Legislating Morality In America

This title undertakes an impartial, authoritative, and in-depth examination of the moral arguments and ideas behind the laws and policies that govern personal, corporate, and government behavior in the United States. This A–Z encyclopedia surveys the moral arguments that provide the foundation for many of the most important and/or divisive laws, policies, and beliefs that govern modern American society. The work discusses such controversial and important issues as abortion, civil rights, drugs and alcohol, euthanasia, guns, hate crimes, immigration, immunization, natural resource use and protection, prostitution, same-sex marriage, and workplace laws. In the process of surveying historical and current beliefs about appropriate legislative responses to these issues, this work will help readers to understand how conservative and liberal conceptions of justice, fairness, and morality are at the center of so many hot-button political and social issues in 21st century America. The essays featured in the volume cover wide-ranging and controversial topics related to constitutional and religious freedoms, crime and punishment, sexuality and reproduction, environmental protection and public health, national security and civil liberties, social welfare programs, and education.

America's moral decline is not secret. An alarming number of moral and cultural problems have exploded in our country since 1960--a period when the standards of morality expressed in our laws and customs have been relaxed, abandoned, or judicially overruled. Conventional wisdom says laws cannot stem moral decline. Anyone who raises the prospect of legislation on the hot topics of our day - abortion, family issues, gay rights, euthanasia - encounters a host of objections: As long as I don't hurt anyone the government s should leave me alone.Ó No one should force their morals on anyone else.Ó You can't make people be good.Ó Legislating morality violates the separation of church and state.Ó 'Legislating Morality' answers those objections and advocates a moral base for America without sacrificing religious and cultural diversity. It debunks the myth that morality can't be legislatedÓ and amply demonstrates how liberals, moderates, and conservatives alike exploit law to promote good and curtail evil. This book boldly challenges prevailing thinking about right and wrong and about our nation's moral future.

The debate over religious lawmaking pits respect for religious pluralism against moral identity-with liberal theorists contending that religious lawmaking is generally suspect in a morally and religiously diverse polity like the United States, and communitarian ones arguing that lawmakers cannot, and should not, be expected to suppress their religious commitments in their public policy making. Looking carefully at both sides of this ongoing debate, Lucinda Peach explores the limitations as well as the value of these conflicting perspectives, and proposes a solution for their reconciliation. Peach breaks from traditional analysis as she contends that both sides of the argument are fundamentally flawed. Neither side has been willing to recognize the merit of the other's arguments, and both have ignored the gender-based disparities of religious lawmaking (particularly with respect to the effect religion has had on reproductive rights and abortion regulation). Using an interdisciplinary approach, the book argues for a pragmatic solution to this impasse which will respect religious pluralism, moral identity, and gender differences. Peach's proposals will be of interest to philosophers, legal theorists, and scholars in women's studies and political science.

Between 1865 and 1920, Congress passed laws to regulate obscenity, sexuality, divorce, gambling, and prizefighting. It forced Mormons to abandon polygamy, attacked interstate prostitution, made narcotics contraband, and stopped the manufacture and sale of alcohol. Gaines Foster explores the force behind this unprecedented federal regulation of personal morality--a combined Christian lobby. Foster analyzes the fears of appetite and avarice that led organizations such as the Women's Christian Temperance Union and the National Reform Association to call for moral legislation and examines the efforts and interconnections of the men and women who lobbied for it. His account underscores the crucial role white southerners played in the rise of moral reform after 1890. With emancipation, white southerners no longer needed to protect slavery from federal intervention, and they seized on moral legislation as a tool for controlling African Americans. Enriching our understanding of the aftermath of the Civil War and the expansion of national power, Moral Reconstruction also offers valuable insight into the link between historical and contemporary efforts to legislate morality.

Crossing over the Line describes the folly of the Mann Act of 1910—a United States law which made travel from one state to another by a man and a woman with the intent of committing an immoral act a major crime. Spawned by a national wave of "white slave trade" hysteria, the Act was created by the Congress of the United States as a weapon against forced prostitution. This book is the first history of the Mann Act's often bizarre career, from its passage to the amendment that finally laid it low. In David J. Langum's hands, the story of the Act becomes an entertaining cautionary tale about the folly of legislating private morality. Langum recounts the colorful details of numerous court cases to show how enforcement of the Act mirrored changes in America's social attitudes. Federal prosecutors became masters in the selective use of the Act: against political opponents of the government, like Charlie Chaplin; against individuals who eluded other criminal charges, like the Capone mobster "Machine Gun" Jack McGurn; and against black men, like singer Chuck Berry and boxer Jack Johnson, who dared to consort with white women. The Act engendered a thriving blackmail industry and was used by women like Frank Lloyd Wright's wife to extort favorable divorce settlements. "Crossing over the Line is a work of scholarship as wrought by a civil libertarian, and the text . . . sizzles with the passion of an ardent believer in real liberty under reasonable laws."—Jonathan Kirsch, Los Angeles Times

Discusses morals' functions and natures that affect the legislation in general. Bases the discussions on pain and pleasure as basic principle of law embodiment. Mentions of the circumstance influencing sensibility, general human actions, intentionality, conciousness, motives, human dispositions, consequencess of mischievous act, case of punishment, and offences' division.