I have an essay at First Things this week, occasioned by the most extreme Pride Month to date.
In the essay, I argue (1) that the Pelosi Thesis—that drag is “what America is all about”—is incorrect (low-hanging fruit, I know) and (2) that the old-time American distinction between liberty and license is enshrined in state and federal law. More briefly, I say (3) that “it shouldn’t be left to private individuals to act as ‘public decency’ vigilantes. […] Ensuring public decency, no less than public health, is a duty of legislators.”
To elaborate on that third point: I have in mind a specific provision of the Wyoming Constitution that says exactly that. Article 7, Section 20 reads:
As the health and morality of the people are essential to their well-being, and to the peace and permanence of the state, it shall be the duty of the legislature to protect and promote these vital interests by such measures for the encouragement of temperance and virtue, and such restrictions upon vice and immorality of every sort, as are deemed necessary to the public welfare.
I make three observations.
First, “health and morality” are both “essential” to the “well-being of the people” and “the peace and permanence of the state.” Wyoming recognizes the fundamental (most basic) reason for society in the good of health (security) as well as the dependence of enduring security on some degree of human excellence (morality). The good condition of the people is good for the people—and for the state.
Second, it is a duty of the state, and of elected representatives in the legislature in particular, to “protect and promote these vital interests.” Wyoming does not leave the public welfare as some vague desideratum; it enshrines in its constitution a duty on the part of the legislators to direct state power toward this good. This is the only time the Wyoming Constitution speaks of a “duty” of the legislature specifically, although Article 10, Section 2 reads:
All powers and franchises of corporations are derived from the people and are granted by their agent, the government, for the public good and general welfare, and the right and duty of the state to control and regulate them for these purposes is hereby declared. The power, rights and privileges of any and all corporations may be forfeited by willful neglect or abuse thereof. The police power of the state is supreme over all corporations as well as individuals.
The people, via their government, retain the right to “control and regulate” private corporations “for the public good and general welfare”; and this “police power of the state is supreme over all corporations as well as individuals. Politics is indeed the architectonic art, folks, because it pursues a higher end than its subordinate arts, including the economical arts.
Returning to Article 7, Section 20: Third, the precise means and scope of the legislature’s pursuit of the public welfare is left indeterminate, as it must be. But, having emphasized that public health and public decency are “vital interests,” and that legislators are duty-bound to “protect and promote” them, Wyoming notes that there are positive and negative measures at the state’s disposal: “measures for the encouragement of temperance and virtue” as well as “restrictions upon vice and immorality of every sort.” (In speaking of “vice and immorality of every sort,” Wyoming seems even bolder than St. Thomas, who articulated the role of human law as prescribing all the virtues but not repressing every vice! Cf. Summa Theologiae I–II.96.2–3.)
The Wyoming Constitution, then, goes out of its way to emphasize the importance of securing public morality as well as public health, and to prod its legislators to think prudently and creatively of the various means to that end.
Every American state—not just Wyoming—retains a broad array of police powers in order to secure “public safety, public health, morality, peace and quiet, law and order,” and other public goods. We’re all familiar with the use (and abuse) of state police powers for “public health.” Perhaps unsurprisingly, given the general tendency of modern political though to publicize and politicize putatively “uncontroversial” goods (health, wealth, and security) while privatizing and depoliticizing putatively “controversial” goods (morals, happiness, salvation), we are overpowered by the invocation of “public health” yet remain reluctant to pursue “public decency” through public means. State officials overeager to regulate public health during Covid have been not just AWOL when it comes to regulating public morality during Pride Month but actively complicit in advancing its indecencies.
The Wyoming Constitution leaves it up to the legislators, and the citizens they represent, to determine what measures are “necessary to the public welfare.” Thus far, even the legislatures of the most conservative states have cowered or turned a blind eye as Pride Month becomes more and more extreme each year. Perhaps, then, it’s time for the citizens whom they represent to start a “national conversation”—unfolding state by state, primary by primary—on public decency.
Do the people agree that grown men pretending to be hypersexualized women dancing half-naked in front of children is consistent with “the health and morality of the people” and the “peace and permanence of the state”? Do their representatives think they’re doing their “duty” to “protect and promote” morality by turning a blind eye to these obscenities—or even cooperating with, promoting, and celebrating them—rather than instituting proper “restrictions upon vice and immorality”? What “restrictions upon vice and immorality” do the people “deem necessary to the public welfare”? Who in the state government has been reviewing, and deploying, the tools already at their disposal?
Pride Month wasn’t baked into the American Founding. Silence, cowardice, and political inaction in the face of galloping public indecency isn’t baked into 2022 America. As with Covid, so with Pride Month. This is an issue that must be politicized, must be opened up to public deliberation and political regulation once again, if “the well-being” of the people and “the peace and permanence of the states” are to be secured.
I read it over at FT and thought it was super. I like this authorial highlighting and ending civic/citizen encouragement perhaps even more.
Riveting stuff, Pavlos--sounds like the sort of message someone should take to the Wyoming GOP, spread through media, & possibly make something of for the '22 campaign season, to say nothing of the upcoming bigger fight in '24! Know anyone in Cheyenne?