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It seems to me that if you are about the business of taking away individual liberty, of frustrating someone's pursuit of his definition of "happiness" by bringing to bear the full force and power of the criminal law, the burden is on you to connect the dots.

In connecting those dots, you have five or six thousand years of history to overcome and in every year your way has failed.

You are asking us to endorse a failed system. You are asking us to endorse a hypocritical system. You are asking us to endorse an expensive and self-defeating system.

You are asking us to deprive people of their liberty for engaging in sex in commerce when if they did it for free it would be perfectly legal. Society has passed your position by.

This is your law, you defend it. You explain the broken lives and the crowded jails. You explain the venereal disease. You explain the white slavery. You explain the brutal pimps. You explain the traffic in underage girls.

You must explain all of these things because your system has brought them about. Kindly spare me your inability to connect the dots, you are consigning people to misery and worse.

The German system is clearly better because it produces less misery and more freedom. I thought that was what the pursuit of happiness was all about. It is certainly not about our personal biblical views which we impose on others through the vehicle of the criminal law. If you want to impose the criminal law on someone you have the burden of justifying it. And doing so you shall not be heard to say that we would sweep away all laws against all crimes.

We are talking about laws which are not malum in se but laws which impose criminal sanctions not because victims need to be protected but because hypocrites need to be vindicated.

Your post #49 is outstanding. Very well said.

But it does surprise me to hear such well expressed thoughts coming from someone who uses the image and name of a slave dealer and Klan leader.

No insult intended - I am interested in how you would reconcile Forrest and human freedom.

"If you want to impose the criminal law on someone you have the burden of justifying it."

And since imposing criminal sanctions based on religious values in this (and other) regard has been constitutional since the beginning, that's all the reason I need. If a majority of the people support a criminal law based purely on ethical reasons with a religious foundation then that is their right in a democratic republic, baby. Who are you to say your cost/benifit empirical analysis is somehow a more authoritative or moral basis for criminal law than a motivation based on divine revelation from God? If you can bring enough people to your way of thinking so they vote in different laws, go for it. But so far your position has consistently been rejected over a thousand years over a broad spectrum of cultures. And I will continue to support laws consistent with my theistic presuppositions.