My Comment on the Childishness Surrounding the Debacle over Jamie Whyte's Incest Statement

As I've commented on Carrie Stoddart-Smith's intelligent and challenging blog post on this topic:

Unfortunately because Jamie’s an honest guy, he can easily be ambushed by every such question, from this to p use. Just because you believe all drugs should be legalised given prohibition doesn’t work, and freedom can only rest on individual responsibility, doesn’t mean you’re advocating p use.

What the haters are hating on this one, the Left particularly, is the concept of responsible adulthood free of the state (ie, the prison of each others minds).

The one good thing is this will set a cat amongst the pigeons in ACT. I like Jamie, but believe ACT is still a stalwart of conservatism I’d have no interest in voting for.

When the incest question was put to him, Jamie allowed sway to his natural instinct for academic honesty by repairing to the first principles of classical liberalism: good on him for that. His later retraction indicates there was political naivety involved, but in that retraction is a problem, being he's already being turned by the mincing machine of party politics into that thing I despise: a politician.

Never lose the principled honesty, Jamie. Don't let an intelligent conversation with the electorate fall to its opposite: electioneering.


Final Clarification.

On another blog I've just seen a Tory announce that Whyte 'wants to marry his sister'. Showing again that the civilised society will not be found from either the blinkered, bigoted Left, or the blinkered, bigoted Right.

The inane agenda-led conclusions this issue has brought about confirms for me that democracy is not in the interests of freedom. (Watch that statement get taken out of context.)

I can state the principle involved here no clearer than this:

Jamie made it very clear he in no way agreed with incest; the classical liberal principle that he was enunciating, and it's a bedrock of a free society, is that it is not up to the state to police incestuous relationships unless there is the initiation of force involved, and thus no consent - remembering that minors, as with those of unsound mind, are not capable of giving consent, so relationships with them, incest or not, will always be criminal behaviour.

Now apply that principle to everything, including taboos and behaviours you (and I) might find repugnant, and that's classical liberalism, the only basis on which consenting adults can transact free, fulfilling lives.