It seems to me that this fear is well taken, and that we need to establish both a social norm (to restrain individual busybodies) and a constitutional amendment (to restrain government) that says every adult has the absolute right to make these choices for himself.

Then if an insurance company (or, goodness forbid, socialized medicine bureaucracy) wants to make the individual pay for his choices in these areas, more power to them. But they have no business providing coverage and then using that fact as a reason we all must live our lives according to their safety prescriptions. If (for instance) I enjoy smoking enough to give up two years’ life expectancy for it, how dare anybody — government, boss, or landlord — say I can’t, or even nag me about it!

I don’t intend any of this to detract from your message that self-restraint is a good idea. The point is that, like charity, true self-restraint can be neither learnt nor practiced unless the individual has the option to choose otherwise (with only those consequences the laws of nature itself impose).

Mr. Deenan, I should have read this article before I commented on your article “Majoring in Idiocy” because the two are more intimately related than one would think at first glance.

Sadly, many or most of these basic manners deserve to be spoken of only in the past tense, in regards to our society. This breakdown in basic limits is, no doubt, a major contributor to our unabashed “food positive” and “sex positive” age.

Salatin writes, bar none, the most enjoyable “how-to” books on farming. It’s cogent that you drew the connection between the two events occurring simultaneously. Per MizzE, “Be careful what you wish for”…words to live by.

Ahhh Vice, gateway to both redemption and recidivism.

We learn the same lesson from the Old Testament: the well-lived life is full of blessing; the profligate life offers a seductive but deadly curse.

And thanks Jonathan for the good reminders from Anthony and Isaac.

“Suppose you came to a country where you could fill a theatre by simply bringing a covered plate on stage and then slowly lifting the cover so as to let everyone see, just before the lights went out, that it contained a pork chop or a piece of bacon. Would you not think that in that country something had gone wrong with their appetite for food? And would not anyone who had grown up in a different world think there was something strange about the fact that people pay money to watch a woman take off her clothes?” – Mere Christianity

What Lewis did not make explicit, and what I think he may have understood, is that there is an intimate connection among all the appetites. One cannot have a disordered appetite for sex, while having an ordered one for food. I think it is no surprise that obesity and sexual appetite have both gone disordered at the same time in the United States. Or, to put it in Porcher language (perhaps), one cannot be consumerist about sex and not about anything else. “Abbe Pambo asked Abba Antony, [St. Antony of the Desert] “What ought I to do?” and the old man said to him, “Do not trust in your own righteousness, do not worry about the past, but control your tongue and your stomach.” St. Isaac the Syrian said that “The work of fasting and vigil is the beginning of every endeavor directed against sin and lust, especially in the case of a man who fights against the sin which is within. This practice shows hatred of sin and lust in the doer of this invisible warfare. Almost all passionate impulses decrease through fasting.”

Not saying I disagree with your article. I’m just having some self-indulgent fun with a counter-example.