What You Do in the Privacy of Your Home May Hurt Me

Several years ago when I was attending college in the small town of Rexburg, Idaho, a man was arrested after it was discovered that he had enough fireworks and explosives, including dynamite, in the basement of his home to take out several city blocks. Much of the dynamite was old, and dynamite becomes more and more unstable and likely to detonate as it becomes older. A simple stray spark from an electrical wire could have turned scores of homes into rubble and killed hundreds.

It would have been patently ridiculous for this man to have claimed “What I do in my home doesn’t hurt you” and yet this claim is made every day by those whose behavior is also destructive, albeit not in such obvious, physical ways.

Someone addicted to child porn could make the claim that their consumption of child porn doesn’t harm anybody. After all, the porn has already been created and the damage to its victims already done, and the consumer is merely looking at it after the fact. But child porn addicts aren’t satisfied with a limited supply, and that means their addiction drives more demand, and we know from basic economics that as demand increases so does supply. In other words, those who consume child porn increase the likelihood that more children will become victims of those who create child porn. Those who view child porn directly lead to more children being abused, even if they don’t abuse children themselves.

I’ve often seen those of religious persuasion, both my own and others, claim that practicing homosexuals, consumers of pornography, and practitioners of other activities condemned by scripture are in the wrong because God says they’re in the wrong. But such an argument makes no sense to those who don’t believe in God, as Orson Scott Card points out in his article Why and how to defend marriage. But lacking scientific and secular evidence, religious persons often don’t know how better to explain that gay marriage isn’t a good thing other than to say “Because God said so.”

Plus, they are afraid to base their argument on scientific grounds because there is so much contrary science. Even if you remove those “scientists” on both sides of moral issues who bring their strong biases with them and thus do a disservice to all of us, what remains may still be inconclusive.

I don’t have the evidence at hand to definitively say that homosexual behavior is going to hurt my children. But what should be obvious is that it will have an effect, and it may be a negative effect. If two gay people could live in a house next door to mine and ensure with 100% that nobody ever knew they were gay, then they might be able to make a believable claim that my children aren’t being affected. But when a person is openly gay, or openly smokes, or does drugs, or sleeps around, or does any other number of things and my children witness it, there is no way to claim my children aren’t being affected by it. You may argue about what that effect is, but there is obviously some level of influence, and therefore I can make the claim that what you do in the privacy of your home may hurt me, and for anyone claim “What I do in my home doesn’t hurt you” is to dabble in fantasy.