Sunday, March 05, 2006

We'll miss you, Harry Browne.

On March 1, the 1996 and 2000 Libertarian Party nominee for President, Harry Browne, passed away due to ALS (Lou Gehrig's Disease). While Mr. Browne was probably the most "Republican-acting" candidate our party has ever nominated, he was nonetheless a staunch defender of LGBT equal rights under the law. Less than a year ago, just last April, he debated the Reverend O'Neal Dozier on same-sex marriage for Free Market News Network. And though the entire discussion was very much targeted toward FMNN's primarily Republican audience, using the term "homosexual" instead of "gay" or "lesbian" and taking Biblical stories as historical fact, Mr. Browne would not yield on the issue of marriage equality for same-sex couples. He was speaking in "their" terms. This is the kind of argument that our community needs to be making in the "red states" that have a habit of banning same-sex marriage and adoption by gays and lesbians.

You can watch the debate here. You can skip ahead in the program to 14:00 to the beginning of the debate. My favorite part is where the Reverend makes unfounded assertion after unfounded assertion, to which Mr. Browne simply asked "How?" over and over again to prove the circular logic of such assertions.

We'll miss you, Harry Browne.