Laws that equate to sins that prohibit acts which violate the rights of others, or otherwise directly harm others exist everywhere.
Murder is a sin, so should we legalize murder?
To the state, murder is a crime. Whether or not it's a sin is between the sinner and his church.
What I presented to you was a natural law argument in favor of the criminalization of fornication. I didn't appeal to divine revelation of any kind. My argument was purely "secular," or based on truths knowable to everyone.
The only people who believe fornication is against natural law believe it because of religious teachings. It is clearly a religious based sin.
Is your point that monogomy has not always been normative? It has. Polygamy and polyandry are the exceptions that prove the rule.
Marriage was the issue, not monogamy. Two people cohabiting are maintaining a monogamous relationship.
Right. They perversely divorce the tangential pleasurable aspect of the act from its fundamental procreative purpose in a analogous manner to binging and purging. It's a lie on top of the lie of cohabitation.
What you are doing is simply digging a deeper hole in an attempt to separate religion from secular life. Without the pleasurable aspect, few if any would engage. So it is anything but tangential to most. That's why almost all married and cohabiting couples use birth control and other forms of sexual pleasure.
"I love you baby, just not enough to marry you."
"I love you baby, but not enough to have children with you."
These choices are normally made by both parties.
The act says, "I love you, but not enough to have children with you. But I'm willing to use your body as a means of mutual masturbation."
And that is and should be their free choice. Laws against that too?
Why is it their business alone? They are habituating themselves to treating the opposite sex as a means to an end. The consequences to society of this mindset are all around us.
If there is no direct harm to anyone else, what they do in the privacy of their homes is no one's business. Changes in attitudes are the result of thousands of changes in the social fabric including technology, 2 partner working status, and a host of other changes in the world. It's dangerous to select one or two that for religious reasons are considered bad, and draw any conclusions about changing attitudes.
Why? The purpose of the State is to promote the common good. And fornication harms society.
After providing for a common defense, the primary purpose of any state should be the protection of the rights of its citizens. It is not the job of the state to control the morals of its citizens. It is the job of the state to adjust to those changes. It is the primary job of religion to look after the moral climate of its parishioners.
Where is the flaw in my reasoning?
First, it is simply conjecture. How many children come from broken homes of cohabitation? Millions come from broken homes of divorce. Though a two parent family is preferable to a one parent family, it's simply a fact of life in our society that single parent households exist. Your law would increase that number.
Have you just demonstrated that "the effect of living with this lie is to dissociate in the minds of those involved the natural connection between copulation and marriage"?
It simply does not exist in our society any more. There are many reasons for marriage, children being one of them. Even in the Catholic Church where birth control is forbidden, somewhere near 100 percent of Catholic married partners practice it.
Dogs try to hump people's legs because it feels good. When people engage in artificially induced sterile intercourse, they're behaving like the above mentioned dog.
Which in any free society they have the right to do.
More than bringing forth new human life? What more noble human act is there in life?
Won't disagree that it is a noble act. I am merely telling you that most people get married for a lot more reasons than that. And in any case, it is not in the state's domain to regulate that act in any way. It can promote procreation by certain laws such as maintaining marriage for heterosexuals. But to go any further is not the job of the state.
Then two men could get "married." Or three men. Or three men, two women and my dog.
Some states may eventually permit same sex marriages, but I doubt any will ever permit these other situations you speculate about. But marriage is in the 10th Amendment domain of the state.
When the matter is grave enough, it is. And this is grave matter.
Then submit it for a constitutional amendment. Like I said, the 6 million couples living together today outside of marriage cannot in my mind be influencing many, since marriages outnumber them by a significant amount.
Contrary to conventional wisdom that living together before marriage will screen out poor matches and therefore improve subsequent marital stability, there is considerable empirical evidence demonstrating that premarital cohabitation is associated with lowered marital stability.
The key word here is associated, not causal. So the real causes of the divorce may well have nothing to do with cohabitation.
In any case, you simply cannot stop all activities that could have negative consequences. Let's stop drinking, driving, gambling, sports, etc, since all of those activities bring risks those who do not engage in them don't experience.
So in principle, the guy who encourages him shouldn't be arrested as an accessory?
Not sure where you are going with this, but conspiracy is a crime in most jurisdictions.
I didn't say that. I said that an evil act may be criminalized if the harm to society of criminalizing the act is less than the harm caused to society of decriminalizing the act.
How do you measure the harm of violating the rights of individuals in order to provide a good example to others? That example can be greatly expanded, not just to cohabitation.
Since when does a lie constitute love?
When two people express love for each other but decide against marriage, I fail to see the lie. OTOH, since almost no one marries simply for your procreation theory, are they all living a lie? Should the state require that they create children?
"I love you baby, I just don't want to marry you. I am willing to use you as a means of masturbation for an indefinite period, however."
God gave us a free will. You want the state to take that free will away so that we only do what you perceive is the moral thing.
Love is a choice, specifically, willing the highest and greatest good for the other. What you describe as love is simple selfishness.
Not if both partners wish it.
That may be true. But shacking up is simply a string of one-nighters. So it's hard to argue that such a law would increase the overall incidences of fornication.
No, but it's a proven fact that it will lead to far more single parent households, which for some here would be far preferable to two happy people living together.
You're correct that attitudes do change over time. They sometimes change for the better, sometimes for the worse. However, that's not constitutionally relevant. The fact that "x" was unpopular 100 years ago, but is popular today, doesn't make "x" suddenly a part of the Constitution. The only way for "x" to get into the Constitution is for us to put it there via an amendment.
Joseph Biden uses the "times have changed" argument all the time, and it makes no sense. Ask him why no one ever found a right to abortion or sodomy in the Constitution for 200 years of American history and he'll stammer out that "back then" those practices weren't acceptable, but "times have changed". But the thing is, if times have changed, you don't need the Supreme Court to forcibly impose popular policies.
At the founding of the country, women were thought unqualified to vote. Attitudes changed, and that was reflected by states voting to give women the vote, and ultimately by the legitimate ratification of the 19th Amendment. Some arrogant judge didn't shake his fist and announce himself the determiner of the propriety of our laws, and order nationwide female suffrage on the grounds that "times have changed".
If times have changed, you don't need the judge. If you need the judge, times haven't changed.
I understand some of you oppose the fornication law. But the solution would be to ask the legislature to change the law. It clearly isn't unconstitutional by any possible logic. The men who wrote the Bill of Rights would have applauded that law.
We're now governed by unelected judges because every little law on the books that liberals don't like gets hauled into federal court, with the frequent result being yet another expansion of federal power at the expense of local autonomy, and a transfer of power from the voters to unelected judges who decide which laws to uphold and which to strike down based on nothing more than their personal whims.
People are justifiably aghast that some of these judges are now using foreign court rulings and documents such as the EU Consitution to void some of our laws. They wonder where the court could possibly have gotten the idea that they can do that. Well, it's just a logical extension of the judicial activism of the past few decades. If all that matters is finding some way to get rid of a law that liberals dislike (sodomy, fornication, contraception, or whatever), and if "old fashioned" things such as jurisdiction, original intent, and judicial restraint are just trash to be tossed aside, then why not go all the way? Why not invite the UN to come in and review our laws for sexism and homophobia?