Should we be alarmed that religious groups with theocratic tendencies and ultraconservative social views are trying to impose their values on the rest of us?
The question isn't about Islamic fundamentalists seeking to bring Shariah law to the West. It's about faith-based groups in Virginia opposed to Bob McDonnell's ABC privatization plan.
In the past several days the governor's proposal to sell off the state's liquor monopoly has come under fire from the Virginia Assembly of Independent Baptists, the Virginia Interfaith Center, and the Religious Herald, a publication of the Baptist General Association of Virginia. Jack Knapp, executive director of the Virginia Assembly, says his group "opposes alcohol altogether," according to a news story earlier this week by
The Times-Dispatch's Jeff Schapiro. "But since it's a legal product," Knapp says, "I want as much control as possible. You can't have control if you privatize."
Actually, you can. Selling off the retail outlets wouldn't shut down the ABC's enforcement arm. Its agents would continue to make sure convenience stores are carding minors and bootleggers aren't selling white lightning out the back door. Virginia is one of only 18 states that retain a government monopoly on liquor sales, after all -- and there is no correlation between state control and alcohol-related pathology.
Even opponents of McDonnell's plan concede as much. The Virginia Interfaith Center's paper on the subject acknowledges that "although alcohol consumption is slightly higher in private sale states, there is no difference in the rates of underage drinking, underage binge drinking, and alcohol-related traffic deaths between license states and control states."
For Knapp, however, facts are secondary considerations, if not entirely irrelevant. For instance: Four years ago, he spoke out against legislation before the General Assembly that would have prohibited discrimination against homosexuals in state and local government. "We feel the activity is against the teaching of God," he said (referring to homosexual activity, not discrimination) "and that settles it for us."
God says it, he believes it -- end of debate. This is certainly a respectable theological position to take. But as a foundation for public policy, it's rather shaky.
Equally shaky is Jim White's editorial for the Religious Herald, which compensates for its shortness of facts with lachrymose anecdotes about "the human suffering alcohol inflicts." The current ABC system hasn't contained that suffering, he admits, but "without question the suffering was less than it would have been without controls!" Without question? See above.
Likewise, the Interfaith Center cites studies by the Univerisity of Michigan and the RAND Corporation showing that liquor stores are "disproportionately" located in low-income and predominantly black census tracts. RAND terms this "an environmental injustice . . . with potential adverse consequences for drinking behavior and other social ills."
The Interfaith Center seems to be saying about minorities what the Baptists say of people in general: You can't trust 'em. Give them a free market in liquor, and they will drink too much.
In certain individual cases that is certainly true. But the argument cuts both ways. A society that cannot keep prison inmates from drinking fermented jailhouse pruno or stop homeless derelicts from downing fortified wines and jakeleg splo also cannot keep boozehounds from getting soused just by making liquor-store hours inconvenient.
The more troubling assumption behind these arguments is that it is the state's job to enforce private virtue in the first place. As Kenneth Minogue wrote recently in The New Criterion, this sentiment is enjoying a renaissance across the political spectrum:
"Most Western governments hate me smoking, or eating the wrong kind of food, or hunting foxes, or drinking too much, and these are merely the surface disapprovals, the ones that provoke legislation or public campaigns. We also borrow too much money for our personal pleasures, and many of us are very bad parents. Ministers of state have been known to instruct us in elementary matters, such as the importance of reading stories to our children. Again, many of us have unsound views about people of other races, cultures, or religions, and the distribution of our friends does not always correspond, as governments think that it ought, to the cultural diversity of our society. We must face up to the grim fact that the rulers we elect are losing patience with us."
The trouble with this, he goes on to say, is that in managing our lives for us the state is crowding out our own moral judgments. By depriving us of choices, it not only deprives us of the chance to make bad decisions, it also robs us of the opportunity to make good ones. A bank robber can't go straight from inside a prison cell.
Here is an even bigger problem: The religious groups have no business trying to manage other people's morals in the first place -- not by force, anyway. In arguing against privatizing the ABC, they argue as follows: If Joe, a consenting adult, offers to buy a bottle of liquor from Sam, another consenting adult, and Sam gladly agrees to sell it to him, then the church -- using the coercive power of the state -- should to step in and prevent the sale.
The real question isn't whether Joe and Sam are wise to make such a trade. The real question is what right the church has to stop them.
The spirit of liberty is the spirit which is not too sure that it is right.
--Judge Learned Hand.
Contact A. Barton Hinkle at (804) 649-6627 or bhinkle@timesdispatch.com.
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