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Legislating Morality

The U.S. Government had no business legislating the way people live. Morality is the end result of a process of learning and not something that can be decreed. It's a job for parents, church's and possibly local governments

It is a violation of Church and State separation and the First Amendment right to free exercise of religion. The conflict of alcohol laws with the use of wine for the consecration of certain religious rites was in evidence in colonial and post revolution times. At the same time there were temperance churches that would not allow the use of alcohol yet for these people it was their own choice and should not be legislated as it would constitute a violation of religious freedom. Eventually their beliefs could possibly fall to the control of others.

When laws limiting your decisions in regards to how you live your life are passed and enforced then it denies liberty and becomes a form of enslavement. It often ends up with one group of people placing their will on other people's children and that interferes with people's right to raise their own children.

Enforced morality is not in the Constitution, the amendments or the early Federal Laws of the United States and we did a lot better than the U.S. is doing in the present day. Maybe we knew something that has been forgotten?

Maturity is automatically the result when a person's moral understandings are all summed up correctly. Without moral understandings then a child can never mature and others have to raise these children when they become adults. This includes American society as a whole, the legal system, the U.S. Military and the mass media, the last of which nearly everyone will agree does not do an adequate job at all.

You can't legislate morality, you only legislate rules.

I think most of this stems from a fairly recent desire to legislate out a persons rights to raise their own children.

It's perhaps a backlash in direct response to the 'me generation' of the 1980's+. Many people saw the outrageous behavior of a minority as a call to arms. When people saw children behaving unethically they used to make an inner commitment which went something like this: 'I'm not going to raise my children to behave like that'. That changed when they saw a whole generation behaving unethically to 'I'm not going to allow anyone to raise their children to behave like that'.

George Washington had this to say concerning moral rules and regulations: 'They are going to do it anyway. The sooner they do it the sooner they will get it out of their system.' (Ben Franklin also had a really good one but I can't remember what it was.)

The greatest impediment of raising children is primarily interference by others. It used to be interfeerance by other children mainly, now it seems to be by other well meaning parents as well. No matter how well meaning a person is that kind of interference can't help but to undermine the family's influence by planting seeds of distrust of their parents in children.

When others tell you what to do and what not to do they are actually robbing you of your morality and the right to become a moral person. They usurp the process of learning right from wrong which results in the establishment of a person's rules of morality. If a person cannot learn right from wrong then they can never become a moral person.

Morality must be understood. Morality laws only create a set of rules. They almost never produce the same result. They often create the opposite effect. The process of learning is cut short so that the person learns to say one thing and then do the opposite. The person often then, as an adult, work backwards in an attempt to go through the learning process which should have given them a sense of morality. It's inefficient in reverse so it takes much longer and the end result is usually a patchwork of understandings. This process just does not produce the same results.

I might add that it is also liable to create the opposite effect. Tell someone else's young children to never put beans up their nose and pretty soon those children are likely to be found in the hospital emergency room. Tell someone else's older children to 'never take drugs' and you are just about as likely to find them in the hospital emergency room.

All you end up with are dead inside robotic people and hypocritical radio talk show hosts who chastise drug users, even when it is for medical purposes, while at the same time they are drugging themselves with the most addictive narcotics know to the human race. That is the epitome of immorality. This is evidence of the poisoning that morality legislation has perpetrated and the resulting immorality that it has actually created. A nation of Stepford wives and Rush Limbaughs is where the United States seems to be headed.