Well, well! Isn’t that special! Former Church Lady and now libertarian poseur Bob Barr has decided that the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) he wrote in 1996 was a mistake. Yes, this is the same Bob Barr who was such a Church Lady that he led the impeachment of Bill Clinton for the Monica Lewinsky blow-job escapade. Now Bob Barr, masquerading as a libertarian so successfully that they made him their Libertarian Party Presidential candidate, is all about state’s rights, and he thinks the DOMA he wrote violates those states’ rights. Here’s what passes for reasoning from Bob Barr, from his column today in the LA Times:

I’ve wrestled with this issue for the last several years and come to the conclusion that DOMA is not working out as planned. In testifying before Congress against a federal marriage amendment, and more recently while making my case to skeptical Libertarians as to why I was worthy of their support as their party’s presidential nominee, I have concluded that DOMA is neither meeting the principles of federalism it was supposed to, nor is its impact limited to federal law.

In effect, DOMA’s language reflects one-way federalism: It protects only those states that don’t want to accept a same-sex marriage granted by another state. Moreover, the heterosexual definition of marriage for purposes of federal laws — including, immigration, Social Security survivor rights and veteran’s benefits — has become a de facto club used to limit, if not thwart, the ability of a state to choose to recognize same-sex unions.

Even more so now than in 1996, I believe we need to reduce federal power over the lives of the citizenry and over the prerogatives of the states. It truly is time to get the federal government out of the marriage business. In law and policy, such decisions should be left to the people themselves.

In 2006, when then-Sen. Obama voted against the Federal Marriage Amendment, he said, “Decisions about marriage should be left to the states.” He was right then; and as I have come to realize, he is right now in concluding that DOMA has to go. If one truly believes in federalism and the primacy of state government over the federal, DOMA is simply incompatible with those notions.

I suppose I can be pleased in a minor way that Bob Barr agrees with Barack Obama, but I suspect it is just a way of him trying to appeal to Democrats in California who opposed Proposition 8. Bob Barr, to my mind, is nothing but a political opportunist who bolted the Republican Party when he saw the country turn against the Bush Administration’s extra-constitutional measures after 9/11. Sure, Barr has written against such measures, such as here in 2004, but it all rings false for him to pose as a libertarian when he is supposedly against abortion, against same sex marriage, against a whole bunch of liberties that one would think libertarians would see as expansive of the value they hold most dear.

No, Barr is not a real libertarian in my mind. He’s much more a federalist in libertarian clothing, giving a federalist answer to why DOMA is not good law. A true libertarian, to my mind, would come out to the center of the stage and declare that the most liberty for the most people is optimum, and if that liberty meant that gays and lesbians be allowed to call their unions “marriage,” then that’s fine. The Libertarian Party in this country doesn’t necessarily follow any kind of pure libertarian philosophy, however. Sometimes I get the sense the Libertarian Party in the US has become a haven for Church Ladies who don’t like being recognized as Church Ladies. They have the sense to understand that being tarred with the same brush as the extremists right wing Christians makes them look morally suspect, but they still generally share many of those values. Yeah, I guess I think of many members of the Libertarian Party, especially after they nominated Bob Barr, as Church Ladies in drag.

Not that there’s anything wrong with that.