Daddy knows best, kids - part 1

Here's a topic that's irked me for a long time: so called "vice" laws. I'll do deeper explorations on the individual items in later posts, but I wanted to do an overview of the whole mess for now. Vice laws generally boil down to three topics. Substance vice laws cover drugs of all kinds, including alcohol and tobacco. Sex vice laws restrict things like sodomy (which, by the by, covers anything other than coital sex between one male and one female) to prostitution to pornography. Gambling vice laws cover any type of business that facilitates gambling, be it sports booking, casinos, or bingo halls.

What is wrong with all of these laws is that they presume to enforce one group's moral code upon everyone through legislation. I covered the logical problem with this in my earlier post, Legality Vs. Morality. Gambling, prostitution, drug abuse, pornography, etc. - these are what we call "victimless" crimes. But riddle me this: what is a victimless crime? How can there be a crime if there is no victim?

Let's try the American Heritage Dictionary for a definition of crime - ah, I get it now. The good old AHD says the definition of crime, in this context, is:

"1. An act committed or omitted in violation of a law forbidding or commanding it and for which punishment is imposed upon conviction."

So, you don't have to have done anything actually wrong to have committed a crime, just something illegal. Make a note of that - there is frequently a big difference between "right and wrong" and "legal and illegal", and this difference is nowhere more glaring and apparent than in the area of vice laws. The whole thing just smacks of the paternalistic "Because I said so, and what I say goes, because I know what's best for you and you don't" attitude that our wonderful government has developed over the last hundred and fifty years or so.

You know, I can see that I really don't have room to cover this massive topic in one post, so check back later. I'll cover each of these areas - drug laws, sex laws, and gambling laws - in that order over my next three posts.