this is not a journal title

being good is not a prerequisite for being legal. people hold Klan rallies and put too much salt on their food and sell tickets to bad movies and say mean things to strangers in line to get subway passes and wear offensively ugly clothing and make stupid investment decisions that mean they won't be able to provide for their families as well as they would have otherwise. in none of these cases is it deemed appropriate to ban the practice outright (although in some there are regulatory measures to try to soften things a bit). further, there are in all these cases pretty good reasons why we shouldn't try to ban these things outright. if you want me to believe that this one industry is not merely bad-on-balance (of which i'm still unconvinced, because it's hard to establish a baseline), but bad enough to ban, then yes i'd like to see some show of good faith that you actually think the underlying moral standard is important enough to inform your policy positions, especially in the absence of any other really knock-down argument.

besides, i think that this kind of policy agenda promotes the culture of ‘if i don't see it, and if it doesn't happen to kinds of people and animals i'm familiar with, i don't have to care about it’, and i may not think i have the authority to ban that culture, but i sure as hell don't have to like it.