By Stephan Kinsella

Like everyone, my political and ethical views have evolved over time. From a somewhat racialist milieu in rural Louisiana, I consciously rejected racism when I was in my young teens. From a devout Catholic youth I became a secularist and freethinker at a fairly young age. From libertarian-conservative hawkish Reaganism at 18 I quickly became a die-hard libertarian minarchist, then an anarchist. My initial conservative and Randian pro-American exuberance has given way to a much more critical view of America’s baleful effect on world history and my rosy view of its founding has been replaced with skepticism, disdain, scorn, and regret. On abortion, initially militantly pro-choice in the Randian fashion, over the years my aversion to it has grown deeper and deeper to where I see at least late-stage abortion to be tantamount to murder (though I still don’t favor its being outlawed by states). On affirmative action, my conservative and libertarian overboard “meritism” has given way to a more contrarian view. My initial attraction to natural rights and natural law type arguments slowly shifted to a more realistic and focused transcendental type approach. On intellectual property, despite my initial–but hesitant and troubled–assumption that it was legitimate, after struggling to find a better way to defend it than arguments such as Rand’s and those of utilitarians, I finally rejected it after realizing it is indeed incompatible with property rights. And though I initially praised centralist libertarian ideas such as the Lochner-type caselaw praised by some libertarians I later came to develop a radical skepticism of the wisdom and legitimacy of trusting a central state to monitor state actions. For one more example, despite initially accepting the Hayekian knowledge arguments, I became more skeptical of their coherence in the wake of the Austrian “dehomogenization” debate.^*

And so it is with gay marriage. More…