To: IncPen
You can pass laws about morality, but if you don't have a moral society to begin with, it makes no difference. True, the state alone cannot succeed in fostering a virtuous society. It needs the help of the Chruch, family, and other social institutions.
To: traditionalist
True, the state alone cannot succeed in fostering a virtuous society. It needs the help of the Chruch, family, and other social institutions.
I would suggest that that is kind of inside out. The State does not "need the help" in doing the things beyond its proper competence; if anything, what it needs is "the help" in getting it the hell out of such business and getting it back to the business for which it is, by design and construction, properly competent. (The founding era vice laws, such as they were, were laws of the individual states of the union, having their common threads with each other but having emphatic differences as singular as the states themselves as well; it was presumed the several states, and not the central State, had the proper call to enact and uphold such laws, it was rarely thought to be the legitimate business of the central government.) The church or the synagogue, the family, and other institutions of social power (in the proper sense of that too-often abused term) should be let alone to do that job of fostering the virtuous society, which they are competent to do. The State's assumption of matters properly assigned the church or synagogue, the family, the social power, has contributed more than even the State's critics might surmise in the breach and rupture of that which religion, family, social power is both construed and competent to do. (Bear in mind, for those who find the distinction confusing, that when I say "the State" I do not mean the individual states as defined under the United States, I mean instead a singular and suprerogatory body which corrupts and perverts a properly construed government into an instrument of plenipotentiary power over her citizen's doings and undoings beyond its legitimate construction and competence.)
A properly construed government (it is distinct from the improperly-consecrated, presumptuous State) has as its proper and legitimate business nothing further than protecting and defending her citizens against predators at home (real predators, not mere vicemongers - vice is sin, crime is evil, and too often are the occasions when the concentration against vice obstructs or even abrogates the concentration against true evil) and enemies from abroad. You would not, I presume, consider pornography more grave than murder, assault, fraud, theft, property crime, and certainly you would not (I presume again) consider that, on the rare enough occasion when such crimes are committed in the name of or on behalf of pornography or anything else classifiable as mere vice or sin, it makes murder, assault, fraud, theft, property crime more grave than by definition they are in the first place.
Let the social power of the church and synagogue, the family, the voluntary association institution do the job of reducing that interest (no one knows, realistically, just how widespread the actual interest is) in pornography and other vice, and let the State bother itself to its proper realm of competence in battling actual crime. When that day came on which the State said, in effect, that because social power was not doing its job in the manner in which the State saw fit the State was going to take that power away, that day should probably have been marked as a dark one, indeed, in a society purporting to be a free society in which men and women could live as they deemed fit with only the condition that they inflict no harm or damage upon their fellow citizen as they lived. That day arrived longer ago than many think, even if it could not be isolated to a single calendar period, and among the numerous victims of that transformation social power of the sort in which you appear strongly enough to believe was one of the more badly battered of them.
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