“Hotel Pornography and the Market of Morality” —Public Discourse

1. Catholic public intellectual Robert George and Muslim leader Shaykh Hamza Yusuf put out a call to hotels to stop selling pornography on demand. It harms our society, they say.
2. Villanova law professor Robert Miller agrees, but points out that hotels have to be careful how they justify removing porn. If they say it’s immoral, they can be sued for removing a major money-maker for shareholders. But if they say it’s unprofitable, they’re okay.

This is another reason I think it’s important for Christians to give Christian reasons—publicly—for their positions. (I disagree with George’s take here.) No one else will do it. There are sinful reasons for doing the right thing; God cares not just about what you do but about your motivation (1 Cor. 13:3).

Miller ends his article with a worthy insight:

The legal institutions of a democratic and capitalist society are not designed to give people what is good and prevent them from getting what is bad; they are designed to give people what they want and not give them what they don’t want. For this reason, some people decry capitalism and democracy as amoral. Such views are misguided. In a democratic and capitalist society, there is a certain division of labor: it is up to the people themselves to become moral individuals with moral desires, while the political and economic institutions of the society implement the individuals’ aggregated desires.