Why Not Vote Social Conservative?

“Social Conservatives” are good and sincere people, but they are the puritan crusaders, prohibitionists, finger-waggers, torch and pitchfork witch-hunters, censors of obscenity and of heresy, intolerant of perverts and false doctrines, each a self-justified moralist judge and ready executioner of the deserving sinner, likely motivated by a narrow but extreme religious viewpoint. Whatever you think personal liberty means, these are people who likely will religiously strive to prevent you from exercising yours, likely as not in the name of protecting your morality from self-abuse by license to sin, and protecting your children from the trauma of seeing you do it.

A century and a half ago, Lysander Spooner wrote eloquently about the folly of dealing with vice through enforced prohibition. In the 1930’s we recognized the folly of creating a huge and profitable criminal class by the prohibition of alcohol, and that was repealed. Later the pragmatic on both sides of the law recognized the profitability of maintaining prohibition of many other such highly desired substances and elements of various vices. The consumer suffers from the actions of both sides in the wars on sin, but the street money for it and the budget money against it both flows.

Therein lies the unforseen horror. The fact prohibition is profitable for both the suppliers of the desired commodity and those who enforce the laws against them does not change the folly of what is being done, but multiplies it. Both sides soon create in the other the thing they fear, and everyone suffers the terrible destructive effects of each trying to resist and destroy the other. The damage done far outweighs whatever could have been caused by the prohibited substance or practice.

If dancing is outlawed as something sinful, a vice, because it leads to fucking, soon only outlaws will be dancing, and the lawful who succumb to their sinful nature will kill to fuck. Even one such killing will be taken as proof the sins of dancing and fucking should be even more rigorously outlawed. The dance halls move underground and become more expensive, and more and more terpsichorian fornicators are hunted down, tried and appealed, imprisoned in huge new facilities, and hanged. The monster feeds upon itself, and grows.

Whatever you think of Barack Obama, the political ideology of the Republican Party, or the petty arguments of Congress over which of them gets all the money, it would be damaging to all of our personal and civil liberties to vote for any candidate who advertises himself or herself as a “Social Conservative.”