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what they do in the privacy of their home with other consenting adults should be of no interest to the courts as long as it does not effect others
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Guys, I think the issue is significantly more complex than that. Our fabric of laws is full of prohibitions on the behavior of consenting adults.
What about the most common form of prohibition of the sexual behavior of consenting adults, laws against prostitution? Such laws have been repeatedly upheld as being in the interest of public morals, health and welfare.
What about physician-assisted suicide? What about the prohibition of suicide, period?
Thom, following your reasoning, the guy in Germany who posted a request on the internet to be murdered and eaten, and was, well, that would just fall within the context of behavior between consenting persons. Here's the point: ALL laws are based on moral judgments and are intended to encourage or discourage certain types of behavior that society finds vaulable or loathsome. Laws protecting property, your life, regulating business conduct, etc,. are all based on conceptions of "public policy" that basically say you CANNOT just do whatever the hell you want, even if it only harms you.
Now, I know the liberterian viewpoint is that such laws tend to unreasonably limit individual freedom,, but the contrary view is that they tend to facilitate the exercise of individual freedom by making the cost of participating lower for everybody. E.g., in a polygamous household, where all the spouses depend on the primary wage earner for support, something bad happening to the primary wage earner tends to have a cascading negative effect vs. a smaller family.
Nostatic, I'll get to your point about obesity in a separate, but related thread.