Dr. Ron Paul is by all accounts a man of principle and conviction. Paul, a Republican Member of the House of Representatives who represents the 14th District of Texas, is running to become the Republican Party’s presidential candidate. In 1988 Paul was the Libertarian Party’s presidential candidate, running third behind George H.W. Bush and Michael Dukakis. Paul “reportedly would like to be listed as both a Republican and a Libertarian, if Texas law allowed. And maybe also as a member of the Constitutional Party.”

Republican, Libertarian, and Constitutional. Paul is also a Southern Baptist who was raised in a Lutheran family and once considered the ministry as a career. His two brothers are Lutheran ministers. His children were baptized Episcopalian.

Paul, a medical doctor who served in the Air Force during the 1960s, specializes in obstetrics and gynecology. He continues to practice medicine as a congressman, adding new voters to his district by delivering many babies there.

Paul is a noted intellectual fan of an Austrian school of economics represented by Friedrich Hayek and Ludwig von Mises.  Like those economists, Paul advocates free markets and limited government intervention in economic affairs. There is much evidence that he both lives and governs by his economic philosophy. A firm opponent of government spending programs, Dr. Paul refuses Medicaid or Medicare payments for his patients, working out alternative arrangements that do not depend on government funding. He put his children through college and medical school without any reliance on governmental student loans. To his congressional colleagues, Representative Paul is Dr. No because of his regular votes against government spending. He even refuses some farm subsidies and FEMA aid for his district, which includes much agricultural land and lies within the ’s hurricane zone. Paul reportedly will not take a pension when he leaves Congress.

Candidate Paul is now attracting attention within the Republican field because he voted against the Iraq War and the first Gulf War and regrets his vote for the 40 billion dollars in appropriations for that was “misused.” His opposition to those wars was influenced by his suspicion of big government and war’s expense. He also mentions Christianity in relationship to the and focused on Christian arguments against war:

“I was annoyed by the evangelicals’ being so supportive of pre-emptive war, which seems to contradict everything that I was taught as a Christian,” he recalls. “The religion is based on somebody who’s referred to as the Prince of Peace.”

While he was out of Congress during the 1980s, Paul created the Foundation for Rational Economics and Education (FREE); in Congress, he heads the Liberty Caucus. appears to be his watchword. He opposed the USA Patriot Act, the Federal Marriage Amendment, the reinstatement of the draft, and some federal drug legislation. He is more sympathetic to state than federal power. On the question of abortion, for example, he supports states’ rights to restrict abortion and the removal of abortion questions from the jurisdiction of the federal courts. When pressed about how a libertarian can deny women the liberty to choose abortion, he responded that libertarian and pro-life perspectives are consistent:

“If you can't protect life then how can you protect liberty?” Furthermore, Paul argued . . . that since he believes libertarians support non-aggression, libertarians should oppose abortion because abortion is “an act of aggression” against a fetus, which he believes to be alive, human, and possessing legal rights.

The bases for Paul’s policy stances appear various and complex. Paul should be subject to liberal criticism if he bases his votes about prayer, abortion, marriage and other topics on biblical or Christian principles. Religion  is not the appropriate basis for government in this democracy, which should be based on shared constitutional principles. What should liberals make of Paul’s libertarian commitments, which have connected him to a “network of true believers” in market-oriented policies? Are such principles more politically appropriate because they are secular and economic, not religious?

No. Political liberals expect politicians to bracket their religious and philosophical commitments and to govern according to political and constitutional principles. Christians justifiably complain of discrimination when they are asked to ignore their deepest convictions while non-religious politicians pursue their secular moral ideals. When setting public policy, Paul should be a constitutionalist first, not a Christian or a libertarian.

Striking the proper balance between public policy and personal philosophy could be difficult for Paul, because liberty is a central constitutional principle as well as a libertarian one. As Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes wrote in his famous 1905 Lochner dissent, however, “a Constitution is not intended to embody a particular economic theory, whether of paternalism and the organic relation of the citizen to the state or of laissez faire.” Voters should ask Representative Paul if his policies are rooted in the Constitution or in a theory of the Constitution that is based on economics. The Constitution provides the shared principles of governance; the Bible, St. Augustine, Friedrich Hayek and Ludwig von Mises do not. Libertarianism should be treated like any other religion with a “network of true believers;” it provides an interesting and admirable foundation of moral principles for Paul’s personal and family life but fails as the appropriate source for public policy.