Should the government jail people for putting on a drag show or eating a pot brownie? Bill Glod says no. Criticizing “legal moralism” in a July 29 essay for Libertarianism.org, Glod rejected enacting laws based on “controversial conceptions of the good … that not all people have good reason to endorse.” Less than a week later, Andrew T. Walker published a Daily Wire piece taking, in effect, the opposite position and attacking “drag queen conservatism.” These are recent rounds in a years-long fight on the political right about “postliberalism.”
Both equate the government taking a moral side with coercion. They’re missing a key distinction offered by the medieval theologian St. Thomas Aquinas—a likely inspiration for Walker and a boogeyman for Glod. For Aquinas, as for Walker, the law exists to further the common good. But Aquinas believed, as Glod, that the law should leave most private vice unpunished.
Glod’s Critique of “Legal Moralism”
Glod backs government’s moral neutrality. He believes governments should not base laws on “conceptions of morality going beyond protection of basic rights or claims of justice (e.g., laws against murder, assault, and theft).” It is wrong to impose laws that would be “unjustified to many who would be bound by” them.
Underlying Glod’s political position is a deeper commitment to moral pluralism, and even relativism. He questions the moral basis for opposing “successful polyamorous relationships and communities,” “kinks and other ‘unnatural’ sexual practices,” “bondage magazines or brief encounters in bathhouses,” prostitution, pornography, and drug use.
“Nobody is inherently right or wrong to believe and feel as they do,” Glod writes. “Forcing people to live in ways they don’t consider valuable is unjust, and so is forcing them not to live in ways they consider valuable.”
Walker’s Defense of Coercion for the Common Good
Walker could hardly ask for a neater summary of the philosophy he opposes. He writes that “the good is real” and “a good government should promote it,” even if not everyone recognizes it.
Such practices as drag queen story hour and recreational drug use are beneath the dignity of any local community regardless of whether they are freely chosen.… There are some ends that governments must not allow if government is to be considered just and the public square sane.
Walker defends this conclusion based on his Christian beliefs: “For me, when societies elect to violate God’s natural law, they not only violate moral laws, they deprive themselves of the very foundations that enable their existence and flourishing.”
For Walker, attempts to escape personal moral visions in politics lead to deception rather than government neutrality. “A politics that pretends to be neutral about the human good is not neutral; it is merely smuggling in an account of the common good and disguising which good it is serving.”
Walker believes conservatives have ignored this and so disabled themselves from fighting a left that “harbors no doubts and legislates its own common good under the guise of neutrality.” Progressives are busy legislating “with something close to religious fervor, remaking law, medicine, education, and the family in its image.” Conservatives are stuck responding “with proceduralism alone—with a focus on rules and neutral administration.” This “is voluntary disarmament no matter how much one wishes to rise above the fray of culture war politics.”
Glod wants a government that stays strictly neutral in matters of sex and drugs. Walker believes no just government can “allow” drag queen story hour or the eating of a pot brownie.
Governments Do More Than Just Coerce People
Both fail to distinguish between the different things governments do. Although libertarians want less government, it is impossible to imagine how any actual government could—or should—be strictly neutral on all moral questions. Governments run schools. Should neutrality require them either to forgo these or pair every presentation about healthy eating, the dangers of underage sexting, and the perils of addiction with taxpayer-funded assemblies defending Cheetos, teen webcam porn, and the marvels of marijuana? Governments fund things. Is it absolutely necessary to either stop doing so or give equal access to fatherhood initiatives and guides for liberating yourself from your kids? Governments regulate the use of public spaces. Do they have to allow billboards containing hardcore pornography so long as they allow ones depicting married couples kissing?
I don’t know that Glod would say yes. After all, his essay focuses on “legal coercion,” whereas most of these are matters of education, incentives, and regulation. But those are the sorts of things governments have always done and are likely to always do.
Walker buys into the same “neutrality or bans” binary, warning that without the ability to coerce moral behavior, societies surrender to “barbarism.” So off to jail Mrs. Doubtfire must go.
Aquinas Believed in Both the Common Good and Limits on Government Coercion
Although Walker cites the Christian natural law tradition as the foundation for his proposal—and Glod makes it his foil—the tradition itself recognizes nuances that would elevate this debate.
Few thinkers are more influential here than Aquinas. His “Treatise on Law” helped spur 800 years of thinking about the common good. He believed society exists to further human flourishing and train people in virtue. Like Walker, he believed that the good is real, that it is discoverable by people, and that it sets the standard for politics. He taught that laws are an important part of moral formation and can coerce people even if they do not subjectively recognize the good.
And yet, as I explored in a 2023 article for the journal Politics and Religion, Aquinas’ account of when the government should coerce people is quite limited. Coercion should not aim to make people more perfect but to enable imperfect people to live together. While God’s law forbids every vice, human laws have to account for people as they are. They “do not forbid all vices”—but only those “from which it is possible for the majority to abstain.” Governments should “chiefly” prohibit vices “that are to the hurt of others, without the prohibition of which human society could not be maintained,” such as murder and theft. Quoting St. Augustine, he warns that were the world to ban prostitution, it “will be convulsed with lust.”
Efforts to coerce people into becoming virtuous would pose problems—even in the relatively religiously and morally homogeneous medieval societies of Aquinas’ day. Coerced by laws they are “unable to bear,” people “break out into yet greater evils” and reject laws altogether. A decent human society does not demand “that all the citizens be virtuous,” which is “impossible,” but only that each “perform his work pertaining to the [society] well.”
Aquinas was not an outlier in taking a fairly libertarian posture. As the highly influential English common law jurist William Blackstone wrote in the late 1700s: “Let a man … be ever so abandoned in his principles, or vicious in his practice, provided he keeps his wickedness to himself, and does not offend against the rules of public decency, he is out of the reach of human laws.”
Aquinas’ Approach Is Practical
While Glod and Walker both believe that coercion follows whenever governments make moral judgments, Aquinas’ philosophy is realistic. Contrary to Glod, governments do not need to aspire to absolute moral neutrality to respect personal liberty. They can stop jailing people for drug use without tolerating heroin injections outside the public library. They can permit promiscuity while favoring marriage in the tax code. They can license bars while combating addiction. And, to take Walker’s example, they can decline to host a drag queen story hour at the public library without stopping a local theater from holding one.
These examples are so ordinary because laws strike this balance all the time. The Supreme Court has simultaneously expanded gay rights (Bostock v. Clayton County) and the rights of dissenters to pull their kids out of lessons affirming gay relationships (Mahmoud v. Taylor) and decline to make websites celebrating same-sex couples (303 Creative v. Elenis).
As for Walker, though he’s right about the inevitability of governments making moral judgments, that’s not a justification for widespread coercion, which is a blunt instrument that often harms society rather than helping it. The war on drugs tried to do what Walker proposes. It harmed the common good so much that the tide shifted against prohibition—even William F. Buckley Jr. came to oppose it. Aquinas had good sense about the limits of coercion, although there’s plenty else governments can do to promote the common good.
Governments can decide what to teach, fund, and promote on openly moral grounds—and reserve coercion for those vices that injure life, property, liberty, and public order.
As the Dominican theologian James Dominic Rooney summarizes Aquinas: “The common good of all is peace.”
