The Consequence of Righteous Legislation
The Consequence of Righteous Legislation
Politicians are meant to determine laws for the betterment of all, not to further a righteous cause.
When someone in a position of power decides to pass laws through a righteous lens, citizens end up hurt or shut out of society. This is one of the reasons that America has a separation of church and state: one religion shouldn’t dictate the rules for everyone else.
Trying to create righteous laws brought our nation:
Slavery
Segregation
Lack of Women’s Rights
Laws against interracial marriages
Abortion bans, which have now returned
Laws against homosexuality
Current restrictions on trans rights/identities
War on Drugs
and so many more
The War on Drugs is a clear example where instead of applying science and data towards a problem, the government created strict laws based on morality alone.
During the fifty years long drug war, America failed in every regard:
Drugs in circulation increased
Drug use increased
Overdoses and deaths increased
Incarcerations increased
Violence increased
All of this at the cost of over $1 trillion dollars to date. $1 trillion dollars invested and we got:
over 80,000 drug overdose deaths in 2022 alone
20% of all inmates are incarcerated for a drug offense at a cost of ~$38,000 per inmate per year
communities destroyed
millions of deaths
Misinformation and righteousness tend to be traveling companions. When the ends justify the means, the path to get there no longer matters. Right now, the GOP is calling out the US - Mexico border on a daily basis.
Republicans found illegal immigration wasn’t enticing enough to steal the headline focus. So they pivoted to drugs.
Fentanyl specifically. The latest scare drug. The issue with their alarm is that over 90% of fentanyl comes through ports of entry, not through illegal border crossings.
This is what a pragmatic set of rules to combat the drug epidemic would look like:
Legalize Marijuana at a federal level
Legalize drug usage in private places/carrying a personal use amount of drugs/paraphernalia
Maintain laws against the sale and distribution of harder drugs
Clean needle and treatment centers
Better education and public information on drugs
Destigmatize addiction
Alcohol is worse for the adult body than marijuana, and marijuana is not a so called “gateway drug”. People who legally use marijuana don’t go seeking harder drugs.
Despite that data, marijuana continues to be more illegal than alcohol due to outdated moral beliefs.
We also have data from cities that have used clean needles and treatment centers to show that those methods do decrease the spread of disease, decrease overdoses and death, and even decrease drug usage.
When an addict knows there is a place they can go for non-judgmental help and where they won’t be arrested for their drug use, then they have a safe avenue to fight their disease. They have a path to improvement.
Despite this factual knowledge, those solutions are rejected by many politicians and citizens alike because a righteous mind can’t look beyond their own beliefs. The belief that using drugs is immoral and therefore must be punished.
That is the common theme throughout righteous legislation. Some item or action is bad, therefore it must be illegal and therefore you must be punished for doing that action or having that item.
The other commonality? That solution never works. People aren’t going to change who they are simply because it is illegal to be themselves.
How many gay people went to prison, suffered violent attacks, and were killed, because for so long America treated their sexuality not only as immoral, but then defined homosexuality as a disorder or disease?
LGBT rights are still under attack to this day. Somehow America hasn’t learned that you can’t change a persons sexuality or identity by making it illegal.
Trans people are the latest group to find themselves centered in the crosshairs of the ultra conservatives.
These conservatives are in such a rage that they are boycotting Nike for having a transgendered influencer promote their product, boycotting Hershey for having a transwoman in their woman’s day campaign, and boycotting Budweiser for having a trans person on their cans.
So violent is their hate, that a musician who hasn’t been relevant for 20 years shot up packs of Budweiser to show his disapproval at the brand’s decision.
Group after group throughout history has been told that they don’t belong. Instead of waiting for the next group to be defined, we should be changing our mindset as a nation.
Everyone has a right to be who they are.
Kansas just passed a law, and overrode a Governor’s veto, to make it illegal for transwomen to play on female school sports teams. This bill was vague in how it would be determined whether someone was transgendered, and the author of the bill said it would happen during the sports physical.
That in turn has made people dub the process of the law as “inspecting children’s genitals”, which unfortunately may end up being a correct assessment of the law, although a simple blood test can also determine biological gender. No matter the approach, it is an invasive moment for an innocent child who just wants to play sports with their friends.
You’d think if politicians were going to ignore science and data, that they’d at least listen to public opinion through polling. But that isn’t the case either. If you believe your actions are coming from a righteous place, it doesn’t matter what anyone else says or thinks because you are righting wrongs.
The majority of Americans support abortion up to ~20-22 weeks, longer if the mother’s health is at risk. Despite this, Republicans attacked Roe v Wade for decades. Then, methodically they built a conservative majority on enough local and federal courts to launch their final attack. They stacked the system all the way up to taking the majority of the Supreme Court.
The GOP pushed through potentially corrupt justices to serve their own agenda. Now, one of those justices has been exposed, again. Clarence Thomas has been taking luxury gifts from a billionaire conservative donor for years without reporting any of it. A clear ethics violation. His wife also attempted to overturn the fully legal and secure 2020 election.
Anita Hill courageously gave us a dire account of the character of Mr. Thomas before he was seated on the court, but America did not listen.
We see the same pattern year after year.
Those who are driven to control the sinful acts of society, would judge themselves immoral. Their righteousness is a form of compensation for their own mistakes and flaws.
Even when their intentions start off pure, politicians must routinely challenge: am I still working for the people, or for myself?
Ronald Reagan, the conservative icon, legalized abortion rights in California when he was the governor. He made it clear that he personally was against abortion, but nonetheless Reagan couldn’t ignore the data that over 100,000 California women were seeking illegal abortions each year. These were unsafe abortions that put the women at serious risk. Reagan accepted that by making abortion legal, more lives would be saved. And that keeping it illegal wasn’t stopping abortions.
Unfortunately, once he rose to be President, Reagan fought against abortion rights and wanted to see Roe v Wade overturned. He wrote an essay about his views on being pro life in 1983, an essay that pro life advocates still quote today.
And while the War on Drugs started during Nixon’s presidency, Reagan doubled down on the war including passing tougher sentencing laws and beginning the mass incarceration era.
Politicians can easily get sucked into the moral and culture wars, the same as anyone else. But they have the potential to do far more harm with their positions of power and influence.
It is important for every voter to cast their ballot with the interest of preserving the rights of all citizens. Do not blindly follow a party as it descends into the darkness of trying to seize control over the freedom of self.