Hello.

Today I am having a fit of moral curiosity. It could happen, stop laughing.

As our culture endures a rather lengthy shake up and restructuring due to gas prices and food costs, I’ve noticed something. The government in the background is trying to legislate morality. They are going about it much more forcefully than ever before.  They are in the process of trying and potentially winning a battle to make nicotine a governmental regulated drug. Recently legislation was presented to make female contraceptives on par with abortion.

Why is this being allowed? Is it because we the people lack the common sense to live up to high moral standards or have we just stopped trying? In a culture that excoriates anyone who attempts to live outside the consumer mentality and exonerates greedy corporations for what amounts to illegal activities it is not a surprise that we no longer care. No one is listening. We are not being heard.

At some point being a gansta became the highest achievement teens will reach for. I say this, not because of flimsy media reports, but because that is what the students tell me. So, instead of looking beyond, they look around this country and feel that since it cannot be fixed in any meaningful way they will glorify defiance and violence. And that is where many inner city teens live. Not all of them mind you, but many of them.

And the adults are losing hope as well. We are losing the feeling that this government is for the people. As oil companies take in record profits on the backs of working Americans, many of whom are losing their homes, what is there to makes retain any hope for the future? Apparently nothing.

That being said, do we need government to regulate our personal habits? After allowing greed and gluttony to rule the last eight years what right does the Bush administration have to decide what we do with our lives?  They are trying to tell us who we can sleep with, while Republicans and evangelist ministers are indicted for prostitution and fraud. They are trying to tell us how to have fun, while Legislators are indicted for sexual harassment and fixing the judicial branch to reflect their groups’ philosophy. And more importantly, they are trying to tell us what we should believe in. By passing care for the poor directly into the hands of protestant churches and giving them government funding, by defining what a human being is using a 2000 year old book and repeatedly failing at passing new marriage laws aimed at keeping out non-traditional families, our government is trying to force this country to move backwards rather than forwards.

This moral legislation ideology will only last as long as the current crisis. Once Bush and his cronies no longer have their boot heels on the throats of ordinary citizens there will be a backlash. One has only to look at periods of history to see this. And it will not be good. Our society is in the midst of a shake up, a change. It happens every 65-70 years or so. Social patterns change and grow. Not everyone will engage in the change and not everyone will appreciate the new direction. However, it is coming, and it is coming faster than most of us realize.

To legislate personal choice is a violation of not just the constitution but the section of the constitution that guarantees us the ‘pursuit of happiness’. To look over the neighbors fence and decide that their idea of happiness is just a bad choice is ludicrous. We do not all engage in the same behaviors. Nor should we.

I, for one, would find no pleasure in living in a dystopian society in which everyone is expected to behave the same way at the same time, all the time.

Would you?

Dogwoman