[avdempsey]

Even Hitchens' examples reflect some basic rights a civil libertarian should want to protect.

Mormon polygamy: the government shouldn't be telling you who you can or can't marry.

Christian sects that disapprove of medicine: the government shouldn't be forcing you to make changes to your body.

Ritual circumcision (especially when the mohel sucks off the debris from the penis with his mouth): sounds gross to me, but the government shouldn't tell you what changes you can't make to your body, or how you provide care for a member of your tribe.

Can government intervention in these areas bring about greater human well-being? Possibly, but I think the above are relatively self-regulating. Christian sects that disapprove of medicine (Christian Scientists for example) must contend with proliferating evidence of the benefits of scientific medicine. As long as scientists have freedom of speech too I suspect their membership will continue to decline in the US.

Can government intervention in these areas bring about greater suffering? Absolutely. The US government currently intervenes in gay marriages, and recently intervened in abortions (and many in Congress would love to intervene here again!).

[slammdunc23]

The government certainly /can/ tell you "how to care for a member of your tribe" if that member is a minor. The ritual circumcision Hitchens references led to a small but deadly outbreak of herpes among recently circumcised babies. The government should let /adults/ practice their religion as they choose, but there would certainly be a rational basis for concluding that this particular practice unnecessarily endangers a third party: children who lack the ability to say, "No, thank you! I'm Buddhist." The same goes for Christian sects that disapprove of medicine. Sure, adults can turn down medical treatment for /themselves/, but if they do so for their children they could (and should) go to jail for child endangerment. A civil libertarian should want to protect everyone's right to liberty, the right to do whatever they wish /without harming others./ In these cases, the religious parents' choices often do harm their children, who are too young to object.

[nickpinkston]

Government can tell you things to or not to do that are by some definitions "immoral" - a legal argument here is moot. You talking utilitarian principles - not libertarian ones.

A civil libertarian would reject the notion that a government should restrict you from a personal activity (which parenting certainly is) - because of society's majority judgment against it. They'd easily call this tyranny of the majority - whether you agree with it or not.

However, a "classic liberal" would come at this from a natural law or humanist perspective and say there is a moral reason to do / not to do such things.

There is a distinction between civil libertarians and classic liberal civil liberties.

[Semiapies]

Some choices can and do harm children, but saying religious parents' choices "often do harm" their children is just flatly absurd.

[slammdunc23]

I said "in these cases"--turning down medicine and practicing that form of ritualized circumcision. Perhaps "often" is an overstatement, but there have been many cases of children dying when their Christian Scientist parents refused to get them proper medical attention (see, e.g., http://www.theatlantic.com/past/docs/unbound/flashbks/xsci/s...).

[Semiapies]

I appear to have have missed that phrase last night.

[vacri]

<i>but the government shouldn't tell you what changes you can't make to your body, or how you provide care for a member of your tribe.</i>

Talk to a social worker and see whether or not you still believe that a government should still be able to step in and tell you how to treat a member of your "tribe"

I remember reading one social worker's long diatribe about why they burned out and quit. Out of several truly horrible things (black and blue children are ten a penny), the one that really stuck in my mind was the description of finding genital warts on the anus of a 7-year-old because his mother repeatedly whored him out.

"Self regulating"? Bollocks.

[Semiapies]

I'm against the abuse of children and happy to use the government to accomplish that.

However, the prevalence of abuse and neglect in the foster care system - complete with cases on that order of horror - makes a very weak case for the idea that external regulation accomplishes any better.

[vacri]

So... a program where near to 100% of input kids are neglected or abused that ends up with a significantly lower proportion of those kids neglected or abused is a "very weak" argument that anything has become "any better"?

If you had a drug that could save 50% of terminally ill patients, would you say "we have a very weak case that this drug saves lives"?

In order for your statement to make sense, the failure rate of foster care would have to approach 100%. Again, talk to an actual social worker about how they see foster care and whether or not they choose to use it. It's an opinion that will most likely come with caveats, but foster care is also a service they use frequently.

[Semiapies]

"near to 100% of input kids are neglected or abused"

Untrue. Children end up in the foster care system for a variety of reasons, including simple loss of parents or a woman (or teenage girl) knowing she can't care for a child.

"significantly lower proportion of those kids neglected or abused"

The evidence is not as clear on this as you'd like it to be.

To correct your example, if we had a drug that caused strokes or death in a significant percentage of cases, simply saying, "Well, many of the patients we'd give it to would otherwise suffer strokes or death," would be a quick route to an FDA rejection.

[firemanx]

As a counter point to your first item - the government now doesn't really tell you who you can and can't marry, at least from a religious perspective. However, in the US at least, marriage is often done both religiously and legally, which imparts a whole slew of rights, obligations, and benefits. From the legal and governmental perspective, polygamy is an abuse of this (see the documented cases of welfare abuse in Utah, for instance).

Back to the point though - you could get married to 10 spouses in front of God and your friends and never tell the government about it, and I doubt they would care (unless your cohabitation violated some health code or something).

[patrickyeon]

As fodder for discussion, where should the government's influence stand on issues of medicine or circumcision, as practiced by children's parents? At what point can the government say "your freedoms matter less to us than taking care of _your_ child the way _we_ believe it should be done"?

[avdempsey]

On a personal note, I was raised in a Christian Science family. While devout, my parents were very attentive and I was lucky to have a healthy childhood (though I didn't even try aspirin until I was in college). A philosophy degree at SFSU cured me of that dogma :) but that's part of why I'm sympathetic; I love my dad even if he is a radical.

I think parents still have a legal obligation to not be negligent. There's a difference between not providing any care (while playing WOW all day) and doing your Christian Scientist damnedest for your children. A person espouses civil libertarianism not because they hate government, but because they trust people and hold others to the personal commitments they make.

[Semiapies]

Things get more complicated when you bring children into them, yes. However, even then there are areas civil libertarians should be leery of and should scrutinize government involvement in - like the religious, political, or other beliefs that a parent teaches a child.