I’m quite sure his adultery hurt his family emotionally, but we don’t imprison people for adultery. The fact that he paid for it, however, was not harmful. But that is what we have criminalized.

This idea that, because we don’t want something criminalized, we must not think it is bad is a frustrating misperception of libertarians. It’s doubly frustrating, because it’s not a difficult distinction to make.

My heart aches more for children than for the adults in all these cases. It is well and good to condemn, even prosecute, those who argue that “no one got hurt” but what is best for those who looked to them as role models? And when can we expect children growing up in those situations to select and follow better examples?

I don’t have good answers to these questions, but I know that at some point external constraints on what we like to call “private” matters are not only appropriate but necessary. Only two weeks ago I heard an elderly lady sweetly advancing the argument that if someone owned a restaurant and wanted to serve only blue-eyed people it should be their right and no one should tell them whom they should or should not serve. (We were talking about Lester Maddox, the famous segregationist restaurant owner and former governor of Georgia whom we both knew.) I haven’t heard that kind of thinking since before the Civil Rights Act of 1964, but there are people alive who still believe it in their hearts.

I rather like the notion that America is made up of many states. If prostitution (or gambling or smoking dope whatever stripe of moral terpitude you like) is legal in one place but not in another I don’t like it but I’m not prepared to make those matters federally normative. In other communities or states those values (or lack of values) aren’t acceptable so Americans have choices. If people come here from all over the world for whatever reasons, it’s not unreasonable to suggest that those wanting a better place to live find a place they like better and move there or, failing that, define and protect boundaries in their local church, school, neighborhood or community.

In the end we will stand or fall as a society not because of laws crafted by politicians but according to values transmitted by our respective family units. If you think about it, some of our “best families” somehow grew from disreputable roots.