And, to return to the original topic, how do certain unmarried sex acts "impact" "society" more than others?
Answer to question 1:
a) Bastard children, and hence
False premise - false conclusions deleted. Only poorly- or un-contracepted unmarried sex leads to bastard children - no justifation there for invading the privacy of people who don't engage in poorly- or un-contracepted unmarried sex.
b) Bastard adults. Perfectly performing contraception and abortion "beget" adults who believe that sex can be extracted from the general intention of faithful marriage and bearing the next generation
I see no reason to think they'll believe that any less if government invades their privacy in an attempt to prevent unmarried sex. Can you provide such a reason?
Answer to question 2:
More bastard adults. As with the answer to question 1, the more distantly you try to abstract sex from the possibility of procreation
So the concept of foreplay is foreign to you? My condolences to your wife. ;-)
See Charles Murray's book, Coming Apart. Statistically, the people who most commonly describe themselves as "happy" are self-sacrificing, religious people who are married to their first spouse, and have children.
It is not the proper function of government to control people's actions to enhance their happiness.
You're right about that. It was just an interesting indicator about the moral life that I'd blundered across in Murray's book. It wasn't my point, but I didn't want to go on forever, so I stopped there.
The real point—and up to now, it's been hard for us as a post-1960s society to grasp—is that what kind of neighbors we have is a matter of life or death. The common understanding since the Greeks has been that the virtues are all connected. On the everyday level, it's not too surprising when we find out that someone who is a shyster in public life was also cheating on his wife with multiple mistresses. I'm reminded of the aristocratic socialist Mitterand, with families in both England and France. And Clintons.
But how about this: Does is make sense that you can be arrested for sending pictures of child pornography around, or, I think, even having them on your hard drive? Certainly seems like police-state stuff. But whereas not all child-porn addicts murder children, it seems that all murderous molesters of children collect child porn. What do we do about the fact that the child-porn "culture" shapes them in their public criminality? Is anything that could be defined as "speech" subject to restriction because of the way it shapes public discourse and behavior? People won't tolerate predators molesting and murdering their children. Most of them feel like drawing the line at protecting "predator speech." Are they wrong?
This wasn't much of a dilemma for the Founders. They did not envision a society without obscenity laws, any more than they opposed laws against libel, loitering, blasphemy, or incitement to riot. Adultery, sodomy, and so on were illegal, without a peep from the Federalist Papers. They just wanted Congress out of it. As I understand it, the reasoning is that any action taken from D.C. to control life on the microcosmic level could only be ill-informed, ham-handed, and potentially tyrannical. (Like the French Revolution two years later.) So there are any number of rules about moral behavior the USC left "to the States and the People" that today's libertarians would not be comfortable with, but which were common sense to the Framers. It was recognized that mores shape the kind of people we are, and that a Republic only works if people have an independently operating sense of integrity—if they act as if they are answerable to God. And if you don't like the way the Quakers or Congregationalists or Methodists run their town, you can move to a better town.
Left-wing outfits like the ACLU have gotten many of these local laws struck down at the Federal level as "unconstitutional"—which is unconstitutional itself, according to the 10th Amendment. The net effect is that, in the name of freeing some parties from various kinds of local restraint, we have micro-regulation of everyday life at the Federal level aimed at everyone else in town. This leaves ordinary people unprotected against criminals with too many rights, job applicants with bad hair and too few skills, illegal aliens with no means of support, toilets that don't work, and abortionists who collect Federal money to solicit business from our minor daughters.
We can talk about what constitutes depravity. But the idea that something called moral depravity exists, and it privately shapes people's behavior in public in ways that become the public's business—this is not a novel idea. Nor is the idea that a free society's first priority is not unrestricted freedom. It has to survive as a society first. Whether we believe that, for instance, pleasure is more important than duty, shapes how we behave, not just at home, but everywhere. I believe it's a matter best pondered locally, not Federally.
False premise - false conclusions deleted. Only poorly- or un-contracepted unmarried sex leads to bastard children - no justifation there for invading the privacy of people who don't engage in poorly- or un-contracepted unmarried sex.
Contraception can't handle human nature. What followed from the legalization of contraception was . . . an explosive increase in illegitimate births, which continues. Forcibly legalized contraception has weakened people's respect for the institution that protected children—marriage. Besides divorcing more, people have children without getting married. Even if the father lives with his girlfriend and children, the children become criminals, indigents, suicides, and so on, at exactly the classic rates that have always been associated with illegitimate children.
In short, sex isn't really private. We don't own it; it was given to us. We take part in it. It has ramifications across the generations.
On the foreplay thing, I'm afraid you have it backwards. For a Catholic, it's a sacrifice toward a greater good, and we're all about sacrifice. . .