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« on: April 10, 2010, 10:25:33 AM »
I highly doubt I've stumbled dick-first into any great discovery here, but I've found it odd that people feel there is a need for legality to connect with morality. The oft-toted pro-legalisation (and I apologise for the excessive use of hyphens, particularly in this economic climate) phrase "is it illegal because it is immoral or immoral because it is illegal?" assumes this, as does everybody against legalisation of any drug, as any who wish to criminalise any particular way of being (homosexual, zoophiliac, paedophile).
Surely law should not be an arbiter of morality, but a guardian of human rights and civil liberties? Of course there is often an overlap, but if we define either by this then we get the absurd situation where filesharing or pot-smoking is morally worse than philandering or refusing to intervene in a rape based entirely on the legality of the two. The law should not prevent a paedophile from being a paedophile, but it should prevent him from the actual act of kiddy-fiddling. In a world where people don't feel the need to force their morality down the throats of everybody else a paedophile could happily whack one out to a bit of loli and not give a kid he passes in the street a second glance.
And yet drawings depicting the depiction of child molestation which never actually occurred are illegal or on the verge of criminalisation in many places. Now our blue-balled paedophile is given two options: stop being a paedophile (castration being the only proven method) or enlist at his nearest seminary. The same problem happens with heroin addicts who are left to pick between the very illegal and very cut crap in a back alley since there's no regulation or methadone, which is just as addictive, just as harmful and offers zero pleasure.
Much as I am loathe to bring this up again, the problem seems to lie in organised religion. Before the existence of scriptures people had no standard by which to judge each other as people, but an infallible guide to life by *insert perfect being here* gave us something to judge and crusade over, creating a culture that even exists in many nonreligious people, just as institutionalised as religion itself, but even more dangerous in its subtlety.
Thoughts?
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