Religious Right Driving Libertarians from Tea Party

A new report documents the trend. What I do find annoying about these surveys is how they focus on values instead of policies. For example, it should not matter to a libertarian what a person believes about religion or morality so long as they do not want the government to do anything about it. Of course experience suggests that there is in fact no such wall of separation between values and policies in political practice. Libertarians have come to be suspicious of the religious right because experience suggests that these people do not value liberty more than their own vision of what society should be like. One might say that the opposite is true as well: The religious right is suspicious of libertarians because religious people doubt the libertarian commitment to using every means to achieve certain social and cultural results. It’s too bad that everyone can’t just agree to let people alone to do and believe what they wish provided they do not impose on others. Of course, if everyone accepted that proposition, the whole world would be libertarian.