So now Colorado is like Iran?
In case you missed it, the comparison occurred in an article about Colorado lawmakers refusing to repeal an archaic statute against adultery. Jonathan Turley, a constitutional law professor at George Washington University, told The Denver Post’s Tim Hoover that it was “quite disappointing, if not embarrassing, for Colorado to affirmatively retain these types of laws.”
“These laws harken back to an earlier period, where a majority of citizens claimed the right to impose their values and morals on their neighbors,” Turley added. “The notion of a government policing immorality runs against the grain of our constitutional system that is more often associated with countries like Iran, where morality police roam the streets.”
Oh, please. It isn’t just in benighted nations such as Iran where a majority of citizens impose their values and morals on their neighbors. They do so in enlightened Western countries such as the United States, and everywhere else, for that matter — although not as comprehensively or as harshly.
Isn’t the criminal code itself a moral document? And that code, after all, is tweaked as the moral consensus evolves — firmly against racial discrimination and sexual harassment in the past half century, for example.
Turley believes Colorado’s anti-adultery statute would be struck down as unconstitutional for the same reason the U.S. Supreme Court overturned a Texas sodomy law in 2003. He’s probably right — and good riddance. But it’s one thing to say that states can no longer bar most kinds of consensual sex and another to denounce the idea of regulating behavior based on moral judgments.
The same court decision outlawing anti-sodomy laws said it would have no effect on prostitution bans, which also prohibit consensual sex and exist in part for moral reasons. Polygamy and bigamy are of course illegal, too.
Meanwhile, the moral motivations behind a variety of other laws can hardly be missed. What about the many restrictions on gambling, including the burgeoning online industry? And how about those against recreational drugs?
Why, even the latest anti-smoking statutes — such as New York City’s ban in 1,700 parks and at beaches — have evolved from health-based efforts to limit bystander exposure to significant levels of second-hand smoke to essentially moral edicts. As Boston University professor Michael Siegel wrote recently in The New York Times, “The antismoking movement has always fought with science on its side, but New York’s ban on outdoor smoking seems to fulfill its opponents’ charge that the movement is being driven instead by an unthinking hatred of tobacco smoke.”
When President Obama capped executive pay at companies receiving bailout money at $500,000, he was reflecting the moral judgment that the size of previous Wall Street bonuses had been “shameful” — and many Americans seemed to agree. Much of the debate about tax policy is also guided by differing moral judgments.
The claim that civilized people do not impose their morals on their neighbors is heard repeatedly in debates over social legislation — often by the sorts of activists who like to criminalize “hate speech” or impose their environmental values on the lifestyles of everyone else. When Boulder County was debating whether to limit the size of homes a few years ago, for example, a county planner justified the idea with moralistic sneering at “consumption, consumption, consumption.”
All such laws have of course a practical rationale as well, whether it’s reducing greenhouse emissions, saving people from the clutches of addiction or seeking equity for the poor. But those who once sought to outlaw adultery weren’t merely moralizing busybodies, either. They also had practical reasons for government intrusion, even if they no longer sound compelling.
Don’t misunderstand: The political spectrum does indeed extend from those who’d impose their values and preferences on their neighbors as often as possible to those who most frequently resist. The former are nanny authoritarians; the latter libertarians.
And while I take my stand far more often with the libertarians than the nannies, I still know the difference between a retrograde theocracy and a healthy pluralist state.
E-mail Vincent Carroll at vcarroll@denverpost.com. Read his blog at .
