On "supporting" drug cartels and drunk driving
Lies are not some innocent rhetorical trick to support a policy that you believe will save lives. Lies are an abomination to Almighty God.
One of the most childish responses to (small-L) libertarian objections to government overreach is that the person objecting must “support” the thing that government is trying to stop. It cannot be that there are trade-offs to public policy: You are either supporting criminals and terrorists or (as we saw with COVID-19 debates five years ago) you have a depraved indifference to human life.
But the fact of the matter is that there are always trade-offs to public policy. We live in a complicated, interconnected world, and no matter what government does (or does not do) there will be negative consequences to those actions. This does not mean a policy is not justified, but that there are sometimes arguments to be made on both sides of any number of issues.
For example, despite childish memes being spread by MAGA online, Democrats (and libertarian-leaning Republicans) do not “support the drug cartels” if they are opposed to an airstrike on a speedboat and then a second strike to exterminate everyone who was on board. Opponents argue the boats should have been stopped and boarded, and the people arrested, instead of executed. Even taking the administration’s argument that the strike was legally and morally justified, calling for a less violent means of stopping the boats does not mean that they want to see more drugs flowing into the country and killing poor rural Whites or poor inner-city Blacks. That is a child’s argument.
In the same way, those who oppose sobriety checkpoints are slammed as “ignorant,” putting their “convenience” over innocent lives or even being drunk drivers themselves afraid of getting busted. These ad hominem arguments are meant to avoid any serious discussion about government power and the surveillance state. People who supported stay-at-home orders during the COVID-19 pandemic were damned as putting their “freedumb” over saving lives if they had any disagreement over how long the quarantines should last or how strict they should be.
People, we need to do better. We need to be adults, not petulant children. We can disagree with people’s arguments on many different issues without attacking their character or condemning them as supporting the worst things imaginable. Most of the time, these red herrings are just outright lies, and that should never be tolerated. God tells us twice in Proverbs 6:16-19 and again in Proverbs 12:22 that He hates lies and liars. Lies are not some innocent rhetorical trick to support a policy that you believe will save lives. Lies are an abomination to Almighty God. God expects us to argue with honesty and integrity, but too much of our online discourse today is language that God hates. Repent.