Government should not have the power to legislate morality.

By Onkar Ghate
web posted March 24, 2003

You are jolted awake at 1:00 a.m. by loud knocking on the
door. Alarmed, you and your girlfriend rise to answer. The
police barge in and arrest you both on suspicion of having had
premarital sex. Sound like something that would happen only in a
dictatorship like Iraq's or China's? This week the U.S. Supreme
Court will hear a case that if not overturned will grant legitimacy
to such governmental power. (In a disturbing 1986 decision the
Court upheld the constitutionality of such power.)

The case is Lawrence v. Texas. In 1998, Texas police,
responding to a neighbor's deliberately false report of an armed
intruder in the apartment of John Geddes Lawrence, entered his
unlocked apartment. Discovering that Lawrence and Tyron
Garner were having consensual sex, the police jailed them on
charges of violating Texas' Homosexual Conduct Law.
Lawrence and Garner are now challenging the law.

At issue is not whether a particular sexual practice among
consenting adults is in fact moral or immoral. At issue is
something much broader: whether the government should have
the power to enter your home and arrest you for having sex
because it regards your sexual desires as "base," the power to
enter your laboratory and arrest you for running a scientific
experiment because it regards your research as "sinful," or the
power to enter your business and arrest you for making money
because it regards the profit motive as "wicked."

At issue is whether the government should have the power to
legislate morality.

If you want to live in a free society, the answer is: No.

To answer "No" does not mean we should throw out laws
punishing murder. It means the government's function is not to
become the thought police, charged with ensuring that citizens
act on correct ideas. The government's function is only to stop an
individual from taking action (e.g., murder) that violates the rights
of other individuals. It means that the absolute moral principles at
the foundation of a free society preclude the government from
becoming policeman of morality.

Our Founding Fathers understood that, like any other form of
knowledge, moral knowledge--knowledge of good and evil--
requires a mind free to follow the observed facts and evidence
wherever they lead. They therefore created a political system
that protects the sovereignty of the rational mind--the very
source of rights. Each American has the right to think, to express
his thoughts in conversations, speeches, and books, and then to
act on his thought in pursuit of the values his life and happiness
require. (So long, of course, as he respects the same rights of
others.) He must have these freedoms because knowledge
comes not from obedience to authority but from reason. "Fix
reason firmly in her seat," Jefferson explained to his nephew,
"and call on her tribunal for every fact, every opinion. Question
with boldness even the existence of a God; because, if there be
one, he must more approve of the homage of reason than that of
blindfolded fear."

To incarcerate John Lawrence because he engaged in
homosexual sex is to do violence to his reason.

According to Lawrence's judgment, sex with the right,
consenting adult represents an important, moral, life-affirming
pleasure. The state demands that he discard this judgment--or
face jail. But to force someone to obey produces no moral
enlightenment in his mind; it only incapacitates his means of
understanding. Even granting for the sake of argument only that
homosexuality is immoral, in jailing Lawrence and Garner the
government does not persuade them that their action is wrong. It
merely makes them fear believing and acting on what they
continue to think is right. No knowledge, moral or otherwise, can
be implanted by the instruments of coercion. "Force and mind,"
in Ayn Rand's memorable words, "are opposites; morality ends
where a gun begins."

Observe that the need of a mind to be free in order to reach
knowledge implies that it has the right to make mistakes (you
may think Lawrence and Garner mistaken). There is no such
thing as the freedom to think so long as you reach "government
approved" ideas. That would make the state guardian of "truth."
That road leads only to what it always has led to: the non-
thought of, say, the Taliban's Afghanistan, Soviet Russia or
Europe's Dark Ages.

In essence the government of a free society bans only *one*
action--the initiation of physical force--precisely because force
prevents an individual from following the judgment of his mind.
The government of a free society does not seek to control its
citizens' thoughts by, say, jailing homosexuals or hypocrites. Its
function is to stop other people from violating one's rights, not to
force them to be good--which is a contradiction in terms.
 
Force vs. mind, authority vs. reason, obedience vs. thought--that
is what is at issue in Lawrence v. Texas. At the birth of this great
nation Jefferson swore "eternal hostility against every form of
tyranny over the mind of man." Let us hope today's Supreme
Court remembers his words. Otherwise, the government's next
knock on the door may be for me or you.

Onkar Ghate, Ph.D. in philosophy, is a resident fellow at the Ayn
Rand Institute (www.aynrand.org/medialink) in Irvine, CA. The
Institute promotes the philosophy of Ayn Rand, author of Atlas
Shrugged and The Fountainhead. Send comments to
reaction@aynrand.org.

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