Skipping Towards Gomorrah Read Free Page B

their vices. Not only will it save the sinners from themselves, but it will also make it easier for the virtuous to get their nine hours every night. Need it be said? Bork doesn’t have to listen to rap music if he doesn’t care for it; Dr. Laura doesn’t have to engage in premarital sex (anymore) if she’s opposed to it (now); Jerry Falwell doesn’t have to join the ACLU; Bill Bennett doesn’t have to have a same-sex marriage if he disapproves. Law-abiding Americans who listen to rap music, indulge in premarital sex, feminism, and agitate for gay marriage do no harm to those who don’t enjoy these activities or share these goals. Bennett’s marriage, for instance, doesn’t appear to have been harmed by legal gay marriages in the Netherlands. (If straight marriage in the United States is such a delicate institution that even a national conversation about gay marriage can destroy it, as Bennett argues in The Broken Hearth , then the institution of straight marriage isn’t long for this world. The next light breeze should blow the thing away.)
    What the moaners and groaners at the Republican National Convention, Fox News, and on the op-ed pages of the Wall Street Journal refuse to accept is that freedom isn’t a one-way street. It’s not even a two-way street. Freedom is space, weightlessness, room to maneuver, to go your own way. It’s people blasting off in all directions. We should agree to disagree about certain things like, say, drug use or premarital sex, and, when necessary, establish reasonable rules to prevent people from slamming into each other—such as laws against assault, rape, and murder, laws that set an age of consent for sexual activity, laws against drinking and driving. Beyond these simple rules, however, the freedom to pursue happiness must be regarded just as Thomas Jefferson described it—an inalienable right, God-given—or all our rhetoric about freedom is meaningless.
    Do some people get harmed in the pursuit of happiness? Aren’t people—and neighborhoods and whole cities—harmed by, say, the drug trade? Aren’t prostitutes frequently harmed by violent clients? Doesn’t adultery destroy homes? Yes, yes, and yes. But much of the harm done by drugs, prostitution, and adultery should be laid at the feet of the virtuous. It’s their meddling that often creates the harm, not the sins in and of themselves. There would be no money, and therefore no gangs or violence, in the drug trade if drugs were legalized and their sale taxed and regulated. When was the last time beer distributors killed each other? Oh, yeah: prohibition. If prostitution were legalized, an American prostitute with a violent client or abusive pimp could turn to the police for protection, just as prostitutes do in the Netherlands. If every couple were encouraged to have a realistic, rational conversation about the near-inevitability of infidelity in long-term relationships, fewer homes would be destroyed by adultery. But the political right wing doesn’t allow for realistic, rational conversation about anything—tune into Fox News anytime to see irrational, unrealistic nonconversation twenty-four hours a day. Furthermore, the law shouldn’t be concerned with preventing people from harming themselves. Our bodies and minds and souls are our own, and we should be free to use and abuse and dispose of them as we see fit.
    Not all sinners lack virtue, and not everyone who’s technically virtuous is ethical. A woman who commits adultery with her husband’s permission—or in her husband’s presence—has to be viewed as more virtuous than a faithful man who’s married to a woman he emotionally abuses. Yet adulterers are universally condemned by the virtuecrats, without any regard for their particular circumstances. Similarly, all users of illegal drugs are condemned. Yet a man who smokes a small amount of pot every day in his own