Marshall Fritz honored in Congress

Dr. Ron Paul (R-TX) recently gave the following speech on the floor of the United States House of Representatives in honor of Marshall Fritz:

Madam Speaker, I rise to pay tribute to my friend Marshall Fritz who passed
away on Tuesday, November 4, after a long battle with pancreatic cancer.
Marshall was a true champion of freedom whose impact on the cause of liberty
will be felt for years to come.

Marshall, with his booming voice and good humor, was the happy warrior of the
freedom movement, as well as the movement’s Will Rogers. Marshall never met a
fellow fighter for liberty, a single-issue ally, or a potential convert he did
not like — and to Marshall anyone who did not already share his love of
liberty was a potential convert.

Marshall was a model of an ideological/political entrepreneur. In 1984,
Marshall saw that the growth of the freedom movement was handicapped by the
lack of an organization to help activists better communicate the freedom
philosophy to the general public. While Marshall was not the first person to
have this realization, he was the first person to attempt to remedy the
situation by founding Advocates for Self-Government, an organization designed
to teach activists how to effectively communicate their principles.

In the years since Marshall founded the Advocates for Self-Government, the
organization has helped countless libertarians by providing them with the
intellectual resources necessary to effectively battle for a free society.

While serving as president of the Advocates, Marshall created the World’s
Smallest Political Quiz. The Quiz graphs an individual’s political philosophy
based on responses to a series of 10 questions that measure one’s commitment to
economic and personal liberty.

Under Marshall’s leadership, the Advocates undertook an aggressive program of
distributing the Quiz. There is no doubt that this has been the Advocate’s most
successful and popular program. The Quiz is responsible for many Americans’
first contact with libertarian ideas.

While traveling around the country, I have often heard people say, “I never
knew I was a libertarian until I took the Quiz!”

In 1990, Marshall stepped down as president of the Advocates to found the
Alliance for the Separation of School and State, an organization focusing on
the vital issue of parental control of education. Thanks in large part to
Marshall’s work, the idea that parents, not the government, should control
education is no longer excluded from public debate as a “fringe” notion. One of
the features that most impresses me about the Alliance is the way that Marshall
brought libertarians, conservatives, liberals together to work for education
freedom.

Anyone who knew Marshall and worked with him would not be surprised that he was
able to forge a coalition of people of diverse views. Marshall’s focus was
always on building alliances and trying to persuade those with whom he
disagreed, rather than on scoring debating points. While he never compromised
his principles and never hesitated to criticize even his closet allies if they
took what he considered an anti-liberty position, Marshall never personalized
disagreements and always treated his opponents with courtesy and respect. I
believe the freedom movement would be more successful if more libertarians
followed Marshall’s example of never turning policy disagreements into personal
attacks.

All of us who care about building an effective freedom movement owe a debt of
gratitude to Marshall Fritz. I join Marshall’s family in mourning his loss and
I urge all of us who work for liberty to honor Marshall’s memory by following
the example he set.

V-