HOME OPINION Opinion Throw our morals out the door

Throw our morals out the door

Written by Justin Sharp, The Shorthorn columnist

Thursday, 05 November 2009 09:47 PM

Hail to the death of traditional Puritan values in America! Well, not quite yet but we seem to be working on it. A story published this week in the Dallas Morning News showing how common sense is overruling Judeo-Christian morality and absolute legalism. According to the article, the Dallas Police Department plans to start collecting DNA samples from truck-stop prostitutes on a voluntary basis to help identify the women if they are later reported missing, comatose or murdered. This is a progressive leap in thinking about the way to best order a society, especially coming from a conservative state. The policy isn’t perfect. It is, a bit hypocritical. Why go to these lengths? To acknowledge prostitution as a fact of society, and also prepare for the not-uncommon eventuality of these prostitutes ending up as corpses on the side of highways seems a bit of a cognitive dissonance. The police will approach the prostitutes and ask them for information in case they get murdered, instead of actually preventing the murders. How about this? Instead of making it easier to identify dead hookers, the law should be to decriminalize prostitution, regulate it and create a safe environment for what is, after all, the world’s oldest profession. It certainly isn’t going anywhere. The same can be said of gambling. Many states have begun to allow casinos as a way to increase revenue during depressing economic times, and Ohio recently voted to allow gambling establishments in places like Cincinnati and Cleveland. This is also a large part of Kinky Friedman’s platform in his gubernatorial bid in Texas. It’s a great idea. I’m not saying we should build casinos and whorehouses on the UTA campus. These sorts of behaviors need to be handled carefully, because they can have negative consequences on individuals and segments of society. And they are not appropriate in certain places, like next to day-care centers. But those have, and always have had, a niche in society. Acknowledging them is a step toward making a malignant issue largely benign. Unpleasant elements of human society shouldn’t be treated as sinkholes of iniquity and sin. They are realities of civilization with inherent problems that have real solutions. - Justin Sharp is a journalist senior and a columnist for The Shorthorn Views: 550 | E-mail   Comments (1)  1  He is Right! Biblical Law is Being Swept Written by C. McCreary, on 11-07-2009 16:34 From the author of \"All crimes are created equal \", which I lauded to a great extent and commented on previously, comes an article suggesting legalizing gambling and prostitution and castigating Puritan morals. He is right Biblical laws and values are being swept aside.    That discussion aside, is there no objective basis for which we can determine what is moral or immoral? At times the author has supported a position of state law which were enumerated in the Old Testament and advocated by Puritans and the Founding Fathers.     Heaven Forbid!    Now he does not support laws that came from the same place. I asked before and will ask again where should this objective basis for morality come from? The state?   The individual? The borg collective they use to call the masses? The churches of which there are a thousand denominations? A deity of any type? (Whom I have never met except through awareness of truth.)    I say again that law is a choice of morality and that it by definition is a legislation of morality, through a choice of right and wrong.     If the Puritans be wrong, and the Old Testament is wrong, and the state is wrong, and the author is right. From where and whence come thou morals sire?     Do not think this response is an attack on the author. The point is that state's law seperated from an "objective basis", determined without a moral compass, other than motivated by sin supported by discourse disguised as \"reason\" will result in destruction of society, as sure as history proves it, both in and out of the Holy Bible. Report Abuse Powered by AkoComment Tweaked Special Edition v.1.4.6 AkoComment © Copyright 2004 by Arthur Konze - www.mamboportal.com All right reserved

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