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The discussion of Hayek and gay marriage has moved from the blogs, to the Boston Globe -- and is now heating up on the Hayek-L email list, where many of those involved got an early "heads up" on the debate. Hayek-Ler Paul Varnell of the Chicago Free Press flags The Independent Gay Forum as "perhaps the most comprehensive collection of commentary pieces on gay marriage" available anywhere. Worth a read -- Varnell's "Gay Rights on the Right". Quotable:

In 1960, Friedrich Hayek, an economist and social philosopher at the University of Chicago, and later a winner of the Nobel prize, published "The Constitution of Liberty." Hayek's chief aim was to set out arguments for personal liberty and explain why government coercion was harmful both to the individual and to society.

One of Hayek's key points was that just because a majority does not like something, it does not have the right to forbid it. "The most conspicuous instance of this in our society," Hayek wrote, "is that of the treatment of homosexuality." After noting that men once believed that tolerating gays would expose them to the fate of Sodom and Gomorrah, Hayek added, "Where such factual beliefs do not prevail, private practice among adults, however abhorrent it may be to the majority, is not a proper subject for coercive action for a state."

Just two years later one of Hayek's students wrote a long article, "Sin and the Criminal Law," for the libertarian quarterly "New Individualist Review." Using Hayek's framework, the article attacked all so-called "morals" legislation — e.g., laws against gambling, drug use, suicide, prostitution, voluntary euthanasia, obscenity and homosexuality.

The article dismissed all these as "imaginary offenses" and developed Hayek's argument that such laws should be repealed because the personal freedom of individuals is what creates the conditions for social progress.

Hayek's influence was pervasive among libertarians ...