Do they? You can't take their immorality as a given. I certainly don't give it. I don't know about prostitution reducing a person to an object, either. What, exactly, would such a reduction consist of? I've always thought of commerce as a distinctly human activity. No, prostitution is immoral because it involves fornication.
You're right, of course, that abortion is immoral because it kills someone. It's also something else. It's a crime. There's an actual victim, the baby.
While it is true that laws have never completely stopped any action in society, this is not an acceptable excuse to legalize the action. Conversely, if making a thing legal were the answer to crime we could simply make everything legal and all crime would be brought under control.
That's not the reason to make those things legal. The reason is, they aren't crimes. Any punishment of them is itself a crime, a crime you have to fund.
Legalizing drugs, prostitution, or any other immoral action will not make society better, but make it worse.
The immoral action I'm concerned with is violating the rights of someone else. That most certainly will make society worse.
If you want less government, then you should fight to retain what remains of our foundational culture.
I can see fighting for our culture, but not, you know, fighting for our culture.
Yes I can, because I don't live in subjective utopia. Concrete moral truths exist. Prostitution reduces a human being to an object because that is what happens when you act sexually base. It strips a person of dignity, and denegrates the sacredness of sex, marriage, family, and human life.
You're right, of course, that abortion is immoral because it kills someone. It's also something else. It's a crime. There's an actual victim, the baby.
There are victims of drug usage and prostitution also. It has a negative effect on society--the society which we have a moral obligation to pass on as healthy as possible for American children. If the "values of morality and legality" are not reinforced among the public and in the media and social institutions, the agreements, declarations, and most sophisticated juridical instruments will be useless. Without a clear conscience of what is right and wrong, our societies will be incapable of being immune to the plague of crime.
I can see fighting for our culture, but not, you know, fighting for our culture.
I don't recall asking you to wage physical war. I'm talking about the arena of ideas.