic nation with a Catholic monarch? Was the Church wrong when it said things, like it did in the Syllabus of Errors, that "error had no rights?" I don't think so, because the Church, unlike the State of NY, happened to be right in its various pronouncements. Politics is tricky of course; the right law or action often depends on the circumstances, and we must often make do with "second best" solutions. I don't think the Church contradicts itself today when it recognizes that legal interference with conscience is wrong, because today and in the 20th Century the great spiritual and mortal threat is the atheist state, even though in the past it was the heretical anarchist and liberal trouble-maker. As Jonathan Swift put it, "He knew no reason why those who entertained opinions prejudicial to the public should be obliged to change, and should not be obliged to conceal them. And as it was tyranny in any government to require the first, so it was weakness not to enforce the second; for a man may be allowed to keep poisons in his closet, but not to send them about for cordials." Sent at: 2008 07 06