Readers continue to criticize Douthat et al:
I shouldn't be allowed to do something because these men wouldn't want their daughters doing it, really? (If I were to apply that rationale, voting Republican would be illegal.) That kind of rationalizing is what keeps women in burkas and prohibited from driving and obtaining an education in many parts of the world.
But aside from the disgusting knee-jerk paternalism, their analyses of this moral imperative has a fatal flaw. The test of criminalizing conduct isn't simply what we should be able to prevent or stop people from doing, it's what kind of conduct should face punishment. So these men would want their daughters arrested and incarcerated and have a lifetime criminal record if their daughters became prostitutes or drug addicts or had an abortion? Such proud papas!
Another:
This is a common mistake among people who are never on the business end of the blunt instrument that is the police.
They think "we should make something illegal because then the police will help us discourage it." Uh, no. The police don't help discourage anything. They find the people who do it, and they punish them. But recidivism is a real thing, and even most of the prostitutes the police arrest and jail become prostitutes again upon their release. Prostitution has been illegal in this country forever, and we still have prostitutes in every single city in this country. So maybe prohibition isn't working, you know?
Benjamin Dueholm is on the same page:
When one is accustomed to being handled with some care and deference by the institutions of law and justice, one can well imagine a criminalized vice regime coming to the rescue of one's own kith and kin. Take away that assumption and the thought experiment changes dramatically.
This, I think, is the context in which we should view the report of a blue-ribbon panel of world leaders on the failure of the drug war and the moral and practical necessity of decriminalizing the non-violent trade and consumption of drugs. I certainly don't want my children to be heroin addicts and to that end I really don't want them to dabble in that drug or any other hard substances. But if my own moral guidance and support and the social capital I hope to provide for them does not prevent it, I most definitely don't want them to be shunted into overcrowded, abuse-ridden prisons for the sake of saving them. I would want them to get treatment. America has involved itself not only in an endless, hopeless 'war' against something that no force in the world can stamp out, it has completely confused the social costs of a vice with the practice of it.
The Dish 