From: utzoo!decvax!duke!mcnc!unc!tim
Newsgroups: net.religion
Title: Re: The basis for laws in our culture.
Article-I.D.: unc.4867
Posted: Wed Mar 30 13:56:15 1983
Received: Thu Mar 31 01:23:05 1983
References: dadla-a.316


I agree almost entirely with Steve's (not Hutchison -- sorry,
I didn't catch the last name) article claiming that the
ultimate source for laws should be pragmatism, not religion.

My first objection is that it is possible for a purely pragmatic
legal structure to disregard human freedoms. It would not greatly
destabilize the USA if the executive branch were to take over
the media, for instance. Rather than "the stability of the society"
as our goal in pragmatism, we should use "the free exercise of
the rights of the individual citizens". We then have to define
rights; this is where the difficulty with religion comes in.
Different people have different ideas of what people's rights
are. My feeling is that it is sufficient to say that no one is
free to infringe on anyone else's freedoms, but this is a recursive
definition and possibly too hard for the masses to live with, due
to its requiring thought. (The bottom of the recursion is that
certain actions such as murder obviously make it impossible for
a person to exercise freedoms.)

My second objection is that the laws on recreational drugs were
not, as Steve claims, formed because the use of drugs was harming
society. Steve provides an example involving patent medicines. This
is what the FDA was set up for; the offending substances were being
deceptively marketed in a harmful fashion. The FDA was created to
control, among other things, the sale of medicines. The Bureau of
Narcotics was responsible for the laws against *recreational* use of
such substances as marijuana, cocaine, heroin, etc. The head of the
Bureau was Harry J. Anslinger, a Prohibition agent who found himself
out of work when Prohibition ended, and managed through family ties
to get the job with the Bureau. He then implemented a massive and
deceitful advertising campaign, focusing particularly on marijuana,
that led to the almost universal anti-pot attitudes today. He was
a bastard, but he was good at what he did. When someone speaks of
the "New Prohibition", referring to pot, they are not being
metaphorical: the current laws are a direct descendant, through
Anslinger, of alcohol Prohibition in this country.

Tim Maroney