RIP Marshall Fritz
My hands hurt, but I want to type this out:

The same day that Michael Crichton died recently, one Marshall Fritz also died of cancer. The libertarians out there probably know him, and others probably don't; here are some links to explain:

Personal
Wikipedia
Alliance for the Separation of School & State
Advocates for Self-Government

I want to tell a little story about him. Many years ago when I was a young undergraduate at the University of Chicago, I met Marshall Fritz. At the time, I considered myself a political libertarian (minarchist), although I was still continuously exploring. I attended some meetings of the Libertarian (largely, Libertarian Party) group on campus. (This was before I went further with developing my own philosophical work, on  Prometheanism, in which—though largely ignorant of 'anarchism' at the time—I derived a more resolute and consistent stance against the State than simply shrinking it or keeping it at bay.) Well, one of our projects was to bring Marshall Fritz to deliver a lecture on campus, which he was happy to do to drum up interest in his petition for the separation of school and state. 

This was bound to be a thankless task for poor Fritz, but I didn't realize just how thankless. There was the predictable, cliched random statist heckler, who barely sat through Fritz's bombastic yet friendly and rather interesting presentation on his case — including the history of how and why education was socialized in the US, and noting some of the many problems with public schools — then asked three snotty questions sarcastically, and then rudely walked out, leaving Fritz to politely answer the man's objections before the rest of the audience. But what really surprised me was the reactions of our "Libertarian" group — most of them, anyway — which comprised the majority of the audience for the lecture, unfortunately. I was the only one, if I remember correctly, who came down after the lecture to sign the petition (which I was planning to do even before hearing the presentation or met Fritz, because I supported the principle wholeheartedly and still do). The others were just as appalled as could be, and quite rude to their guest. It took me until our next exchanges on email to discover why.

You see, Marshall had committed the great sin of being a Christian. Not only that, he was partly interested in separating school and state and giving parents more choices for religious reasons; in fact, he explained the fact that one of the reasons public schools appealed to Americans in the first place was to control religion, specifically, to de-Catholicize young "papist" Irish children — in order words, to brainwash them to become good little Protestants. Not only was Marshall Fritz unapologetically Christian in his interests, even mentioning the Bible once or twice IIRC (shock of shocks), but he was also personally bombastic and exuberant, not at all shy about his fuddy-duddy manners and general social conservatism. The young secular Libertarian urban university kids found some or all of this stuff unforgivable. In short, while I was paying attention to common ground, to the man's central idea and point of persuasion, they were picking apart his manner, and his lifestyle, and his aesthetics, and found it repulsive. One even said that he was convinced that American kids should be forced to attend public schools if only so they wouldn't be exposed to Marshall Fritz, or something like that. Some libertarian!

These supposed believers in ideas and advocates of freedom proved utterly unable to put aside their personal tastes, quibbles, and unnecessary in-fighting in order to focus on substance and common ground, and actually focus on strategy, collaboration and the goal of liberation. Over and over, I have seen this pathetic pattern repeat itself in the years since, among libertarians (minarchists and anarchists), other anarchists, socialists, and every other kind of freedom advocate or anti-State activist or intellectual.

In retrospect, I learned a lot from that experience. I want to pay homage to Marshall Fritz now, a brave, brave man who taught a lesson to a lot of people by a twofold example: one, his refusal to get stuck on what we don't have in common, and two, his incredible, stubborn persistence to stick to his beliefs in the face of constant abuse.