the usual moral confusion

Earlier I got an email from M. Simon, who said this:

I keep telling my friends on the Right that when they have run through the dopers (or warring on them is no longer useful) all that apparatus used to go after the dopers will be used on them (we are already seeing the beginnings of this). They just can’t comprehend it – because everyone knows that dopers are the enemies of civilization.

He reminded me of a thought I had in a post last week. It occurred to me that support for the drug war in certain quarters might not be based on religion, nor on a culture war style dislike of druggies. Rather, because the drug war is morality-based, it is seen as a foot in the door for morality enforcement generally. My post was in response to this:

Congress needs to act quickly before the federal government compresses, enervates, extinguishes, and stupefies us. They need to bring our criminal laws back to basics: Get off the backs of businesses and keep us safe from truly dangerous and morally wrongful behavior.

I see a major contradiction in the above statement. Once you countenance morality enforcement, then why not wage war against big business? Or “the rich”? Why would drug addicts be any more immoral than fat cats on Wall Street? The left has its morality and some of them claim that Jesus was against the rich.

While I have seen no analogous claim on the right that Jesus was against drug addicts, Newt Gingrich wants to execute drug dealers, while Roseanne Barr wants to execute rich bankers.

The principle is what? Morality? Whose morality will that be?

In the name of morality, some Democrats want to criminalize “cyber-bullying.” Which is what exactly? I share Lady Gaga’s concern and even anger over the pressures that drove that gay teenager to suicide, but yet… If you post things online, people can and will react to them. The dead gay kid’s YouTube video drew hateful comments.

…they are continuing to post hatefull comments on his you tube videos, it is absolutely disgusting, that you tube is still allowing this to continue.

I would expect that had someone made a video urging him to come to Jesus, that, too, would have drawn hateful comments. And it would itself have been called hateful. Such things are the inevitable result of being online, where opinions proliferate freely. Whether it is immoral to be gay, or immoral to condemn being gay (or to hate either) is not the point here.  If “cyber-bullying” becomes a crime, then “hateful comments” would simply be illegal:

Under Klein’s bill, the crime of stalking in the third degree would be updated to explicitly include harassing a child using electronic communication.

To better reflect the nature of online interactions, the bill removes requirements that the offender initiate the contact and that the victim be a direct recipient of the communication.

Although it is already a crime to “intentionally cause or aid” another person’s suicide, the bill would update the state’s second-degree manslaughter statute to explicitly include cyber-bullying as a possible cause of such a suicide.

Would ridiculing a post or a YouTube video be “harassment” if the author of the post or video happened to be a child? And the victim need not be be a direct recipient of the communication? What does that mean? That I can’t criticize a minor in this blog? Do I have to know they are minors? Is this not legislating morality? The problem is, kids insult each other, and so do adults. One man’s hate speech is another man’s religion and so forth. Homosexuality is a hate crime against the family and Christianity and Islam are hate crimes against homosexuality and Christianity is a hate crime against Islam which is likewise a hate crime against Christianity.  I see no end to it.

Interestingly, in their haste to criminalize “cyber-bullying,” New York politicians seem to be forgetting that gay kid’s number one complaint: that life had become unendurable in school. Yet the law compelled him to go to that school, unendurable day after unendurable day. Adults face no such restrictions on their freedom, nor are they forced to endure similar taunts in the workplace. They can quit, or even sue. Children, who are inherently more fragile and more easily traumatized than adults, are routinely subjected to what no adult would ever have to tolerate. Under penalty of law. Now, tell me, what’s fair about that? No wonder the adults who preside over the institutionalized tormenting of children target social media…

Anyway, morality is confusing as hell.

I have nothing against moral people or morality per se. I just wish morality had been left in the hands of people with moral restraint. Instead, it often seems to be the property of moral busybodies.

At the risk of sounding hateful, it doesn’t “get better.”

AFTERTHOUGHT: Perhaps I am being unfair to the people who created the website intending to provide hope for depressed gay teenagers. It may be that their unstated premise is that eventually the kids will be free from the torture they must endure in state-mandated schools for the simple reason that they will graduate. If so, why don’t they just say so?


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7 responses to “the usual moral confusion”

  1. Stan Avatar
    Stan

    I love and hate this blog. So much libertarian red meat, yet it makes me feel powerless.

  2. Brett Avatar
    Brett

    “Sorry, Dr. James, there is no moral equivalent to war.”

    And the governments of free nations do not wage such purported wars (on alcohol, tobacco, other drugs, poverty, or bad thoughts such as racism or sexism) against their citizens. The tyranny just isn’t worth any possible result.

  3. Clayton E. Cramer Avatar

    All laws enforce morality–even laws against violence and fraud.

  4. Clayton E. Cramer Avatar

    I don’t know anyone that thinks “dopers are the enemies of civilization.” It is precisely because substance abuse causes a lot of otherwise okay people to do incredibly stupid and destructive things, to themselves and others, that we have both drug prohibition and Prohibition Lite (which is the best way to describe our current alcohol regulatory laws).

  5. Eric Scheie Avatar

    What were the incredibly stupid and destructive things that legal (pre 1914) drug users did to themselves and others that justified putting them in prison? I think criminalization has resulted in a far greater harm than the harm that they admittedly do.

    I think laws that give low-worth substances enormous economic value do more harm than would the substances themselves in a free market.

  6. […] “big bang” of substance prohibition in America, the same stubborn question naturally arises: What were the incredibly stupid and destructive things that legal (pre 1914) drug users did to […]

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