Pork and Horsemeat:

I’ve gotten a bunch of responses to my post about “Religion, Forcing Moral Views on Others, and Abortion”; and quite a few give as hypotheticals bans on eating pork, backed by devout Jews or Muslims, or bans on eating cow meat, backed by devout Hindus. Surely those laws are unconstitutional (that was actually Geof Stone’s argument in the post that prompted by original response). In the words of one correspondent of mine, “A Christian should not be prohibited from eating meat because the Hindu gods that the Christian does not believe exist have decreed the cow sacred.”

It turns out, though, that California voters in 1998 banned the sale of horsemeat for human consumption. (Georgia law bans the sale of dogmeat for human consumption; I’m sure some other states have similar laws.) I have no reason to think that this law was motivated by religion. Rather, I suspect that most voters supported it because of their gut feel that eating horse or dog is disgusting or, in the words of one critic, “morally perverse,” “a perversion of the human-animal bond.” The people probably didn’t even think that horses had a right to life, or a right not to be eaten; the law banned only the sale of horsemeat for human consumption — the sale of horsemeat for animal consumption is, to my knowledge, still permitted.

Both the religiously motivated pork/cow bans and the gut-feel-motivated horsemeat bans burden people’s liberty to eat what they please. Both of them do so because of the unproven and unprovable views of the majority. One can say that both are permissible, on democratic grounds; or that both are impermissible, on libertarian grounds. But it doesn’t seem to me sound to say that (1) the pork/cow (religiously motivated) ban is impermissible, (2) the horsemeat (disgust-motivated) ban is permissible, and (3) if it turned out that in some state the supporters of the horsemeat ban were actually motivated by a belief that it was sacrilegious to eat horse, that horsemeat ban would become impermissible. In any event, supporters of such a distinction have some explaining to do, it seems to me.