We Victims of ‘Victimless Crimes’, by David Carlin

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*Image: Leda and the Swan by Jean-Jacques Feuchère, ca. 1840–50 [The MET, New York]

By David Carlin, The Catholic Thing, Oct. 28, 2022

David Carlin is a retired professor of sociology and philosophy at the Community College of Rhode Island, and the author of The Decline and Fall of the Catholic Church in America and, most recently, Three Sexual Revolutions: Catholic, Protestant, Atheist.

If I remember correctly, it was in the late 1960s that the expression “victimless crime” gained widespread currency.  It was a popular expression among persons who held that it’s absurd to punish people who commit “crimes” that do no harm to anybody except, perhaps, to people who voluntarily participate in these “criminal” activities.

Included among these so-called victimless crimes were drunkenness, use of (or selling of) marijuana and other recreational drugs, prostitution, gay sex, soliciting for sex, and abortion.  That abortion was victimless was (and still is) a highly dubious proposition, since its purpose is to kill a growing-but-unborn baby. …