THE STRANGE EVOLUTION OF PUBLIC MORALITY

Smoking, drinking, gambling, stock-picking, drug-taking, prostitution
and child pornography. We have a highly varied set of rules governing
these seven variously noxious vices.

You can smoke and drink legally, so long as you smoke mainly outdoors
and drink mainly indoors. You can also produce and distribute alcohol
and tobacco products, though if you sell tobacco, you must indicate
that your product kills and maims its users. No such label is required
for alcohol, though it can be at least as addictive. Strangely,
tobacco users, though forewarned, can still sue manufacturers for
damages, at least in the United States, and Canadian courts seemed
bound to follow suit. Presumably you can also sue for the damage done
by drink, and since its sale requires no warning, your chance of
winning may be even better, though so far no one has tried.

You can engage in the act of prostitution, but you cannot advise
potential customers of your willingness to do so. You can solicit, of
course, so long as you do it through newspaper and magazine ads or the
Yellow Pages and call yourself an escort service. What is outlawed is
distribution, not production; speech, not action.

Do it indoors

As with alcohol, the goal seems to be to keep things indoors.
Permitting the act but banning its advertisement used to be the rule
for alcohol and tobacco, too, until the courts struck it down.

You can gamble, but only with the state. Originally, this was to keep
gambling clean, but now the state spends hundreds of millions of
dollars a year encouraging you to play.

The state also encourages you to gamble in stocks, by regulating the
exchanges, so as to persuade you that fraud has been minimized, and by
offering fiscal inducements to risky investments: hotels in
Shawinigan, all manner of investment in the Maritimes, small business.

Most forms of recreational drug-taking remain illegal, as do drug
production and distribution. But soft drugs seem on their way to
legalization, though you may need the sponsorship of a sympathetic
physician, who will attest that, as your grandmother needed her
whisky, you need your marijuana, for medicinal purposes.

Sale and distribution are another matter. If consumption becomes
legal, where will the stuff come from? No doubt some governments would
get into the business themselves, seeking profit for the fisc. Alberta
perhaps,would allow private retailers (but not wholesalers, if its
deregulation of liquor is the model). In the end, federal law may be
silent. If the stuff is sold through ads, but not on the streets, so
be it.

No Underage Models

Until the recent decisions of the B.C. courts, child pornography was
verboten in toto. Now it is more like prostitution; people may possess
it, but not distribute it. If the law is changed in the way the courts
seem to want, possession of some forms of child pornography may well
continue to be permitted, namely, what people have produced themselves
- - so long as they have confined themselves to drawing, writing and
sculpting and have not used underage models.

Models who are of age but do not look it are a difficult problem. In
this case, consenting adults have been stand-ins for innocents, in
which case the perpetrators' thoughts have been impure.

That is the nub of the problem. Do we punish people's thoughts, their
private drawings, their writing to themselves, however disgusting we
may find them?

The liberal experiment may eventually be deemed a failure, but so long
as it continues we should confine ourselves to punishing acts, not
thoughts. The thought may be father to the deed, but only may, and in
the indeterminacy lies individual responsibility.

Recently Frank Johnson, editor of the Spectator, congratulated fellow
Britons for not being at each other's throats, as Serbs and Kosovars
are, and he extended the commendation to Americans for having largely
abandoned public racism. Human nature, it seems, is perfectible. As he
says, this is an alarming prospect for conservatives. I wonder if it's
true. I suspect lots of people still harbour horrid thoughts about
groups that are different from them. But public expression of such
thoughts has now been stigmatized.

This was not accomplished by raids on people's homes, or by
early-morning interrogations, but by a long, slow evolution of public
mores. At the end of the day, that is the best defence against the
despicable.

- - William Watson, editor of Policy Options, teaches at McGill
University