Andrew refers to “the usual tedious comments about ‘role models’, a poor example for ‘the children’ and blah and blah and blah.” People have attempted to justify all kinds of disreputable or foolish things in the name of “the children,” so I think I can understand Andrew’s reaction. But surely there are some cases in which certain behaviors, policies, etc., should be followed or avoided for the sake of the children. The knee-jerk dismissal of any rhetorical invocation of “the children” has become something of a conservative cliche–one I find increasingly tedious. Nor do the ideas that celebrities’ behavior is likely to get publicized, that this publicized behavior is likely to influence young (and not-so-young) people, and that they may deserve moral condemnation for the predictable effects their behavior will have on young people strike me as obviously silly.

I’m inclined to go pretty far toward Andrew’s relatively laissez-faire view on the appropriate government policy on drugs. But it’s going to be very hard to persuade most people, and especially most parents, that civil society should be laissez-faire too. Sneering won’t do the job–and that’s how Andrew comes across to me in his post (perhaps because there’s an underlying argument with which he is so familiar that he has forgotten that some of us aren’t).