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“Yahweh or the Highway” would make a great bumper sticker.
121. Inventing God and Law: Deadly Monolatry
The Illustrated Guide to Law
The comic that teaches what the law is, how it really works, and why.
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“Yahweh or the Highway” would make a great bumper sticker.
How the “hell” do we do that, indeed.
“If you criminalize behavior that people consider fine and normal, you’ll never stop it from happening.”
Not sure that was included in the memo to state legislatures when Roe v. Wade got overturned.
It’s an observation that applies to many aspects of law and policy-making. We’re going to see some variations on this theme in Con Law.
When the law punishes you for doing something everyone understands to be evil, there’s no problem. But when it punishes you for doing something that only some people think is wrong, you’ve got a problem. And when it punishes you for violating an artificial prohibition that nobody could even predict would get you in trouble, it’s the system itself that’s evil. (Remember Trudy and her feathers?)
It’s the cultural norms that matter. In culturally homogenous societies, where laws and regulations reflect common values, it’s not much of a problem. But in multicultural societies where group A thinks an act is evil, but group B thinks it’s no big deal, and group C wants to impose all new rules on everyone… you’re going to encounter seemingly unsolveable problems of crime and injustice.
In communities with a cultural expectation that certain behaviors are simply to be expected—ranging from grafitti to drug dealing to mugging to murder—you get highly disproportionate crime rates. But it goes away in the blink of an eye when cultural attitudes change to “we don’t do that around here.” And it comes back in the blink of an eye once there’s a perception that it’s tolerated. (Note: This is not the same thing as “broken windows” policies, which are all about stepping up the arrests, not about changing attitudes.)
Similarly, early 20th-century laws that criminalized harmless cultural norms of urban Black communities—such as drinking a beer on your front stoop, or smoking marijuana—did not stop the conduct from happening. It only resulted in a lot of Black people getting arrested and harassed. And to the extent it changed hearts and minds, it only engendered a sense that “those are someone else’s laws, not mine, and the system that enforces them is unjust.”
These are conundrums right now in the 21st century. What about Jerusalem in the 300s BCE? They needed to change hearts and minds to accommodate new artificial laws. And they didn’t have armies of sociologists and criminologists telling them how to do it. Kinda makes you wonder what they tried, and whether it worked, doesn’t it?
“Similarly, early 20th-century laws that criminalized harmless cultural norms of urban Black communities—such as drinking a beer on your front stoop, or smoking marijuana—did not stop the conduct from happening. It only resulted in a lot of Black people getting arrested and harassed. And to the extent it changed hearts and minds, it only engendered a sense that “those are someone else’s laws, not mine, and the system that enforces them is unjust.””
Yeah, but that was the point. It wasn’t to change the norms, it was to enforce the will of the White ruling class and reintroduce slavery through the back door. They didn’t want the consent of the subgroup they were governing because they didn’t think they needed it.