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Chesterton once accused the Puritans "Not of having too much morality, but too little." It seems to me that the neoPuritans, those secular busybodies that try to legislate their version of good and clean living, are stricken with the same malody.

It is not that they have a robust morality that provides vision, energy, and purpose to human life, but that they have a weak and feable structure, hardly capable of being principled, ordered, or systematic. In order to buttress up their little morality they attempt moral short cuts, the biggest of which is federal legislation.

Lobbying for laws against all things that they deem bad, unfit, or unhealthy, they seek to impose a grand appearance of their morality, but it becomes, like Bilbo Baggins so artfully said, "thin. Sort of stretched, like butter scrapped over too much bread." It is thin, and thus prone to distortions, corruptions, and ripple-effects that were unintended, but necessarily follow.

NeoPuritans try to take moral short cuts. They want the nation to be better, so instead of convincing every man, woman, and child to be better, they simply legislate away those things they believe are making our country worse. They think that national policy and law make people better versions of themselves because it saves them from themselves.