imposing morality

I was rather taken aback recently when on a well-known right-wing forum someone seriously suggested that adultery should be made a criminal matter. I was even more taken aback when the person suggested that fornication should be made a crime as well. Punishable by prison!

Of course no-one would take such an idea seriously. But quite a few people on this forum did take it seriously and enthusiastically agreed.

The reasons it’s ludicrous are pretty obvious. For one thing it would be entirely unenforceable. How would you prove such a charge in court, given that it’s almost certain that neither partner would have the slightest intention of coöperating with the prosecution? Would you force the woman to undergo a medical examination? Would you subject a woman (who might well be innocent) to such a humiliation? I suppose the police could keep the homes of suspected fornicators under surveillance, but does anyone really want cops peering into people’s bedroom windows to find out if they’re having non government approved sex? Does anyone want a police Chastity Squad kicking in people’s doors? All this quite apart from the fact that it amounts to the kind of social control one associates with 17th century Puritans.

It’s a silly proposal but it is a symptom of something I’ve noticed recently – that the dissident right seems to be moving towards more and more extreme positions. And that the right seems increasingly willing to embrace draconian statist solutions to social problems. Of course what we’re seeing at the moment is actually both the cultural left and the cultural right becoming more extreme. It’s the cultural left that has the monopoly of power at the moment but it’s sobering to think that many on the cultural right would be willing to be just as oppressive if they were given the chance.

It also raises a key problem for social conservatives and those who espouse traditional moral values (and I have a great deal of sympathy for traditional moral values). Is it justifiable to impose such moral values by means of legal sanctions? The person who made the suggestion alluded to above is a Christian who at other times has expressed the view that morality should be enforced by the state. Clearly there are some areas of  sexual morality which should be a matter for the police (rape and offences involving children are obvious examples where a civilised society’s duty to protect children and women overrides all other considerations). You can certainly argue that abortion, given that it involves actual killing, is another such case (and I’d agree).

It does seem to me however that even suggesting the idea of legally enforcing sexual morality beyond such cases would be not only doomed to failure but seriously counter-productive. And I think it would be wrong. Whether we like it or not we live in a world in which there is no possibility of achieving universal agreement on sexual morality. No matter how strongly we might believe in certain moral values it is highly questionable whether we could ever justify imposing those values on those who disagree with us. We can certainly argue the case for our values, we can try to persuade others of the utility of our values and we can strongly resist efforts by the SJWs to impose their values on us. We can resist efforts by SJWs to propagandise schoolchildren with their values.

I don’t think we can go further than that.

Social conservatives are often accused of wanting to turn back the clock, and in some ways it’s true that we’d like to do that. However I don’t really think any sane person wants to use the Puritan societies of the 17th century as a model. But apparently some do indeed want that.