That’s my appeal to “traditional values.”
In this morning’s Washington Examiner, Jonetta Rose Barras complains that the DC Superior Court ruling by Judge Judith Retchen against a referendum to overturn the mandate for DC to recognize legal same-sex marriages performed in other states is one of two “dual downers for traditional values.” The other is the push for legalization of Marijuana for medical treatment.
Barras blames the lack of voting representation as a prime culprit in allowing such violations of “traditional values” to occur unhindered. It’s not clear how Barras defines “traditional values,” but anyone claiming that the medicinal use of marijuana and the acceptance of same-sex marriage violates traditional values either lacks or ignores basic knowledge of the history of marijuana and the accepted “traditional” forms of marriage in the states.
“Make the most you can of the Indian hemp seed. Sow it everywhere.” Said Columbian drug cartel leader Edward Gonzalez. No, wait, it was George Washington who said it. Prior to 1900, marijuana wasn’t even regulated in the U.S., let alone criminalized. It’s been well-documented that Thomas Jefferson cultivated hemp: “Hemp is of first necessity to the wealth & protection of the country.” Even Lincoln and Carter had very strong opinions about it:
“Prohibition… goes beyond the bound of reason in that it attempts to control a man’s appetite by legislation and makes a crime out of things that are not crimes. A prohibition law strikes a blow at the very principles upon which our government was founded” -Abraham Lincoln
“Penalties against possession of a drug should not be more damaging to an individual than the use of the drug itself; and where they are, they should be changed. Nowhere is this more clear than in the laws against possession of marihuana in private for personal use… Therefore, I support legislation amending Federal law to eliminate all Federal criminal penalties for the possession of up to one ounce of marihuana.” – Jimmy Carter1
It wasn’t until the 1930s that regulation had become nationalized.2 Should we infer, then, that Barras thinks that tradition prior to the 1930s doesn’t count? What exactly is a “traditional value” when referring to marijuana? If the arguments put forth regard health and welfare, then why aren’t those arguments applied across the board, to alcohol and tobacco, and why limit the scope to the past 80 years? If the arguments are religious, then we encounter another handful of problems.
First, the First Amendment prohibits such blatant violation of constitutional separation of church and state. Second, what’s the bible (assuming it’s the Judeo-Christian religion to which Barras and others appeal) got to say about marijuana? “Jesus inhaled, and God saw that it was good.” Oh, wait, the bible really didn’t talk all that much about drug prohibitions. As a matter of fact, didn’t the bible say something to effect of, “Then God said, “Behold, I have given you every plant yielding seed that is on the surface of all the earth, and every tree which has fruit yielding seed; it shall be food for you,”" in Genesis 1:29? Oh, but that doesn’t count. Obviously. We’re not interpreting it to mean that. Jesus came along and changed all that. Nope, not buying the religious argument.
The “traditional values” of which Barras and others speak, regarding marijuana, are embodied in state and federal laws spanning all of 80 years. On this eve of the remembrance of our independence from imperial Britain’s tight grasp, perhaps we should do some simple math. Take 233 years of independence (plus more years, depending on how you like to define “tradition”), and subtract 80 years of progressively militant marijuana prohibition, and you get 153 years of non-prohibition. Are we just ignoring all of that tradition? It seems so. What’s the “value” in that? This is why we don’t appeal to tradition.
This nation had nearly 90 years of condoned slavery (plus all the years prior to independence), over 90 years of blacks not being able to vote, and, incredibly, embarrassingly, disgustingly, it took 144 years since our independence to give women the right to vote. It took 191 years for us to allow blacks to marry whites (and whites to marry blacks). Let’s do the math here and kill the double standards. If you want to appeal to traditional values, Ms. Barras, relinquish your right to vote, and advocate that women and minorities do the same.
The appeal to tradition is not just a formal logical fallacy, it’s also the method by which manipulative people create justification for their own actions while condemning actions they dislike. It’s also a devious double standard which should appeal to no rational person who appreciates our progress, especially regarding civil rights.
