Fuse This

Christopher Hitchens on William F. Buckley:

Buckley was willing to be immensely friendly with figures from the gay Right, like the doomed congressman Bob Bauman of Maryland or the flamboyant Marvin Liebman, but nonetheless wrote a column in the early 1980s saying that promiscuous homosexuals with AIDS should be tattooed on the buttocks as a sort of health-warning. There was too much detail in that proposal, and it showed how hard it can be to reconcile conservatism—one of his self-definitions—with libertarianism (one of his alternate ones).