Cathy Young’s article in the March issue of Reason, Enforcing Virtue, is an excellent clarification for anyone who is under the mistaken impression that libertarians not only want government to stop enforcing morality, but also want society to stop enforcing it as well. For most libertarians, this isn’t the case at all.

But the merits of specific conservative pleadings aside, is there anything illiberal about an argument for the cultural stigmatization of, say, casual sex? Does supporting the free speech right to chronicle your sex life or explore your sexual fantasies online mean that you cannot regard such porno-blogging as tacky and narcissistic? Must you oppose not just state censorship but the social conventions that generally compel such bloggers to conceal their activities from relatives and employers?

Few libertarians, I think, would argue that stigmatization as such is abhorrent. While no libertarian worth the name would support legal prohibitions on hate speech, the overwhelming majority would agree that racist, anti-Semitic, or homophobic slurs should be socially unacceptable, penalized through severe disapproval if not outright ostracism.

Thank you, Cathy Young! There may be some sociological anarchists who subscribe to the libertarian philosophy, but, by and large, libertarians have very specific morals– they’re just not all the same. Society, and, yes, even you alone can inspire change in people. You do not need the government’s help.

What really gets me about the Republican Party (And here I speak of the machine that makes laws, not individual Republicans, many of whom I know and love.) is that they still think that government can change people’s minds on moral issues, even though the contrary morals the Democratic Party often pushes annoys the hell out of them. People of all stripes resent government interference in their lives, and even when they’re prevented (or, as is more often the case, only hindered) from living the way they want, their mind never changes.

Just because we don’t outlaw something, doesn’t mean we condone it. We might hate it. And we’re free to, thank God.