If you live in Connecticut, the answer is yes.
They have a law against “injury or risk of injury to, or impairing morals of, children.”
I think this law is fantastic. It’s exactly the kind of law that should exist – the law that simply says, “Don’t do wrong.” This is the best law – it’s simple, it’s direct, and it upholds what is good. It’s obvious.
My first thought on seeing this law was that it was completely unenforceable. How rotten have we gotten? When someone says, “You can’t legislate morality” they’re really just stating the awful fact that our fragmented ideas of good are utterly fallen – to the point where we can’t even build a society worth living in.
The Bible sets as the vision of a great society one in which the notion of what is good and right is implanted – so deeply embedded that it doesn’t need discussion or teaching – or legislation. Law, it seems, is a testimony to brokenness. Where there is no transgression, there need be no law!
The interesting thing is, I found this law by reading a news story where a man was actually being charged with it (I can’t remember the story).
This law is enforceable – but it’s enforceable in special cases: those cases which operate on the principle, “I know it when I see it.” In some cases you can trot this law before judge and jury and they will just apply it without any discussion or controversy.
Again, this is the perfection of law – the idea that we can see something and immediately know the rightness or wrongness of it. But again, this is flawed, because we are flawed.
We live in a world where good laws are unenforceable as a very consequence of their goodness, and of our very badness.
This has a consequence for lawyers: they are dedicated to a system that is entirely a function of human evil.
I wonder what aspects of my own workplace are a function of human evil?